Petualangan Unjung dan Mbui Kuvong

The Punan Tuvu' (Tubu) is a community of former nomadic hunter-gatherers in north Kalimantan, Borneo, upriver (hulu) along the Tubu.This Punan linguistic/ethnic group is the largest of the nomadic groups in Kalimantan with about 4,000 people, yet their language is endangered (p.26).Antonio Guerreiro, tells in the preface how he initiated the book project in discussions with the École francaise d'Extrême-Orient.The idea was to build on material from a previous Culture and Conservation project, primarily two publications that never reached a large audience: a dictionary and folk story book compiled by Dollop Mamung, a Punan Tuvu' man (Mamung 1998).Antonia Soriente and Nicolas Césard, who both have extensive experience researching Borneo languages and communities, were invited to carry out the work and serve as editors.They provided additional documentation, including new recordings.Soriente, working closely with Mamung and in consultation with several local informants, revised the phonology, expanded the dictionary, and revised the oral literature texts.This publication brings together a Punan Tuvu'-Indonesian dictionary (177 pp.), folk tales known in Punan Tuvu' as mbui (100 pp.), and a section about medicinal plants (20 pp.).The latter was compiled by a local expert and lists 44 species with user guidelines.Punan Tuvu' oral literature also consists of songs, epics, and healing ritual texts.The included tales are but a small sample of the recorded corpus that primarily consists of mbui.Most recordings are not yet annotated, but exist as a 'digital archive ' (pp.35-6).It would add great value if the recordings and annotations could be accessed online, a common goal in the documentation of endangered languages.Soriente and Césard have written a comprehensive introduction (pp.21-45) to the history of the Punan Tuvu' , the adaptation to a settled life with farming, and the language situation.They report that the young Punan Tuvu' rarely use their own language, many parents do not speak it to their children, and adults below forty are not fluent in Punan Tuvu' .With such a transmission failure the language is clearly endangered, and a prime motivation behind the publication is the local need for revitalizing resources.Soriente's general description of the language (pp.47-62) discusses classification, phonology, and morphology, especially the prefix system.Soriente

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