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John (Hans) Z�graggen died on Monday, May 20, 2013 in Menzingen, Switzerland, aged 80. He is best known for his pioneering surveys and classification of the languages of Madang Province, Papua New Guinea, including the identification and internal classification of what is now called the Madang subgroup of the Trans-New Guinea family. His four volumes of wordlists and grammatical notes on 98 languages of this subgroup, and his tapes and unpublished materials, remain a priceless source for linguists working in Madang Province, where many of these languages are rapidly being replaced by New Guinea Pidgin (Tok Pisin). He also contributed to the documentation of languages of East Sepik, Manus, and Gulf Provinces. Z�graggen�s achievements in Papuan linguistics deserve great respect. It is easy to think of Madang Province as just a small part of New Guinea and to point to flaws in his classification. We need to bear in mind that the region consisting of Madang and the adjacent Sepik provinces is by some distance the most diverse linguistic area of its size in the world. Madang Province alone contains about 170 languages (all but 16 of them Papuan, that is, non-Austronesian) in an area less than a third the size of Ireland. Even more striking is that Madang languages fall into five families that are not demonstrably related (Austronesian, Trans-New Guinea, Torricelli, Lower Sepik-Ramu, and Upper Yuat). The linguistic diversity of the whole of Europe pales in comparison. It is no mean feat to do fieldwork on and gather a substantial body of data on almost all of these languages and to arrive at a tentative classification. The scale of this achievement can be compared in some respects with Greenberg�s classification of the languages of Africa. Z�graggen was also deeply interested in folklore, and published several volumes about the myths and legends and the cosmogony of Madang peoples. He was an assiduous photographer who compiled a sizable collection of photos of ethnographic interest. Hans Anton Z�graggen (known as �John� to anglophone and New Guinea friends) was born in Schattdorf in the Canton of Uri, Switzerland on June 24, 1932, into a family of devout Catholic farmers and officials in local government. John�s teacher at the local school encouraged his parents to send the boy to the Society of the Divine Word�s (SVD) Marienburg Secondary School at Rheineck in the Canton of St. Gallen. He came speaking a distinctive Urner dialect and recalled that boys in the school poked fun at him for this. Among the teachers and guests at Marienburg were SVD missionaries, including Wilhelm Schmidt, the founder of the Anthropos Institute, the scientific branch of SVD. A former classmate of John still remembers the latter�s intention to become a missionary in remote New Guinea. John continued his education at the senior high school at Einsiedeln, run by the Benedictine Monastery. In 1955, he became a novice in the SVD missionary order at St. Gabriel College at M�dling, near Vienna, where he studied philosophy, theology, and anthropology. SVD missionary scholars from the German-speaking countries, guided by Wilhelm Schmidt, had an established tradition of research on vernacular cultures and languages of the northern half of Papua New Guinea. Joseph Schmidt, Josef Schebesta, Franz J. Kirschbaum, Aloys Kasprus, and Georg H�ltker were among those SVD priests who published in this field in the decades before World War II. After studies in linguistics and anthropology under Prof. Paul Schebesta, Z�graggen graduated in 1961 with a Diploma in Ethnology, and was ordained as a priest in Marienburg, Rheineck. The Superior General of the order, Fr. Johannes Sch�tte, then sent him to the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, to do a Master�s degree in Philosophy, with the plan that he should go on to teach philosophy at the newly established Holy Spirit Seminary at Kap, near Madang, in what is now the nation of Papua New Guinea (PNG). In 1963, Z�graggen arrived in Madang, a port town with a pretty harbor on the north coast of PNG, to begin teaching duties.

The island of New Guinea is a region of spectacular, deep linguistic diversity.1It contains roughly 850 languages, which on present evidence fall into at least 18 language families that are not demonstrably related, along with several iso-lates.2 This immense diversity, far greater than that found in the much larger area of Europe, is no doubt mainly a consequence of the fact that New Guinea has been occupied for roughly 50,000 years by peoples organised into small kin-based social groups, lacking overarching political affiliations, and dispersed across a terrain largely dominated by rugged mountains and swampy lowlands, with quite frequent population movements. Among the non-Austronesian families of New Guinea one family stands out for its large membership and wide geographic spread: Trans New Guinea (TNG). With a probable membership of between 300 and 500 discrete languages, plus hundreds of highly divergent dialects, TNG is among the most numerous of the world's language families.3 TNG languages are spoken from the Bomberai Pen-insula at the western end of mainland New Guinea (132 degrees E) almost to the eastern tip of the island (150 degrees E). Most of the cordillera that runs for more than 2000 kilometers along the centre of New Guinea is occupied exclusively by TNG languages. They are also prominent in much of the lowlands to the south of the cordillera and in patches to the north, especially from central Madang Province eastwards. There are possible outliers spoken on Timor, Alor and Pantar.

This is the second in a series of five volumes on the lexicon of Proto Oceanic, the ancestor of the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian language family. Each volume deals with a particular domain of culture and/or environment and consists of a collection of essays each of which presents and comments on lexical reconstructions of a particular semantic field within that domain. Volume 2 examines how Proto Oceanic speakers described their geophysical environment. An introductory chapter discusses linguistic and archaeological evidence that locates the Proto Oceanic language community in the Bismarck Archipelago in the late 2nd millennium BC. The next three chapters investigate terms used to denote inland, coastal, reef and open sea environments, and meteorological phenomena. A further chapter examines the lexicon for features of the heavens and navigational techniques associated with the stars. How Proto Oceanic speakers talked about their environment is also described in three further chapters which treat property terms for describing inanimate objects, locational and directional terms, and terms related to the expression of time.