Tahiti has a rich history of oral tradition. Early visitors to the island transcribed recitations of myth, battle address, and land description. Until now their poetic organization has remained unexplored. From a computationally assisted analysis, this book describes early use of meter and parallelism and speculates on manner of composition. It sheds light on a poetic style unanticipated for Polynesia and remarkable among world poetries.

The Path of the Ocean is the first anthology of representative Polynesian poetry to be offered as a book of poetry rather than as a ethnological or historical document. Guided primarily by literary taste, Marjorie Sinclair has gathered poems from many sources and from translations with many kinds of expertise. She has scrupulously edited the old translations, modernized where necessary, and in some cases has translated or adapted the poetry. The arrangement of the anthology is rough geographic. It begins with Hawaii and travels southward, sometimes to the east and sometimes to the west until finally New Zealand is reached. As the title suggests, a journey that conveys scope, complexity, and deep humanity of the poetic spirit of the Polynesians.

A computationally-assisted analysis was undertaken of Tahitian oral poetry transcribed in the early 19th century, with the aim of discovering its poetic organization. An automated pattern detection process attempted to recognize many of the organizational possibilities for poetry that have been documented in the literature, as well as be open to unanticipated varieties. Candidate patterns generated were subjected to several rounds of manual review. Some tasks that would have proved difficult to automate, such as the detection of semantic parallelism, were pursued fully manually. Two distinct varieties of meter were encountered: A syllabic counting meter based upon a colon line, and a much less common word stress counting meter based upon a colon line or a list item. The use of each meter was ubiquitous in the corpus, but somewhat sporadic. Word stress counting meter was typically applied to lists, and generally co-occurred with patterns of syllabic counting meter; perhaps in order to enhance metrical effect through an addition of rhythm. For both meters, counts were regulated by an external pattern, wherein they were observed to repeat, increment, form inverted structures, or group into alternating sequences. There appeared to be few limitations as to the possibilities for a pattern"s starting count or length. Patterns were found to juxtapose freely, as well as alongside unpatterned counts. According to Nigel Fabb and Morris Halle, syllabic counting meter is only otherwise encountered in a style of Hebrew poetry from the Old Testament (Fabb and Halle 2008:268, 271, 283). Word stress counting meter may be unique to Tahitian poetry. The colon also functioned as poetic line for purposes of sound parallelism, which manifested itself in patterns of simple assonance, simple consonance, and complex patterns that combined simpler ones of assonance, consonance, and parallel strings of phonemes. Although sound patterns most often spanned lines, they were sometimes constrained to within a line. Occasionally, they were arranged into inverted structures, somewhat analogous to those noted for counting meter. Some sound patterns were contained within names and epithets, and perhaps served as recurring islands of parallelism. Syntactic parallelism was common, especially in the organization of lists. Occasionally, its application was suggestive of canonical parallelism. Items of syntactic frame lists were often arranged so as to assist patterns of counting meter. A syntactic frame"s variable elements often belonged to a single semantic category for which there seemed to be no restriction, and which could represent any taxonomic level. There appeared to be complete freedom in regards to the arrangement of syntactic frame patterns, and it was common for several to follow one another in unbroken succession. There is evidence that some of the corpus poetry was memorized. Other evidence suggests that a capacity existed, and perhaps continues to exist, of poetic composition-in-performance.

In 28 essays selected from the proceedings of the XXII International Congress of FILLM held at Assumption University, Bangkok, scholars and teachers of languages and literatures have noted, bemoaned and analyzed the waning influence of the humanities to varying degrees. They have raised questions, offered solutions and vigorously defended their languages and literatures, often in no uncertain terms - not as a politically correct thing to do, but as a human obligation. The papers presented here are true to the spirit of the Congress from the moment of the keynote address to what followed in a spontaneous outbreak of voices from scholars of more than 70 universities throughout the world. For the first time, in an international congress, scholars have described with great sensitivity many languages and literatures often considered the periphery, in a sincere attempt to understand ‘the other’, thus making a passionate plea for inclusion in the umbrella of the world’s languages and literatures. With contributions by keynote speaker and authority on Comparative Literature Gayatri Spivak, USA and plenary speakers Vridhagiri Ganeshan, India; Roger Sell, Finland; Antoine Compagnon, France; and Chetana Nagavajara, Thailand this volume is of immense interest to scholars and teachers of languages and literatures the world over.

Whetu Moana is a historic work - the first anthology of contemporary indigenous Polynesian poetry in English edited by Polynesians.