The Bullroarer Atlas

OCEXP-003 - ethnographic attestation

Araga (Pentecost Island), New Hebrides

Vanuatu - New Hebrides - Oceania

Play / practical

A dark wooden blade with a notched, cord-wound tip and a loose bundle of dried grass tied to its cord - the same general Island Melanesian...
Representative image. A dark wooden blade with a notched, cord-wound tip and a loose bundle of dried grass tied to its cord - the same general Island Melanesian form, not the tavire bua of Pentecost Island documented here, whose name means merely 'a bit of bamboo'. © The Trustees of the British Museum (E/Oc1987-05-121) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

tavire bua English

Source term: bull-roarer

tavire bua — Araga (Pentecost) for the bull-roarer, meaning "a bit of bamboo."

Etymology. Semantically minimal toy name: object-material rather than ritual meaning. (high confidence)

On Araga (Pentecost), the swung bull-roarer carried no name grander than the thing itself: tavire bua, "a bit of bamboo." Codrington noted that the toy held superstitious significance only at Florida, where it was used in the Mysteries; everywhere else it was a common plaything. He set Araga among neighboring islands where the names still caught at something the instrument did — mala, "a pig," on Vanua Lava, after the noise it made; tal-viv, "a whirring string," on Maewo — while on Araga the word had narrowed to a bare description of the wood in hand.

It is a common plaything; in Vanua Lava they call it mala, a pig, from the noise it makes; in Maewo it is tal-viv, a whirring string; in Araga it is merely tavire bua, a bit of bamboo.

Codrington, The Melanesians (1891), Ch. XVII, p. 342
Object
Swung-cord aerophone; local name means merely 'a bit of bamboo'. Used as a common plaything.
Function
Secular toy; semantically minimal name, the most secularised form in Codrington's passage.
Map confidence
medium - Pentecost Island centroid (Araga = northern Pentecost), central Vanuatu
Source location
p. 342

View source Open this point on the interactive map