One of the most lamented deaths of the past two decades was that of the Princess Kalara, daughter of King Ueg. During the initial American landings on the atoll in September 1944, it was believed that Japanese pockets of resistance remained in the then-thick undergrowth and foliage on the islands of Mogmog and Asor. The natives were forewarned to retire to the beaches while American planes strafed the interior. For some reason, two of the natives neglected to heed the warnings…they were both struck by gunfire from the strafing planes. One was Kalara, the young and beloved princess of Ulithi. She was taken aboard a hospital ship in the lagoon, but medical care was ineffective; she died two days later. Marking one of the more regrettable phases of war's touching the innocent, Kalara was buried on Mogmog with services conducted by a navy chaplain. At the native cemetary on that island, one may observe the coral memorial, topped by a simple white cross bearing the inscription:
"Princess Kalara, Christiano, September, 1944."
All the various dialects of the Western Carolines are founded upon a Malayo-Polynesian stock and have enough common factors, both in grammar and vocabulary, to permit a person who knows one of the dialects to converse in any other rather easily. There are three major dialects—: that spoken on the islands from Truk to Ulithi, another spoken on the islands of Yap and Ngulu, and still another spoken in the Palaus. The language spoken by Ulithians is the most widely accepted, and a native mastering it can get along practically everywhere in the Western Carolines. The writing is done in Japanese Katakana script, a sort of phonetic alphabet which transliterates consonant-vowel sounds into characters. It would not be difficult for an American student of languages to master both the spoken and written by language in a short time.
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