Place-dwellers know where they are and tend not to identify places in the same way that their neighbours do and certainly not as Europeans often insisted they should. While domains and specific areas in them are commonly named descriptively in North Ambrym, as, for example, ‘on the beach’ (ranon), ‘by the bulua tree’ (lonlilibulua), ‘over the sea’ (fante, the North Ambrym designation of Malakula), Ambrymese had no name for the entire island until Cook, in what is now a contemporary legend, named it for them. The explorer, who now stands for ‘the first European’, did indeed name the island though he did not land there. He is said to have misheard the phrase of those who offered a welcoming gift. ‘Am rem’ (‘your yam’), the men of Fona declared as they handed over the tuber, appropriately, though unwittingly, as the legend has it, conferring on their island the name of the cosmically iconic crop that stands for transformation, connection and life itself.

In North Ambrym, the three most important words used to refer to land and place are ‘tan’, ‘ot’ and ‘vere’. While there is no reflex of ‘vanua’, the word ‘vere’ has the broad connotations that we find elsewhere with vanua and its variants, for what Rodman refers to as ‘lived space’. Its etymology is unclear but there are perhaps some clues in another Poc place term isolated by Green and Pawley (1998). They list Poc *pera(?), translated as ‘settlement, open space associated with a house or settlement’, and some of the reflexes they list approximate the North Ambrym vere. However, they note that while

[*pera is] well attested in both major subgroups of Southeast Solomonic [it has] only one secure external cognate, in Manam. The range of meanings or glosses associated with this cognate set makes it impossible to make a firm semantic reconstruction either for Poc or for Proto Southeast Solomonic. Our best guess is that *pera referred to some sort of settlement or space associated with this. (Green and Pawley 1998: 63)

Vere, like vanua, has a somewhat broader reference than the word ‘ot’ discussed below, as when the people of West Ambrym refer to the north as ‘vereha’ (which I would tentatively translate as ‘the origin place’, where ‘ha’ has the connotation of staying forever). Mweneng vere could be translated as ‘my island’ or ‘my place’ in the general sense, where mweneng means ‘my’. ^[2]

‘Ot’ in North Ambrym usually appears in a compound as an adverbial form. It seems to connote a more specific place where people have left their mark. So lonor, which translates literally as ‘in the place’, means ‘garden’ or cultivated land; when compounded with a named residential locality, it identifies the place, e.g. ot Fona- Fona village. It appears to me to be a more specific marker that we could translate as ‘domain’ and although it is presumably related to the Banks Island word ‘mot’ that Vienne mentions, its connotations as noted above contain the sense of the wild and uncultivated and the specificity of inhabited space. It rarely, however, seems to be possessed. Specificity of place, as when one says lonotgea, ‘in this place’, seems to be the defining feature of this word. In its connotation of ‘wild’ space, we find the reference by the saltwater-dwellers to those of the hinterland as ‘taot’—the bush-dwellers. Nonetheless, there is semantic overlap between ‘ot’ and ‘vere’; the period of ritual proscription during the major politico-religious rituals of the mage were referred to as ‘otkonkon’ and ‘vere’ mokon’: the first refers to the place as sacralised (being kon) and thereby proscribed—‘the sacred place’; the second to the process of making the domain sacred— ‘the place has been sacralised’.

Despite family resemblances in the three words for land and place, the major difference lies between ‘ot’ and ‘vere’ on the one hand and ‘tan’ on the other. ‘Tan’ which also connotes place, means more particularly and, as in the Banks and elsewhere in northern Vanuatu, ‘earth’, ‘ground’ and ‘productive land’; its prime reference being to fertility, generativeness and transformative power. Moreover, this distinction is marked linguistically.