Professor A. S. C. Ross on Pitcairnese and the Pronunciation of "Pitcairn"

Abstract

In the latter part of his career British academic Professor Alan Strode Campbell Ross turned his hand to researching Pitcairnese, the Pitcairn Island language: My own connection with Pitcairnese is the following. Some ten years ago I noticed, in The Times, that the High Commissioner for the Western Pacific had visited Pitcairn [Island]; he said that the inhabitants spoke a form of English but that much of what they said was incomprehensible to him; he gave me a specimen sentence which was incomprehensible to me also. I wrote to him and he kindly put me in touch with the then schoolmaster on the island, A. W. [Albert Wadkins] Moverley. I found that the latter was extremely interested in Pitcairnese and had made large linguistics collections. He came to Birmingham, with a scholarship from the University, so that, working under my direction, he might submit a Ph.D. thesis on the subject. It is very sad to record that, after a year's hard work in Birmingham, he died very suddenly in the autumn of 1953. He had worked so hard, both on the island and in Birmingham that, at the time of his death, his thesis was very far advanced. It had always been our intention that we should publish a joint work on Pitcairnese which should consist, essentially, of his thesis, elaborated on the General-Linguistic and Tahitian sides by myself. Aided by grants from the University of Birmingham and the French Government, I therefore went to Paris to try to learn to talk Tahitian from the Tahitian colony living there. I thought that, despite Moverley's death, our joint project should still be adhered to. The book is now almost ready for press and is to be published by Messrs. Andre Deutsch in 1962.