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Introduction

Introductory comments

Among the Rotenese of eastern Indonesia, certain recitations were of profound spiritual significance. The most important of these recitations were origin narratives that recounted primeval relations between the realm of the Sun and Moon and the realm of the Sea. Until recently, these chants were restricted and could only be recounted in a ritual setting.

The origin narratives in this volume come from two long-established domains on the island of Rote in eastern Indonesia: the domain of Termanu and the domain of Thie¹—both small communities whose populations shared related ideas about a spiritual world concerned with primeval relations between the Heavens and of the Sea. Presenting these narratives here in an ordered fashion with commentary provides a glimpse of that world of ancestral ideas that were once celebrated but have now passed away. This volume is intended as a tribute to that world, preserving for future generations the possibilities for consideration and contemplation of a sphere of once powerful spiritual significance.

Preserving the oral narratives of a tiny island of marginal significance may appear to be an effort of little value. Viewed, however, within the context in which I wish to present these tales, they are of major significance. The forms of composition used by the poets of Rote go back to the origins of oral poetry. They speak to the first poetry recorded from Sumer and to an enormous array of oral poetry from around the world. Understanding the composition of the oral narratives from Rote sheds light on the creativity of compositions that underlie some of the greatest works of world literature. As expressions of creative imagination, they can take their place within this canon of the world’s poetry.

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I gathered many of these oral narratives—especially those in their most extended form—during my first fieldwork on the island in 1965–66. Gathering the full array of these recitations, transcribing, translating and then trying to understand them, has been an effort of more than 50 years.

The oral poets who recited these chants for me intended that they be transmitted to subsequent generations but in a ritually restricted and respectful manner. For this reason, I have hesitated for decades to make them widely available. At a gathering with some eight master poets from Rote in October 2011, I discussed the issue of how I might best make these sacred recitations public. It was the unanimous opinion of all the poet-chanters that now was the time to do so. Hence, I set to work to prepare this collection for publication.

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This study records several ritual voices whose collective import constitutes the equivalent for the Rotenese of an ‘oral scripture’. Whereas the idea of a scripture emphasises the preservation of spiritual ideas through a written text, this volume can be considered as a rendering of ideas of the sacred through recognised recitation, the authority, stability and continuing coherence of which are preserved by fixed linguistic conventions. Many of the world’s scriptures began, similarly, as oral revelations and many of these were couched in a form like those of the Rotenese. It is this form of oral preservation and presentation that I examine in this book. The language of many such similar recitations has served as the oral prelude to the scripting of spiritual ideas.

All the Rotenese oral recitations in this book are composed in a strict canonical parallelism that requires the pairing of terms: all nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbial elements. Originally, these chants were restricted and could only be spoken in a ritual setting. Improper recitation—mistakes in the wording of a chant, deviations or misrepresentations in the narrative—was believed to provoke serious consequences.

Although I recorded these chants as separate recitations, these narratives are related to one another and together hint at an ancestral epic—an epic that recounts relations between the Sun and the Moon and their heavenly descendants and the rulers of the Ocean and Sea, identified as Shark and Crocodile. The common meeting place for these great lords was the flat Earth with its pointed rocks. Their primal deeds set the pattern for the humans who came to dwell there.

Each of these narratives explains how a vital feature of Rotenese life came into being. These narratives include several recitations that recount the Sun and Moon’s discovery of the wealth of the Sea. These initial recitations focus on the origin of cooking and the origin of the house and its construction, but they also recount the establishment of relations between the realms of the Sun and Moon and the Lords of the Sea. Subsequent narratives from Termanu relate the origins of rice and millet, the origin of the process of weaving and dyeing, including the patterning of traditional cloth, the origin of the container for indigo and the base used for spinning cloth—all ultimately gifts from the Sea.

The origin narratives of Thie, like those of Termanu, recount a related array of events linking the realm of the Sun and the Moon with the realm of the Sea. This includes the origins of planting but also other narratives that were of celebratory significance in Thie.

None of these ritual narratives is entirely intelligible without appropriate commentary and exegesis. In some of these narratives, their most important element is hinted at but purposely unstated. It is essential, therefore, to present more than just the texts themselves.

Underlying all these narratives is the fundamental idea that the knowledge of origins is empowering. This knowledge was once celebrated as an essential guide to action in the present.

The idea of an ‘oral scripture’ and of a ‘scriptural voice’

The pairing of words and the composition of phrasing that occur in Rotenese-origin narratives are a means of expression common to oral traditions among diverse populations around the world. This pairing is consistent and systematic, and compositions tend to be formulaic. This ‘ritual voice’ is a form of heightened speech intended to enhance the significance of the message it conveys. This ritual voice in its highest register can also be referred to as a ‘scriptural voice’ and as such is a feature of numerous and varied religious traditions. This scriptural voice is many-faceted; its liturgical scope may encompass a diverse range of utterances. It can be revelatory, admonitory, directive, performative or extensively narrative but its utterances are intentionally elevated for spiritual effect. A key vehicle for this scriptural voice across a great variety of religious traditions is a pervasive semantic parallelism. It is the dominant feature of the Rotenese narratives in this volume.

The term ‘parallelism’ was originally used to describe the compositional structures of parts of the Old Testament. Thus, in 1753, in lectures delivered at the University of Oxford, the esteemed Professor of Hebrew Poetry Bishop Robert Lowth noted that

the poetic conformation of the sentences, which has been so often alluded to as characteristic of the Hebrew poetry, consists chiefly in a certain equality, resemblance, or parallelism between the members of each period; so that in two lines (or members of the same period) things for the most part shall answer to things, and words, to words, as if fitted to each other by a kind of rule or measure.

(1829: 157)

Later in his ‘Preliminary Dissertation’ on a new translation of Isaiah, he described this arrangement of sacred compositions as parallelismus membrorum:

The correspondence of one verse or line with another, I call parallelism. When a proposition is delivered, and a second is subjoined to it, or drawn under it, equivalent, or contrasted with it in sense, or similar to it in the form of grammatical construction, these I call parallel lines; and the words or phrases, answering one to another in the corresponding lines, parallel terms.

(Lowth 1834: IX)

Lowth described the voice conveyed by the parallelism that he had identified as a ‘prophetic’ one. Since Lowth’s time, similar usages have been identified in numerous contexts in a great variety of writings as well as among an even greater variety of oral traditions. Far more than simple correspondences are involved in such compositions. Where the ordering of words and phrases becomes stricter and such compulsory strictures are elevated to a canon, these forms of parallelism, as the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson (1966: 399) has argued, can be considered as ‘canonical parallelism’ or, more aptly, as ‘semantic parallelism’. Based on the rigorous culturally defined pairings of specific terms, all Rotenese origin narratives constitute a form of semantic parallelism.

Traditions of composition in parallelism have been developed and elaborated across a range of diverse cultures: from the earliest ritual poetry of Sumer through a scribal continuity of transmission over centuries across other languages in the Middle East, but just as distinctively in the Chinese and Mongolian traditions as well those of the Uralic languages, in numerous diverse South-East Asian languages including the Austronesian traditions of island South-East Asia and extensively, as well, in the Americas, most notably among the Incas, Aztecs and Mayan languages. Explorations in Semantic Parallelism (Fox 2014: 19–90) provides an extensive survey of the now substantial literature on the varieties of these forms of parallelism, particularly the use of elevated forms of canonical parallelism, in both the oral and the written traditions around the world.²

Mesopotamian sources of parallelism

The Hebrew traditions for which Lowth coined the term parallelism were part of an older and more widespread Mesopotamian tradition that can be traced back to the earliest period of written records: those of Sumer, which date back some 5,000 years.

Samuel Noah Kramer, in his From the Poetry of Sumer (1979), has provided a glimpse of this extraordinary poetry—some of the world’s earliest poetic compositions. A creation passage of great beauty occurs as a prologue to the myth of the hero Gilgamesh, which Kramer translates as follows:

In primeval days, in distant primeval days.

In primeval nights, in far-off primeval nights,

In primeval years, in distant primeval years—

In ancient days, when everything vital had been brought into existence,

In ancient days, when everything vital had been nurtured,

When bread had been tasted in the shires of the land

When bread had been baked in the ovens of the land—

When heaven had been moved away from the earth,

When earth had been separated from heaven,

When the name of man had been fixed—

When An had carried off heaven,

When Enlil had carried off earth …

(Kramer 1979: 23)

This prologue, which goes on to recount the deeds of the gods and the planting of the huluppu tree on the banks of the Euphrates River, is composed in a strict and balanced parallelism. Although Kramer makes no mention in this work of the parallelism that he so carefully translates, he and other researchers have commented on and examined this pervasive use of parallelism in many other studies.

In his book Reading Sumerian Poetry, Jeremy Black discusses the ‘technical features’ of this Sumerian poetry in a way that paraphrases Lowth:

This includes parallelism of word patterning within the individual line of verse or between pairs of lines; grouping of lines into pairs, or groups of three or four on the basis of meaning, structure or sound; assonance and alliteration; and rhyme.

(1998: 8)

A short selection of illustrative lines from a cuneiform text (from the Electronic Corpus of Sumerian Literature) in praise of the god Enlil in his shrine in the settlement of Nibru gives a further illustration of the rich forms of parallelism in this poetry.³

In this text, Enlil is Father and Great Mountain; E-kur is his shining temple and lofty shrine; it is a dais of abundance and a mountain of abundance; it rises from the soil and grows on pure land; its festivals are celebrated with fat and cream; its presence brings joy and abundance:

In the city, the holy settlement of Enlil,

In Nibru, the beloved shrine of Father Great Mountain,

He has made the dais of abundance,

The E-kur, the shining temple, rise from the soil.

He has made it grow on pure land as high as a towering mountain.

Its prince, the Great Mountain,

Father Enlil has taken his seat on the dais of the E-kur, the lofty shrine …

In the festivals, there is plenty of fat and cream.

They are full of abundance.

Its divine plans bring joy and rejoicing …

(Dahl 1997–2006: t.4.05.1)

Even in translation, this Sumerian fragment pours forth a profusion of recognisable pairs including godly names and titles identified in named locations. Pairing in these verses is as specific as it is general. It is in the detailed examination of extended poetic lines that the full extent of composition based on pervasive parallelism becomes apparent.

Rotenese comparisons

For comparison, it is instructive to consider the initial 10 lines of the first version of the Rotenese origin narrative to gain an idea of the semantic pairing features of this parallelism. This passage reads as follows:

1.	Boe ma ala soku Mandeti Ledo	They set off, Mandeti Ledo
2.	Ma lali Patola Bulan.	And they go forth, Patola Bulan.
3.	De ala fu-toleu asu	They whistle for their dog
4.	Ma ala kati-kofio busa	And they call for their hound
5.	Busa nade Pia Dola	The hound named Pia Dola
6.	Ma asu nade Hua Lae.	And the dog named Hua Lae.
7.	Ala sopu lai basa dae	They hunt through all the land
8.	Ala fule [lai] basa oe.	They stalk through all the water.
9.	Leu Ledo lasi nana-papadak	They go to the Sun’s forbidden forest
10.	Ma Bulan nula nana-babatak.	And the Moon’s restricted wood.

This passage introduces the sons of the Sun and Moon, whose paired double names are Mandeti Ledo//Patola Bulan. These names highlight a fundamental feature of Rotenese parallel expression and one of the challenging aspects of the translation of Rotenese parallel verse. The doubling of names, particularly of persons, can render these chant characters as either singular or plural persons. In this passage, as indicated by the pronoun ala (‘they’), the sons of the Sun and Moon are presented in the plural. In other recitations of this same origin narrative and often in Rotenese exegesis on these narratives, Mandeti Ledo//Patola Bulan can be treated as the single son of the Sun and Moon. This feature is pervasive, and some poets purposely play on this potential difference by pairing singular and plural pronouns in contrastive lines. To maintain sense in English, consistency is essential. Hence the plural form, which is used most frequently in these origin narratives, has been adopted for the sake of translation.

In this passage, the first lexical elements, Mandeti//Patola, of these paired double names form personal identifiers while the second elements, Ledo//Bulan, are genealogical identifiers indicating direct ancestry from the Sun (Ledo) and the Moon (Bulan). All personal names and all placenames in this oral tradition are paired and, in the case of placenames, these names often have a complex duality. Trees, animals and most other living creatures are also paired. In this passage, for example, Mandeti Ledo//Patola Bulan’s hunting dog has the double name Pia Dola//Hua Lae.

This passage of 10 lines is composed of 10 paired terms: ‘dyadic sets’⁴ whose required pairings accord with the culturally accepted rules of composition.

There are three paired verbs, one of which is a complex verb:

lali//soku: ‘go forth’//‘set off’

fu-toleu//kati-kofio: ‘whistle’//‘call’

fule//sopu: ‘stalk’//‘hunt’

There are also three paired nouns:

asu//busa: ‘dog’//‘hound’

dae//oe: ‘land’//‘water’

lasi//nula: ‘forest’//‘wood’

In addition, there is a dyadic set, which can be either a noun or a verb. In this passage, it functions in partially reduplicated form as a modifier:

bata//pada: ‘forbidden’//‘restricted’

The remaining terms are invariant elements: sentence/statement makers boe ma, de and the connective ma (‘and’) plus the plural third-person pronoun ala (‘they’). The term nade (‘named’) is here an invariant term, although in other contexts nade forms a dyadic set with tamok (‘genealogical name’//‘ancestral name’).

The only recurrent set is Ledo//Bulan, which appears in lines 1 and 2 in the names of the two hunters and again in lines 9 and 10 in reference to the forbidden forest where they first hunt.

Given the ordered structure of these lines, it is possible—as it is possible with any such lines—to set out the formal arrangement of pairs. Most verse lines have either two or three lexical elements that pair with other such elements in another line. (This poetry also allows for internal pairing within lines.) Using a simple notation for sets but not for invariant elements, this formulaic ordering for the initial 10 lines of the first Rotenese oral narrative is as follows:

a1 b1 c1

a2 b2 c2

d1 e1

d2 e2

e2 g1 f1

e1 g2 f2

h1i1

h2i2

c1j1k1

c2j2k2

Comparison of the initial lines of the first version of the origin narratives with the initial lines of the second version offers an idea of the canonical similarity that characterises these recitations. The recitation of this second version was recorded from a different poet at a different time. Significantly, this passage follows a singular format.

The passage begins with a common formulaic opening and proceeds to introduce the son of the Sun and Moon, Patola Bulan//Mandeti Ledo, who is hunting pig and civet. It introduces his hunting dog but gives the dog a different double name to that in the first version. In the next two lines, it explains the meaning of these double names, which are a verb play on the Rotenese words for assistance (doi//so’u) and for carrying (lepa//la’e):⁵

1.	Neu faik esa manunin	On one certain day
2.	Ma ledo dua mateben-na	And at a particular time
3.	Boe ma touk Patola Bulan	The man Patola Bulan
4.	Ma ta’ek Mandeti Ledo	And the boy Mandeti Ledo
5.	Neu sopu bafi ndondolo	Wander about hunting pig
6.	Ma ana fule kue lolota.	And roam about stalking civet cat.
7.	Asu nade Lepa La’e	The dog named Lepa La’e
8.	Ma busa nade Doi Sou,	And the hound named Doi So’u,
9.	Doi-la so’u ao	Mutual aid in balancing a burden
10.	Ma lepa-la la’e ao …	And mutual support in carrying a load …

Although these 10 lines present a slightly different rendering from the 10 lines of the first version, the essential import is similar. Although the names of the hunting dogs in the two versions are not the same, this is not a significant difference. Names are often the subject of contention in the oral narratives. Since many persons and most places have multiple names, the citation of a different name for the ‘same’ hunting dog raises little concern.

There are four paired verbs in these lines, one of which is used adverbially in semi-reduplicated form:

fule//sopu: ‘hunt’//‘stalk’

lota//ndolo: ‘wander’//‘roam’

doi//lepa: ‘aid’//‘support’

la’e//so’u: ‘lift’//‘carry’

There are also five paired nouns:

esa//dua: ‘one’//‘two’

fai//ledo: ‘day’//‘sun’

ta’e//tou: ‘boy’//‘man’

kue//bafi: ‘civet cat’//‘pig’

asu//busa: ‘dog’//‘hound’

The invariant terms are the singular third-person pronoun ana (‘he’), which appears only once, in line 6; the term nade (‘name’), which functions as a verb; and the reflexive term ao.

In addition to the names Patola Bulan//Mandeti Ledo, this second set of 10 lines shares two dyadic sets—fule//sopu and asu//busa—with the set of 10 lines of the first version. As both versions of this narrative proceed, this sharing increases steadily, creating an elevated discourse of recurrent pairs.

This discourse lends these recitations a formal stability like that of a scriptural text. Although each recitation may differ, the constituent elements of its discourse—the canonical pairs of which it is composed—remain consistent and stable.

The continuity of canonical pairing

One of the characteristics of an ‘oral’ scripture is the continuity of its authoritative word—a continuity of stable pairing that extends over generations and marks traditions of canonical pairing. In the case of the succession of societies in the Middle East from Sumer onwards, this continuity was enhanced and perpetuated by scribal traditions of writing but was also firmly founded on a common poetic tradition of composition. While emphasis has been given to the similarity in the transmission of certain narratives, the historical continuity of this authority, based on the semantics of canonical pairing, has been given less attention.

One focus of scholarly attention has drawn on the comparison of ‘parallels’ between Hebrew and Ugaritic, both of which share a large repertoire of formal pairs. The discovery in 1928–29 at Ras Shamra in Syria of a hoard of cuneiform tablets opened the possibilities of comparison of the Ugaritic and Hebrew scriptural traditions (and, by extension, that of the older Akkadian tradition). This discovery led to an explosion of notable scholarship that carried forward the work of Lowth.⁶

Ginsberg (1935) was the first to call attention to what he described as ‘certain fixed pairs of synonyms that recur repeatedly in the same order’. Following Ginsberg, Stanley Gevirtz, in his Patterns in the Early Poetry of Israel (1963: 8), examined these ‘conventionally fixed pairs of words’ to argue for ‘a traditional poetic diction common to Syro-Palestinian literatures’. At the time, Gevirtz could point to just ‘sixty-odd pairs of fixed parallels’ shared between the two poetic traditions, but Michel Dahood’s (1974, 1975, 1981) research over many years has extended this number to at least 450 such compositional pairs. This evidence would further indicate a continuity in formal poetic diction that extended, in some form, back to early Akkadian.

In The Ugaritic Texts and the Origins of West-Semitic Literary Composition (2012), Dennis Pardee has described this common shared tradition as one based on parallelism as ‘the basic structural device for the poets working in those traditions’. Defining this poetry as ‘the highest literary register in these two languages’, he has examined in detail ‘how parallelism functions to provide structure, meaning and a sense of compositional well-being’ (Pardee 2012: 80). Although more narrative in its compositions than in the Hebrew tradition, Ugaritic possesses a similar authoritative scriptural voice. Pardee quotes, as one among numerous examples of this common poetic diction, the several lines of a Ugaritic parallel text that shares a similar idiom with Hebrew texts that emphasise the thunderous voice of Yahweh:

He opens a window in the house

A latticed window in the palace

Ba’lu [himself] opens up the rift in the clouds

His holy voice Ba’lu gives forth repeatedly

Repeatedly utters, does Ba’lu, the outpouring of his lips

His holy voice causes the earth to tremble,

At the outpouring of his lips, the mountains take fright.

(Pardee 2012: 94)

In Pardee’s view, the scriptural voice expressed in Hebrew (as in Ugaritic) is fundamentally a poetic voice: ‘[T]he oldest Hebrew data on the prophets reveal these persons to have been poets in the fullest sense of the term, not so much prophets who knew something about poetry as poets who happened to be prophets’ and whose literary production has been preserved in the Hebrew Bible (2012: 123).

Mesoamerican parallelism: The Maya

Shifting to another religious tradition provides a further perspective on the authority and continuity that canonical parallelism accords to the scriptural voice. The Mayan and Nahuatl languages of Mesoamerica possess traditions of parallelism as elaborate and as pervasive as those of Mesopotamia and these poetic traditions continue to the present. Extensive ethnographic documentation of the living traditions of this poetry combined with a renewed and concerted effort in translating texts of the colonial period and the notable achievement in the decipherment of ancient Maya glyphs have produced an enormous body of scholarship on the uses of this parallelism.⁷

As Kerry Hull, a researcher who has worked across the full range of Maya genres, has eloquently and amply argued:

The preferred vehicle for literary expression among all Maya languages is paralleled discourse. Quite simply, parallelism defines poetic or ornate discourse in the minds of the Maya themselves. Within its seemly strict confines, the Maya are able to elaborate profoundly complex cultural knowledge by means of associative connections … [I]n modern Maya languages a general adage applies: the more formal the discourse, the more parallel structures appear. In fact, in the case of Maya there is an unequivocal link between the frequency and the formality of the discourse … It is undoubtedly on ritual and other formal speech occasions where the full flowering of parallel structures can be found among the Maya … Both knowing which word combinations are acceptable and understanding the metaphorical extensions that often accompany such groupings are crucial elements in one’s communicative competence in many Maya societies.

(Hull and Carrasco 2012: 74–75)

A feature of this diversity of traditions of parallelism is the continuity of its canonical pairings. The decipherment of Mayan glyphs has provided a glimpse of a wide range of ancient pairs.⁸ Hull, who has studied these pairings across compositions of different periods, notes that ‘many of the lexical pairings we find in colonial and modern Maya literature can be traced back to classical periods. In most cases such couplets represent intimate cultural understandings, which explains their longevity’ (Hull and Carrasco 2012: 77). He refers to this use of canonical pairing as ‘poetic tenacity’—‘a strong continuity and preservation of meaning over more than a millennium’ (Hull and Carrasco 2012: 7).

As evidence of this poetic tenacity, Hull has listed a range of shared pairs that occur in the glyphic inscriptions, colonial manuscripts and numerous contemporary ritual settings among different Mayan languages. For each of these pairs, he illustrates its various usages including its glyph representations. A list of the pairs that Hull has selected and labelled ‘diaphrastic kennings’ are the following: 1) sky//earth, 2) sky//cave, 3) well//spring, 4) land//well, 5) wind/air//water/rain, 6) male//female, 7) day//year, 8) day//night, 9) stone//wood, 10) flint//shield, 11) bread//water, 12) green//yellow, 13) god//lord, and 14) throne//mat.⁹

An illustration of the occurrence of the first of these pairs, sky//earth, in different periods follows.

Mayan glyphic occurrences

The following use of the pair sky//earth is inscribed on the Tikal Stela 3:

8,000 are the Gods of Sky

Gods of Earth.

Similarly, this same pair is found on a bench in the southern subterranean building of the Palenque Palace:

Passing in the sky

Passing on the earth.

Colonial manuscript occurrences

This pair occurs in the two key colonial manuscripts of the Quiché (K’iche’) Maya, the Rabinal Achí and the Popol Vuh.

In the Rabinal Achí, it is the single most frequent pair to occur. One such example is:

On the face of the sky

On the face of the earth.

In the Popol Vuh, an example of this pair is:

The four corners of the sky

The four corners of the earth.

Contemporary occurrences

Two Yucatecan Maya examples of the use of this pair in different contexts are:

Burned was the sky

Burned was the earth

In the caves of the sky

In the caves of the earth.

(Hull and Carrasco 2012: 80–81)

The Rabinal Achí (‘Man of Rabinal’) is a remarkable Mayan text that spans centuries. It is a dramatic enactment of events dating to an era of fierce struggle before the invasion of the Spanish, the Mayan-language ‘script’ of which was composed in the colonial period and eventually recorded by the notable parish priest of Rabinal, Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, who also succeeded in preserving the Popol Vuh, another Mayan masterpiece. The Maya script has been transmitted to the local Quiché population of Rabinal in the highlands of Guatemala, who have rendered its dialogue into a costumed performance known as the Xajoj Tun (‘Dance of the Trumpets’), which is performed each January before the feast of St Sebastian and in the following week in commemoration of St Paul, the patron saint of Rabinal. A superb English translation of the Mayan text of the Rabinal Achí has been done by Dennis Tedlock (2003).

An excerpt from this translation of the first speech of the Man of Rabinal, who addresses his prisoner, Cawek of the Forest People, highlights the strict parallelism of an altering discourse and the repeated invocation of Sky and Earth:

Is that what your words say

in the hearing of Sky

in the hearing of Earth?

You delivered them

in range of my weapon

in range of my shield

and my upraised ax blade

and my snail-shell bracelet

my armband

my white paint

my gourd of tobacco

and my strength

and my manhood

So whether you see it coming

or it happens without warning

I shall catch you

with my henequen rope

my henequen cord

So say my words

before Sky

before Earth.

May Sky and Earth be with you

brave man

prisoner, captive …

(Tedlock 2003: 27–28)

Parallelism within the Chinese sphere: The Zhuang

Parallelism is a prominent feature in the earliest of Chinese recorded documents such as the Book of Changes (I Ching) and has a long history of subsequent elaboration within the Chinese tradition. In his 1830 disquisition, ‘On the Poetry of the Chinese’, John Francis Davis was one of the first literary scholars to draw on the insights of Robert Lowth and to point out the ‘striking coincidence’ of parallelism in the construction of Chinese verse. He argued that the key features of this verse—‘the exact equality in the number of words, which form each line of a poetic couplet, and the almost total absence of recurring participles’—endow Chinese, like ‘no other language’, with a capacity for the elaboration of parallelism (Davis 1830: 417). Davis argued that, for the Chinese, this parallelism ‘pervades their poetry universally, forms its chief characteristic feature, and is the source of a great deal of its artificial poetry’ (1830: 415).¹⁰ A host of subsequent scholars have extended Davis’s observations.¹¹

Complementary pairing, combined with the poetic juxtaposition of antithetic pairs, has been directed, to great effect, in the Daoist scriptures to highlight the paradoxes of being and, thus, create a powerful scriptural voice. The opening lines of the Yuandao, the Chinese treatise on the Dao that forms a crucial component of the Huainanzi, an early Han Dynasty compendium of knowledge written in about 139 BCE, presents the Dao as the ‘oneness of all things’:

It [the Dao] shelters the heavens and supports the earth

Extends beyond the four points of the compass

And opens up the eight points of the compass.

It is high beyond reach

And deep beyond reckoning

It envelops the cosmos

And gives to the yet formless.

Flowing from its source it becomes a gushing spring

What was empty slowly becomes full;

First turbid and then surging forward,

What was murky slowly becomes clear.

(Lau and Ames 1998: 1)

The antiquity of Chinese parallelism and its long history have had profound religious and intellectual influences on cultural traditions within China and among neighbouring populations. The Chinese script’s detachment from any vernacular creates a separation of oral and writing forms of parallelism that is particularly pertinent to usages that continue to this day among the Zhuang of south-western China.

The Zhuang are a Tai-speaking population of some 16 million living in the western reaches of Guanxi province. They are an officially recognised minority (minzu), the largest such national minority in China. They are closely related linguistically to the Bouyei of Guizhou—a separately recognised minority with whom they share cultural traditions. They are also linguistically related to the Nùng, Thổ and Tày minorities of northern Vietnam. Given their long presence in the region and considerable cultural and linguistic diversity, their designation as Zhuang serves as an umbrella term for most of these Tai-speaking groups.

For centuries, the Zhuang have relied on a modified Chinese script to record their language and to preserve their traditions, including their own distinctive religious traditions. David Holm has been documenting these religious traditions by translating manuscripts used by vernacular priests in the performance of their rituals. These ancient manuscripts are passed down the generations through individual priestly lines.

The first of Holm’s monumental studies,¹²Killing a Buffalo for the Ancestors (2003), which offers critical insights into the origins of Tai in southern China, examines an origin narrative used in rituals involving buffalo sacrifice. The narrative recounts a succession of creations and orderings of the world, leading to the first buffalo sacrifice to atone for primordial incest and to assure prosperity, culminating in the attainment of longevity rice. Notably the text of this narrative and its sung and chanted recitation, directed to an invited assembly of gods and spirits, are conducted in a pervasive parallelism. Following the invitation to attend, the recitation begins at the verge of creation and, after hundreds of lines, concludes with the prospect of longevity, progeny and plenty:

In the beginning the world was suddenly dark and suddenly light

All at once it was suddenly heaven and suddenly earth

No one yet knew of night nor evening

They knew not of short or long

They knew neither crosswise nor straight …

Everyone eats this grain and will enjoy longevity

Everyone eats this grain and will have many progeny

At that time the folk had enough to eat everywhere

Everyone under the sky had enough to eat everywhere

This was the time of King Shennong of the time primordial

Shennong of the time of yore.

(Holm 2003: 108, 132)

Many of the ancient Zhuang manuscripts that record these recitations are of considerable, but uncertain, age and they often exist in tatters. The priests use them to guide their oral recitations and, as Holm notes, they can and do substitute their own terms for those of the written script. The tradition thus persists at two levels: as an oral tradition among priests and as a written tradition that dates back centuries. Holm’s close, masterful examination of text and recitation illuminates this interrelation between script and performative.

As Holm has noted:

Many of the scriptures recited by Zhuang vernacular priests also circulated as orally transmitted ‘ancient songs’ … ‘Ancient songs’ were often many times the length of corresponding written texts, and were regarded as sacred … The words of the ‘ancient song’ were regarded as the ‘words of the ancestors’, in local parlance, and a premium was placed on accurate transmission of the entire song.

(Holm 2017: 377–78)

More importantly, Holm has highlighted how the oral and written transmission processes differ. Vernacular priests generally come from families with existing priestly traditions, and they begin their learning early. An aspiring priest, however, will apprentice himself to a master priest from whom he learns a set of performed oral recitations. On or before ordination, the apprentice is offered some of his master’s ritual manuscripts to be carefully copied. This possession of manuscripts elevates the status of a vernacular priest in relation to Buddhist and Taoist priests, who rely on prestigious Chinese texts. These reference manuscripts, often obtained late in life, are not, however, the main basis of what a new priest has learned to recite. Oral transmission in the learning process takes precedence over the scripted word.

South-East Asian parallelism: Eastern Indonesian traditions

Holm’s research offers a bridge to the traditions of South-East Asian parallel poetry. Many of these continue to this day as oral traditions. Taken together, they constitute by far the most diverse of the world’s traditions of parallel poetry. The languages of four major families—Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai, Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian—are found, often locally interspersed, in mainland South-East Asia while Austronesian languages extend into island South-East Asia and the Pacific. The Austronesian languages of eastern Indonesia in particular have some of the world’s most elaborate oral traditions of pervasive parallelism.¹³

To Speak in Pairs (Fox 1988b) is a collection of 10 ethnographically focused studies of these living traditions from the islands of Sulawesi, Flores, Sumba, Rote and Timor. The scriptural voice in each of these traditions, expressed in oral compositions with strict pairing, is distinct and emphatic. This is a voice enunciated in a great variety of different ceremonial settings.

In an essay on ‘Etiquette in Kodi Spirit Communication’, Janet Hoskins cites a variety of ordered poetic forms required in addressing and inviting the participation of deities and spirits in divination ceremonies in the west Sumba domain of Kodi. The diviner directs a spear to the head pillar in the right corner of the house and begins his recitation with a general invitation to the spirit community and then to the double-gendered deity in the house pillar:

So that you now—

Great Mother, Great Father

Who travels down the sacred corner,

Who braces her/himself on the holy beam,

Who gives girl children and boy children,

Who gives thick rice sheaves and heavy ears of corn,

Who gives us plentiful chicken and abundant pigs,

Whose pillar reaches to the heavens

And stretches down to the earth …

(Hoskins 1988: 36–37)

Another major deity to be addressed is the Elder Spirit (Marapu Matuya) resident in the rock and tree altar at the centre of the ancestral village:

So that now, you

Elder Mother, Ancient Father

Who leads us out in the daytime,

Who brings us out in the night-time,

In the sewn-up circle of rocks,

Among the heaped stone foundations,

The sacred mat of pandanus leaves

The holy ring of mboro leaves,

Who oversees us from afar,

Who watches over us from above …

(Hoskins 1988: 38)

The souls of dead founders of the clan village are also addressed in a long litany that begins as follows:

Souls of grandparents, souls of forebears

Souls of mothers, souls of fathers

Who first dug the house foundation pillars

Who formed the first even surface of stones …

(Hoskins 1988: 39)

Another instance of this scriptural voice in strict parallelism comes from the creation myth of the Ata Tana ´Ai of central-eastern Flores. In a paper, ‘A Quest for the Source’, E. Douglas Lewis has provided the creation and origin chant of Sukun Ipir Wai Brama, the personal narrative of Mo’an Robertus Rapa Ipir Rai Brama, the Clan Lord of Ipir and Source Lord of the Domain of Tana Wai Brama. This ‘earth-diver’ creation myth involves multiple processes of creation after the first lump of earth is taken from the sea to form the land. A second descent requires the creation of a path from the centre of the Earth to the heavens above:

Descend downward breaking the rock,

Descend downward breaking the trees.

The coral stone could be broken,

The trees could be parted,

Descend down to where dark[ness] is,

Get to the place where blackness is found,

Sit below on the protruding stone and the final reach,

Lean at the cliff at the centre of the earth,

Below the land was obstructed and dark,

The earth below was tight and constricted

Order the crab to open a path with its dorsal spines

To chisel upward through the stone,

Command the snail to show the path

To bore upward through the earth …

Chisel, chisel upward

Bore, bore upward

Until the cord of heaven and earth is reached

Until the hanging cord is reached …

(Lewis 1988a: 265–66)

As different as these two recitations are, their expression reflects a common oral tradition that insists on the semantic pairing as its highest register of address and spiritual narration. As such, this similarity in pairing of elements creates metaphoric worlds that resemble each other.

Understanding Rotenese parallelism in its linguistic context

Eastern Indonesia is a large region with considerable linguistic and cultural diversity. Yet, comparisons among its traditions of parallelism are evident. In comparative perspective, Rotenese shares many of the same canonical pairs in its ritual language with other ritual languages in the region. This share of common canonical pairs increase considerably among the languages most closely related to Rotenese—those of the Meto-speaking and Tetun-speaking populations of Timor. A list of 20 such canonical pairs gives some idea of this sharing:

	Canonical pair	Rotenese	Tetun	Meto
1.	sun//moon	ledo//bulan	loro//fulan	manse//funan
2.	rock//tree	batu//ai	fatu//ai	fatu//hau
3.	trunk//root	hu//oka	hun//abut	uf//baaf
4.	areca//betel	pua//manus	bua//fuik	puah//manus
5.	seven//eight	hitu//walu	hitu//walu	hitu//faon
6.	eight//nine	walu//sio	walu//sio	faon//siwi
7.	pestle//mortar	alu//nesu	alu//nesung	alu//esu
8.	shame//fear	mae//tau	moe//tauk	mae//mtaus
9.	banana//sugar cane	huni//tefu	hudi//tohu	uki//tefu
10.	tuber//tales	ufi//talas	fehuk//talas	laku//nali
11.	lung//liver	ba//ate	afak//aten	ansao//ate
12.	thigh//navel	pu//puse	kelen//hussar	pusun//usan
13.	turtle//dugong	kea//lui	kea//lenuk	ke//kunfui
14.	friarbird//parrot	koa//nggia	kawa//birus	kol ao//kit neno
15.	orphan//widow	ana-ma//falu-ing	oa kiak//balu	anmanat//ban-banu
16.	dedap//kelumpang	delas//nitas	dik//nitas	ensa//nitas
17.	waringin//banyan	keka//nunu	hali//hedan	nunuh//lete
18.	spear//sword	te//tafa	diman//surit	auni//suni
19.	drum//gong	labu//meko	bidu//tala	kee//sene
20.	head//tail	langa/iku	ulun//ikun	nakan//ikon

This sharing of canonical pairs among major languages of Timor is evidence of a historical ‘tenacity’ similar to that noted by Dahood and others for the Syro-Palestinian traditions of parallelism and by Hull for Mayan traditions.

Some of these canonical pairs are general (sun//moon, rock//tree, head//tail), but others are specific (shame//fear, banana//sugar cane, lung//liver, dedap//kelumpang [two species of tree]) and, as such, these pairs create notable metaphoric linkages.

While many of these pairs share similar lexical terms, many do not. Those that do not are indicative of lexical changes that have occurred over centuries in these different but related languages.

The same dynamic is evident among the different ‘dialects’ on Rote that form a dialect chain across the length of the island. Neighbouring domains can understand one another’s dialects but, for more distant domains, intelligibility diminishes. It is possible to distinguish at least six different ‘dialect areas’, each of which can be said to have its own language. The dyadic sets in Rotenese ritual language are composed of lexical terms from among these different dialects.¹⁴

This volume contains the origin narratives from two domains, Termanu and Thie, which belong to different, near-contiguous dialect areas. The majority of the dyadic sets in the ritual languages of these domains are the same, but there are several differences that distinguish them. A few examples may illustrate some of these differences. For example, the dyadic set for ‘human’ or ‘person’ in Termanu is hataholi//daehena (the lexical term daehena is drawn from an eastern dialect area), while in Thie this same dyadic set is hatahori//andiana (the lexical term andiana is shared with a dialect area to the west of Thie). The dyadic set for ‘dryland fields’ in Termanu is tina//osi, while in Thie it is tine//lane and, similarly, for ‘field-markers’, Termanu has to batu//peu ai while Thie has to batu//lane ai. Significantly, the dyadic set for ‘origin ceremony’ in Termanu is hu//sio—a set that links the term for ‘trunk’ or ‘origin’ with the term for the number ‘nine’, which signifies ‘fullness’ or ‘completion’. In Thie, this set comprises two different specific lexical items: limba//oli.

Other examples are: in Termanu, ‘to wake up’ is fafa’e//o’ofe, while in Thie it is fafa’e//titipa; in Termanu, ‘to divide and distribute’ is ba’e//tada, while in Thie it is ba’e//bati. Another example is the dyadic set for ‘full’ or ‘enough’. Here, the two domains share the other’s dialect words. The dyadic set is henu//sofe. Henu is the everyday word for ‘full’ in Termanu, while sofe is the everyday word for ‘full’ in Thie. Another seemingly curious yet important dyadic set combines two kinds of bee, the smaller honeybee and the larger bumblebee: fani//bupu. This set in Thie combines the honeybee with a kind of wasp: fani//nggunik. The creatures are significant because they were once believed to represent the deceased’s spirit that returns to partake of offerings set out after death.

Although differences among these various pairs may appear as part of the minutiae of cultural communication, they are indicative of the distinguishing subtlety of Rotenese parallelism. For a listener, each of these sets contains a familiar word with a less familiar word from another dialect. Ritual language thus utilises a rich array of dialect resources while at the same time preserving a tacit knowledge of different dialects. In this way, despite differences among spoken dialects, Rotenese ritual language is generally intelligible across the island. Its parallelism flourishes in a situation of linguistic diversity by drawing on the resources of different dialects to create its pairs. The remarkable feature of parallelism is that its pairings transcend linguistic diversity, remaining stable as its source languages change. This is probably the case in other areas of elaborate parallelism. It is this constituent stability of parallelism as a language of communication based on the rigorous organisation of hundreds, if not thousands, of canonical pairs that underlies its authority as a scriptural voice.

The significance of an underlying network of relationships in Rotenese parallelism

Parallelism in Rotenese ritual language is more than an organised accumulation of canonical pairs. An underlying network of relationships exists among these pairs. A critical number of lexical elements form multiple pairs while other elements form fewer pairs but still extend linkages within a wider network of relationships. The critical linking elements with multiple pairings constitute the symbolic core of Rotenese culture.¹⁵ This symbolic core consists of basic terms such as ‘earth’, ‘rock’, ‘water’, ‘tree’ and ‘trunk, origin’ along with key directional coordinates (‘above’, ‘below’, ‘east’, ‘west’), key body coordinates (‘head’, ‘tail’, ‘hand’, ‘leg’, ‘stomach’, ‘insides’) and key plant designations (‘fruit’ and ‘leaf’). All these key symbols have multiple meanings and connotations. They are linked to one another but also crucially linked to—paired with—other terms within ritual language.¹⁶

The ritual function of the oral narratives

All the oral narratives in this volume were once recited on specific ritual occasions. For Termanu, these occasions were directly related to the work processes whose origins they recount. These were for house-building, which once required multistage celebrations as construction proceeded; for marriages, which were conducted in stages; for the planting of rice and millet and, in relation to particular fields, for other crops; and for the initiation of both the weaving and the dyeing processes of cloth. The origin narratives from Thie include recitations intended to bless these same work processes but they also include the recitation for one of Thie’s most significant origin ceremonies.

In Thie and Termanu today, these rituals are no longer performed. The recitations that once accompanied them are now preserved as memories of the ancestral past. That they are preserved reflects a continuing Rotenese concern with origins and the authority that this knowledge conveys.

Origin narratives represent only a portion of the Rotenese traditional liturgy. The more extensive portion of this liturgy consists of an array of mortuary chants that were once sung to honour the deceased on the nights before the burial ceremony and chanted, after burial, to lament the passing of the deceased’s spirit.

Most Rotenese mortuary chants represent a substantial body of recitations. While many Austronesian societies in their mortuary rituals recount a precarious journey to an afterworld, the Rotenese at their funeral ceremonies select one chant from a repertoire of patterned life-course recitations intended symbolically to fit the life of the deceased. This life-course chant is then recited in celebration of the deceased. The narratives of these life-course recitations with their imagined biographies are conceived of as particular paths that define a diversity of human possibilities of life on Rote (see Fox 2021).

Ritual language may be used to define all facets of life on Rote. It thus creates, for the Rotenese, a conception of life and its activities set forth in a complementary mode. As such, it is appropriate to examine in some detail the way this language portrays a metaphoric world and life within it.

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1. 1 I have chosen to use the historical name for the domain of ‘Thie’—the name originally recorded in Dutch records in the mid-seventeenth century and retained for most of the domain’s history. Thie, along with Termanu, was recognised by the Dutch East India Company between 1653 and 1662 as one of an original group of 12 domains on the island of Rote. For historical background and comparison of these two domains, see Fox (1971a, 1979a).

2. 2 Because parallelism occurs in so many diverse oral traditions and has repeatedly been ‘rediscovered’ and often separately studied in different ‘literary’ traditions, its comparative study is beset with a plethora of terminology that can be confusing, contradictory or ambiguous. Depending on the analyst, pairs in parallel expressions may be designated as ‘couplets’, ‘doublets’, ‘binaries’, ‘binominals’, ‘polarities’, ‘polar extremes’, ‘complementary pairs’ or ‘formal oppositions’. To take one example, however, a ‘couplet’ may refer to a pair of words and thus constitute a ‘semantic couplet’ or it may refer to the pairing of successive parallel verses. The pairing of terms may be regarded as evidence of ‘semantic’ or ‘lexical’ parallelism, yet when such pairs occur in a particular morphological context, these pairs may as often be taken as evidence of syntactic parallelism. My focus is on semantic parallelism. Lowth initiated a certain train of analysis that distinguished between ‘synonymous parallelism’, ‘antithetic parallelism’ and ‘synthetic or constructive parallelism’. Many subsequent analysts have followed Lowth in sorting pairs in a similar vein but precisely what is achieved by this sorting process is not clear. In an early and important study of Nahuatl parallelism, Ángela Maria Garibay (1953) coined the term difrasismos for what Lowth would have classified as ‘synthetic’ or ‘constructive’ parallelism: pairs whose combined terms have a wider metaphorical meaning. This expression and, more importantly, the focus on such pairings as emblematic of the traditions of Aztec and Maya parallelism have tended to overshadow other forms of parallelism, which form part of the poet’s compositional repertoire. It is, in my view, misleading to concentrate attention on specific sorts of pairings instead of considering the full repertoire of all such pairings. For my analysis of Rotenese parallelism, I have used the label ‘dyadic set’ to refer to all pairs that can be formally represented by the notation (a, b). This use of this designation and notation allows the possibility of a formal representation of all Rotenese parallel compositions. It also allows the possibility of ‘triadic sets’, which occur in some traditions of parallelism, as is the case among the Maya. The key to understanding the processes of oral composition is a recognition that any semantic term or element ‘a’ can form a set not just with ‘b’ but also with ‘c’ and possibly other elements, ‘d’, ‘e’ and so forth. This opens the study of any tradition of parallelism to a formal network analysis in which certain semantic elements possess wider crucial linkages than others, many of which may have only a single linkage. In Fox (2014), I have discussed this theoretical approach (pp. 149 ff.) and illustrated this partial network for Rotenese (pp. 381–83).

3. 3 This text, like most such texts, has gaps. For this reason, I have selected passages from different stanzas to highlight the recurrence of pairing.

4. 4 I use both ‘pair’ and ‘dyadic set’ in my discussion of Rotenese parallel verse. I use the expression ‘dyadic set’ as a more precise expression than ‘pair’. I also use the term ‘element’ for each culturally recognised lexical term within such sets. Underlying the pairing expressed in parallel verse is a more complex semantic patterning because lexical elements may form multiple sets. The resulting interrelation of lexical elements produces a complex network of semantic relations (see Fox 2014: 379–83).

5. 5 Patola Bulan//Mandeti Ledo’s dog’s name, Lepa La’e//Doi So’u, is of special significance, which lines 9 and 10 make explicit. Both lepa and doi are carrying sticks: a lepa is used to support a balanced burden at both ends; a doi supports a burden at just one end. These words may be used as nouns that describe the object or verbs that describe the act of carrying (la’e) or lifting (so’u). Their pair is an illustrative instance of the specificity involved in the cultural pairing of terms.

6. 6 References to a portion of this substantial scholarship—which includes the work of an array of Biblical scholars including Albright, Cross, Dahood, Driver, Gevirtz, Gordon and others—can be found in D.N. Freedman’s (1972) ‘Prolegomenon’ to the reprinted edition of G.B. Gray’s The Forms of Hebrew Poetry. References to later scholarship can be found in several studies devoted predominantly to an examination of parallelism (Gevirtz 1963; Geller 1979; Kugel 1981; Berlin 2008).

7. 7 The range of research on Mesoamerican parallelism is as copious and as various as that on Mesopotamian parallelism (for an extended discussion of these traditions of parallelism, see Fox 2014: 60–69). A useful starting point would be Miguel Leon-Portilla’s Pre-Columbian Literature of Mexico (1969) or the more accessible anthology In the Language of Kings (2002) by Leon-Portilla and Earl Shorris. There exist various translations of colonial Maya texts: Munro Edmonson’s translation in verse of The Book of Counsel: The Popol Vuh of the Quiche Maya of Guatemala (1971) and Dennis Tedlock’s Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life (1996); see also Tedlock’s Rabinal Achi: A Mayan Drama of War and Sacrifice (2003) and Edmonson’s Heaven Born Merida and its Destiny: The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel (2008). Gary Gossen’s Chamulas in the World of the Sun (1974a) gives a glimpse of the range of Maya parallelism in a contemporary context, as do numerous ethnographies of modern-day Maya communities. Among these monographs, Evon Vogt’s Zinacantan: A Maya Community in the Highlands of Chiapas (1969) is a classic of its kind, as is the earlier monograph by Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa-Rojas, Chan Kom: A Maya Village (1934). The most valuable single compendium on Maya parallelism is Parallel Worlds: Genre, Discourse, and Poetics in Contemporary, Colonial, and Classic Maya Literature (2012), edited by Kerry M. Hull and Michael Carrasco, a collection of 18 papers devoted to some aspect and/or period of Maya parallelism. Michael Coe’s Breaking the Maya Code (1992) is an engaging account of the long historical effort that eventually resulted in understanding and interpreting Maya glyphs.

8. 8 In fact, the linguist Floyd Lounsbury’s (1980) recognition of couplet glyphs in the Temple of the Cross at Palenque provided early critical insights into the process of decipherment.

9. 9 While some of these pairs may be considered as semantically universal or general categories, others are more particularistic (see Edmonson 1973). Significantly from my theoretical perspective, this small selection contains pairs such as sky//earth and sky//cave whose elements form more than just one dyadic set, making them likely major nodes clearly productive of a range of possible dyadic sets. This would place this illustrative group at the core of a semantic network (see Fox 2014: 379 ff.).

10. 10 Davis also called attention to the importance of parallelism as a form of decoration: ‘The Chinese are so fond of their parallelisms, that the most common decorations of rooms, halls and temples, are ornamental labels hung opposite to each other, or side by side … These are sometimes inscribed on coloured paper, sometimes carved on wood, and distinguished by painting and gilding—but always in pairs’ (1830: 418).

11. 11 As with other major traditions of parallelism, the study of Chinese parallelism has produced an enormous and varied body of scholarship, the diversity of which is notable. Gustaaf Schlegel (1896) elevated parallelism to a ‘law’ of the syntax of Chinese poetry. Marcel Granet (1932) speculated that parallelism was a direct reflection of ancient Chinese society and its division of the world into the categories of yin and yang. Like Granet, Jabłoński (1935) emphasised the popular bases of this poetry. Similarly inspired by Granet, Tchang Tcheng-Ming (1937) wrote an extended treatise on parallelism in the Book of Odes (Shih Ching). In a series of short papers issued from the Berkeley Workshop on Asiatic Philology, Boodberg (1954–55a, 1954–55b, 1954–55c) commented on the ‘stereoscopic’ effect of Chinese parallelism. Following from Tchang Tcheng-Ming but relying on the work of Boodberg, Jakobson, Lowth and Schlegel, David Liu (1983) also examined both syntactic and semantic parallelism in the Book of Odes. Like Davis, he argued that ‘a strict law of syntactical parallelism helps to define the grammatical function of the graphs’ (Liu 1983: 640). Within this same tradition of commentary, Léon Vandermeersch (1989) has argued that parallelism is central to the origins of the ancient utterances based on turtle scapulary divination. More specifically, James R. Hightower (1959) has written on the fu style of the Han Dynasty that continued to the early T’ang as a form of erudite poetry with its multiple degrees of ornate elaboration. Roman Jakobson (1969) has also examined the ‘modular’ structure of such Chinese regulated verse. For a more detailed discussion of this commentary on Chinese parallelism and on the elaboration of parallelism in the Tibetan tradition, see Fox (2014: 22–24, 55–57).

12. 12 Other major studies are Recalling Lost Souls: The Baeu Rodo Scriptures, Tai Cosmogonic Texts from Guangxi in South China (Holm 2004) and Hanvueng: The Goose King and the Ancestral King—An Epic from Guangxi in Southern China (Holm and Meng 2015).

13. 13 As a region of considerable linguistic and cultural diversity, South-East Asia, including island South-East Asia, has a remarkable diversity of traditions of parallelism. Summary discussions of some of the main references to these traditions can be found in Fox (2014: 23–24, 54, 92–94; 1988). Within the tradition of Tai parallelism, it is pertinent to cite Hanvueng: The Goose King and the Ancestral King—An Epic from Guangxi in Southern China (Holm and Meng 2015), which is a monument of critical scholarship directed to the detailed examination of a single long ‘liturgical scripture’ in pervasive parallelism (for a separate discussion of this work, see Holm 2017). In addition to an English translation, this study includes an interlinear transcription of the five-syllable verse structure of the text that sets out the modified Zhuang Chinese script of the text and matches it to the transcription of this script into standard Zhuangwen and its spoken priestly interpretation. This interlinear transcription is further provided with more than 1,500 textual and ethnographic notes. (Several Tai-Ahom texts, recorded in an Old Mon/Burmese script, that have been transcribed, edited and translated by B.J. Terwiel and Ranoo Wichasin [1992] provide a distant comparison. These texts from Assam are rich with pairs, but their parallel structure is not as consistent as those of the Zhuang.)

14. 14 This is a linguistic phenomenon that I have referred to as the ‘semantics of dialect concatenation’—a creative process that I believe to be central to an understanding of parallelism (see Fox 2014: 374 ff.). To be understood in the Rotenese context, this dialect concatenation must be seen in relation to all the dialects on the island of Rote because there is no simple pattern to the creation of lexical pairs. My discussion here of Termanu and Thie is merely illustrative of more complex linguistic processes.

15. 15 Tracing connections within this network and understanding its implications are a work in progress (for a discussion of this network and a representation based on the network program, Pajek, of one semantic cluster in Rotenese ritual language of 470 vertices, see Fox 2014: 381–84). This analysis derives from the ongoing compilation of a Formal Dyadic Dictionary of Rotenese Ritual Language (Termanu dialect).

16. 16 Understanding this network provides insights into how poets learn and eventually gain mastery in recitation; they begin by learning the basic multi-linked terms and use this base to expand their knowledge of more specific dyadic sets.