Pollex Online
What is Pollex Online?
Courtesy of the Anthropology Photographic Archive
POLLEX-Online is a large-scale comparative dictionary of Polynesian languages.
POLLEX was started in the 1960s by Bruce Biggs at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Biggs obtained funding for POLLEX through a New Zealand Government Lottery Grant, and a National Science Foundation Grant to the Bernice P. Bishop Museum. This project was first published as a monograph in 1966 (Biggs and Walsh 1966), and a series of subsequent manuscripts and working papers (Biggs, Walsh and Waqa 1970, Biggs 1976, Biggs 1979), before being distributed as a «computer file». Biggs worked on this project until his death in 2000 (Pawley 2001), when it was handed over to Ross Clark.
News
Dear Friends of POLLEX,
Even though most of you would not have known him personally, I wanted to pass along the news that Peter Ranby died last Wednesday in Howick (Auckland).
As a student at the University of Auckland in the 1960s, Peter was part of the team which produced the first published version of POLLEX (Walsh & Biggs 1966). He did field work on the Nanumea dialect of the Tuvalu language, and a description of its syntax was his M.A.thesis (1973). Another product of this research was his Nanumea Lexicon (Canberra, 1980), in which he provided an etymology for each word - in the process proposing many new reconstructions.
After a time in Wellington, he returned to Auckland in the 1980s, where he taught Linguistics 306 (Comparative Polynesian Linguistics) for some years. He would lead his students on cognate-hunting expeditions through the lesser-known reaches of the Outlier world, which resulted in still more new reconstructions. An exchange of papers with Bruce Biggs in the journal Te Reo (1979-80 and 1982) highlighted the complex phonological history of the Anuta language. This was a period when numerous notes, memoranda, proposals, critiques and lists of cognates (often hand-written) passed back and forth among a group including Peter, Bruce Biggs, Andy Pawley and myself, all leading eventually to much improvement and enlargement of our beloved database.
Although Peter had been in retirement for some years, 61 reconstructions on the web site labelled Rby still attest to his work.
Ross Clark
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