Dictionnaire de la langue de Roro-Mekeo : autograph manuscript / J. M. Vitale, Miss. du S. C.

MLMSS 10495/Box 1X

fonds

approximately 1900

9627749

0.23 metres of textual material (1 outsize box) - bound manuscript of 320 pages (some blank) - 23 x 18 cm

Joseph M. Vitale was born in 1866 in Gildone, Italy. He joined the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart in 1886 and was ordained as a priest in 1888. He was among the first group of missionaries to arrive on Yule Island, following the establishment of a Catholic mission there in 1885. He worked with the native Roro and Mekeo speakers on Yule Island and the nearby coast of New Guinea from the 1890s until his death in 1947.

The Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was founded in 1854 at Issoudun in France by Jules Chevalier, and was approved as a religious congregation by the Holy See in 1869. In 1881 Pope Leo XIII requested that the Sacred Heart Fathers establish a mission in New Guinea and three years later French and Italian priests arrived on Thursday Island where they established the first Catholic mission in Torres Strait, intending it to be a stop-over station and link between the Society’s missions on the Australian mainland and their proposed mission in New Guinea.

References:
Library acquisition file
Missionary Lives : Papua, 1874-1914 / Diane Langmore. Pacific Islands Monograph Series ; No. 6. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989, p. 309

Father Joseph M. Vitale’s unpublished dictionary lists words of Roro and Mekeo, Austronesian languages spoken by the indigenous peoples of Yule Island and the adjacent mainland on the southern coast of New Guinea. The pages are divided into three columns and arranged alphabetically with the French words and phrases in the left hand column and their equivalents in the centre and right hand columns.

The manuscript entries are written in magenta ink on both sides of the pages. The paper has faint squares similar to that used in school exercise books.

This small notebook is bound in heavy boards covered in hessian cloth. The outer front cover has a stamped crest of the Missionaries of the Sacred heart, Issoudun. The inside front cover has a paste-down of a printed map of France (detached).

Austronesian (Other), French

Out of copyright:
Please acknowledge:: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Title transcribed from title page.

Probably the earliest surviving written record of the Roro and Mekeo languages as they were spoken in the 19th century at the time of the first contact between the Roro and Mekeo people and Europeans.
The volume has been paginated in pencil by the Library.

Transcribed from title page. 'Miss. du S. C.' stands for Missionnaire du Sacré-Coeur [Missionary of the Sacred Heart].