Materials for The Study of Kejaman-Sekapan Oral Tradition (Chapter 9: Notes to the prose narrative)

Non-Kejaman (K) words in the text are principally Kenyah (Kny) and Sebop (Sb). This is despite the claim that the story concerns a people called the Sambup (see Maxwell, 1990, for a discussion and sample vocabulary of this group). Such lexical items are discussed here in an attempt to explicate the translation of the text. It is important to note that there was considerable variability in pronunciation of what, according to context, were 'the same' lexical items; nevertheless, as with the sung narrative,an attempt has been made to ensure general consistency in orthography. The numbers cross-refer to the numbered paragraphs of the text; and these are subdivided by phrases in bold form for discussion in the notes. As a variety of languages is used in this narrative, bracketed forms represent broad phonological transcriptions where a well-argued phonemic transcription has not been devised. In contrast to the narrative translation in Chapter 8, the English glosses here generally use the present tense where aspect is uncompleted.