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Eighteen years of listening to conversations of the Temiars has enabled David P. Quinton to piece together the grammatical rules which their language follows. In 2022 he embarked on the daunting task of a systematic description of these rules, in line with other linguistic accounts of ‘Aslian’ or Malayan indigenous languages. The result is a detailed account of phonology, lexical formation and processes of word morphology, with a description of word classes including nouns, kin terms, pronouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, as well as ideophones, expressive phrases and conjunctives. In the appendices a lexical comparison of Temiar and Semai can be found, together with full lists of fossilised morphemes and a great list of ideophones.
There will always be areas to correct or additional rules to include, but as it stands it is a fairly comprehensive work and must be the most complete attempt at Temiar grammar to date. Students of Senoic languages or linguistics in general will without doubt benefit greatly from referencing the rich detail in this volume.
A grammar of the Temiar language, an indigenous people group of Malaysia. Includes overview, phonology and word classes, produced from over 15 years of work.
210pp, paperback, ISBN: 978-1-7391344-6-4
● Preface A description of how the work was compiled and other linguistic sources that greatly helped.
● Chapter 1 | Introduction to Kelantan Temiar A description of who the Temiar people are and a summary of the language, with a brief comparison with Semai.
● Chapter 2 | Phonology A detailed description of vowels and consonants in Temiar, followed by a thorough examination of phonotactics and inflectional processes.
● Chapter 3 | Nouns Description of lexeme nouns, morphology, compounds, headers and classifiers.
● Chapter 4 | Names Description of toponyms, autonyms, nicknames and kin terms.
● Chapter 5 | Pronouns Description of personal pronouns and honorific pronouns with their succinct forms, followed by description of demonstratives and prepositional pronouns, and finally relative pronouns.
● Chapter 6 | Verbs Description of lexeme verbs, stative verbs, aspect and morphemes derived from roots describing aspect.
● Chapter 7 | Adjectives & Adverbs Description of lexeme roots and adjectives derived from verbs, followed by detailed description of quantitatives, qualitatives, temporal adverbs, prepositions, ideophones and expressive words and phrases.
● Chapter | 8 Syntax Description of the common clause, questions, relative clauses and noun phrases, followed by description of conjuctives. Typical phrases are given at the end.
● Appendix 1 A comparison of Temiar and Semai lexicon Lists of Temiar and Semai words categorised into their level of phonemic or semantic congruity.
● Appendix 2 Fossilised morphology Lists of Temiar lexeme words that show evidence of morphological processes.
● Appendix 3 List of ideophones Ideophonic words in use by the Temiars to describe sounds, appearance and behaviour.
● Bibliography List of reading references on Senoic linguistics.
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Just as Temiar traditions, beliefs and culture have been in great need of presenting in a detailed and accurate form for many years, and which I have attempted to do in my book, The Temiars of the Puyan River (2022), so also does the Temiar language. Former attempts have been severely lacking in accuracy and the error in them must have led many to nowhere with learning Temiar. On the one hand, the dictionary published by Natalie Means (1998) was full of mistakes and lacked any proper orthography, while the numerous and detailed papers published by Geoffrey Benjamin have only proven to be halfway there in fully understanding Temiar (this I describe more fully in my preface to my dictionary of Kelantan Temiar).
My work with the Temiar language began in 2010 when I reached the valleys of hinterland Kelantan and started reviewing the said error-ridden dictionary and recording new vocabulary. No less than thirty persons from six villages around the Pos Símpor and Pos Gɔɔb valleys helped in the beginning, proving or disproving the contents of that work while loading me with the names of species of every kind of plant and creature, including birds, fish, frogs, trees, bamboo, fruits and vines, along with the methods they use in preparing food and making crafts. At the start, the grammar was nothing but some bare word lists with no analysis or description. These lists gradually grew and grew, building on initial collections of demonstratives and pronouns with more colloquial expressions and phrases.
Once I had settled at Píɲcơơŋ village, at Pos Gɔɔb, in 2016, I realised that this work needed some serious attention to make it more presentable, though I had no idea how to go about this fairly daunting task. Still, the deep and accurate knowledge of the Temiars here, of their customs and life-skills, aided me enormously and they did not cease to offer their support. It was only in early 2022 that I began to systematically upgrade this grammar to make it something usable among linguists. The initial word lists that I included in the front of the dictionary soon took shape and came out into the chapters of this grammar, that eventually found its way back into the dictionary in a concise version!
Two sources of linguistic material that greatly assisted in this work, the first of which being Geoffrey Benjamin’s various papers on Temiar, which, while the grammar in them did not pass very well with my respondents (I write comments to his papers elsewhere), they did help highlight certain areas for testing. His book, Temiar Religion (2014), enabled me to dig deeply into Temiar customs and beliefs, leading to my detailed accounts in the first two chapters of my aforementioned book and to many fuller definitions in the dictionary.
The other resource that has been crucial to my work, helping me to rectify my careless guesses at the grammar in every area, is Niclas Burenhult’s richly detailed ‘A Grammar of Jahai’ (2005). It has been a complete pleasure to work through, even as a non-Jahai speaker, but as a Temiar-speaker. I owe him many thanks for making his thesis available to the public, as it is extremely difficult for me to order published books at this time, given my remote location. As a non-linguist myself, sometimes it took me three to four reads of a paragraph to understand what he was describing, for example with verbs and aspect. Some areas of the analysis, such as the section on phonotactics, have proven to be the most taxing project for me to complete in my entire life. But hopefully it has been worth all the effort now that it is completed (without any help or critique to date) and I hope that it will prove valuable to others interested with Senoic or even Mon Khmer language studies.