Roger Blench: Enggano language materials

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Enggano house (Modigliani 1894)

General

Enggano island is one of the ‘Barrier Islands’ off the southwest coast of Sumatra. Although possibly Austronesian, its language has many strange lexemes and highly unusual morphology. Moreover, the population, when first contacted from outside, were near-foragers living in beehive-shaped houses, resembling those in the Nicobars. The paper which can be downloaded presents my hypotheses on the origin of Enggano and the page also makes available a number of hard to get old Dutch sources for Enggano language and culture. You can also access the images from Modigliani’s ethnography of 1894, now a rare book. I would welcome any further more modern sources. The paper on the language is definitely a first version, awaiting more analysis.

Documents	Status
The Enggano language and its history	Unpublished
Images of Enggano culture in Modigliani (1894)
Old source materials
Boewang (1854)	Published
Rosenberg (1855)	Published
Straten (1855)	Published
Walland 1 (1864)	Published
Walland 2 (1864)	Published
Anon (1870)	Published
Helfrich (1891)	Published
Helfrich (1893)	Published
Winkler (1903)	Published
Winkler (1907)	Published
Nothofer (1986)	Published

Engganese (Rosenberg 1855)

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