proto-southwestern-tai revised: a new reconstruction - seals 22

196 Bradley McDonnell
uncontroversial. According to Wurm & Hittori (1981), Ende and Lio may, in fact, form a
single language made up of a dialect chain that can be considered mutually unintelligible at
either end of the dialect chain. The extent of their intelligibility, however, is not yet clear.
Some have considered Lio to be a dialect of Ende, but have also noted that the cultures see
themselves as culturally distinct (see Nakagawa, 1984, 1988b; Aoki, 1988). Even though a
clear picture of the dialects of Ende and Lio are unclear, there appears to be three primary
dialect groups named after their respective first person pronoun (Wurm & Hittori, 1981;
Nakagawa, p.c.). Beginning in the west, the Nga'o dialect makes up only about 9,000
speakers (Wurm & Hittori, 1981), but according to Nakagawa (1988b), it may be
considered a separate language. Bordering to the east of Nga'o is the Ja'o dialect, which is
spoken in and around the city of Ende in the central region of the Ende Regency. The Ja'o
dialect is also spoken on the small island of Ende off the south coast of Flores. Lastly, the
eastern most dialect is the Aku dialect, which borders on Lio speaking regions in the east,
which may be mutually intelligible with Lio.
Even though the vast majority of Flores and NTT ascribe to Catholicism, nearly
half of the 87,000 in the Ende population ascribe to Islam. Most of the ethnically Ende
Muslims reside on the coast and make their living by fishing, while most ethnically Ende
Catholics dwell inland and make their living by primarily farming maize and cassava. On
the small island of Ende, approximately an hour motorboat ride from the city of Ende,
there is 8,000 inhabitants that are almost exclusively Muslims (www.ende.go.id, 2005).
Other Ende communities, where the Ende language is still spoken, exist on the north coast
of the island of Sumba and the Manggarai region of western Flores (see Nakagawa, 1984;
Needham, 1968). Islam apparently came to Ende between the 16 th and 17 th century from
the island of Solor with either direct or indirect influence from the Bugis of Sulawesi
(Nakagawa, 1984).
1.1 Previous studies
There have been a handful of anthropological studies on Ende beginning in the midnineteenth
century. These studies have focused on kinship terminology and short word
lists, mostly for comparative work in linguistics and anthropology. Needham’s (1968)
study of Ende kinship terminology summarizes many of the earlier studies. He cites the
earliest wordlists of Ende as coming from an anonymous Dutch description of the
languages of Sumba (Anon., 1855) and Roos (1877). Further, Needham cites van
Suchtelen (1921) as presenting Ende wordlists as well as some dialectal information on the
Ende speaking region of Flores. Lastly, Needham (1968) states that the other analyses of
Ende kinship terminology, including Frazer (1919) and Wilken (1886), are not primary
sources, but are based on three aforementioned studies. Needham’s own study represents
data collected from a small permanent Ende community in Mamboru on the island of
Sumba, who had resided on Sumba since at least the mid-nineteenth century (Needham,
1968). In a second attempt to analyze Ende kinship terminology, Needham (1970) cites
field notes taken by the late Raymond Kennedy from 1949 to 1950 in the village of
Roworeke, closely located to the administrative center of Ende. It is unclear from
Needham (1970) how extensive Kennedy’s field notes are, but they appear to provide
descriptions of material culture and kinship relationships in Ende.
More recent studies on Ende have been carried out by the Japanese anthropologists,
Satoshi Nakagawa and Eriko Aoki. They have focused on ritual language of Ende (and
Lio) and have compiled a 2,500+ word Ende-English dictionary (Aoki and Nakagawa,