45 
. . .Midnight. . . 
When I lay down^ telling Jean Guiart I hoped to arise in an hour or so 
and continue work^he surely did not believe me! It is probably after 
midnight. Jean has gone to bed — I have awakened and I have been working 
wide awake for over an hour and I am very self-satisfied. 
Jean comments on my failure to record linguistic information in an 
acceptable phonetics. He is right. Actually my ear is not that good 
and for phonetics I have a great handicap. I usually write phonetically 
using a Pidgin or Spanish use of our alphabet, more Pidgin than Spanish. 
This works for languages without complex sounds, but not others. I 
actually try quickly to arrive at the alphabet that results after a 
phonetic analysis of a language is made and an adaptation to a Roman 
alphabet is achieved. This is, if anything, a bit presumptuous, but it 
has the advantage of quickly arriving at generality and avoiding the 
attention to minutia of pronunciation and dialect. Even American English 
would yield a dozen dialects and a vast "variance" of form if approached 
with phonetic purism. 
I am sleeping on the ground in the open walled frame for a school 
building which has been our center for work here on Merig. The sheet 
metal roof is fine and the lack of sides is surely an advantage as long 
as we do not have wind driven rain. The building is beside the white 
mortar church, across the track from the main village. After darkness 
sets in girls and men often visit us here but only in "safe" groups. It 
is only 50-100 meters from anyones dwelling, but that is already a bit 
far afield after the village has begun to retire. Thus, even the indiv- 
ual dwellings are arranged so that doors do not face each other and so 
that stone walks provide a modicum of privacy, and private family life 
proceeds just in and around the family structures and not throughout an 
"open" village, tiny as it is! The desire for privacy is reflected in the 
further nine dwellings scattered around the island, each isolated by 
gardens, walled pig enclosures and bush from each other. 
Today, after loading our supplies and personnel onto the Alpha Helix , 
Walter secured from Captain Phinney permission to bring on board a few 
Merig Islanders and returned with the boat to bring three of them on a 
brief tour of the ship. 
If only good weather stays with us and we get to Gaua by tomorrow 
noon, we will be on schedule and our Merig and Merelava studies will be 
far along. On Gaua I hope principally to locate the Merig and Merelava 
people there. 
Lavolvol village, Merig Island September 27, 1972 
We are on the calmest sea we have seen on the trip thus far and all 
goes well. All the 50 people of Lavolvol came in to have their tuberculin 
tests read between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m. and by 9 a.m. we were ready to leave 
for the ship. 
