No. MUS2026-145
Pulo Anna (Pur) zorien bullroarer
Palau · Southwest Islands · Pulo Anna (Pur), Sonsorol State · Oceania · Micronesia
Function not recorded
zorien
Source term: bull roarer
zorien - Pur/Pulo Anna word explicitly glossed as bullroarer; no further gloss or object description is supplied.
Pulo Anna — Pur in the old German South Seas Expedition record — is a speck of an island in Palau’s remote Southwest chain, days of open water from the main archipelago. When the expedition worked up Ernst Sarfert’s 1909 field notes, it preserved a single word of the island’s sound-world: zorien, the bull-roarer. That one gloss is the whole record — nothing on the wood, the cord, the occasion, or who was allowed to swing it — but it is enough to place the instrument in one of the smallest and most isolated communities in the Pacific.
They use the word zorien for the bull roarer.
Eilers, West Carolines, vol. 1: Pur, p. 221 (2017 English translation).
Particulars
- Object
- Bullroarer named zorien; construction is not described.
- Function
- Specific use is not recorded.
Source
Anneliese Eilers, West Carolines, vol. 1: Palau - Songosor, Pur (1935), Pur p. 221; 2017 English translation; The Pur section preserves Ernst Sarfert's 1909 field records