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Abau
Abau is a Papuan language spoken in southern Sandaun Province of Papua New Guinea, primarily along the border with Indonesia. In 2002, there were estimated to be between 4,500 and 5,000 speakers, and this number does not appear to have declined since the first accurate count in the 1970s. Abau is reported to have whistled speech. Phonology Abau has the simplest phonemic inventory in the Sepik language family. Pronouns Pronouns are: : The dual and plural numbers only distinguish between first person and non-first person. Also, the third-person gender distinction exists only for the singular, but not the dual or plural forms. Noun classes Abau noun classes are: : Nouns can take on different class affixes depending on the physical characteristics being emphasized. Examples: ;''su'' ‘coconut’ *''su pi-ron'' /coconut class.5-one/ ‘a coconut palm’ *''su ka-mon'' /coconut class.2-one/ ‘a coconut’ ;''pey'' ‘sugarcane’ *''pey pi-ron'' /sugarcane class.5-one/ â ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Upper Sepik Languages
The Upper Sepik languages are a group of ten to a dozen languages generally classified among the Sepik languages of northern Papua New Guinea. Languages The Upper Sepik languages are: NewGuineaWorld *Abau–Iwam ** ** *Yellow and Wanibe Rivers **Amal–Kalou *** *** [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sepik Languages
The Sepik or Sepik River languages are a family of some 50 Papuan languages spoken in the Sepik river basin of northern Papua New Guinea, proposed by Donald Laycock in 1965 in a somewhat more limited form than presented here. They tend to have simple phonologies, with few consonants or vowels and usually no tones. The best known Sepik language is Iatmül. The most populous are Iatmül's fellow Ndu languages Abelam and Boiken, with about 35,000 speakers each. The Sepik languages, like their Ramu neighbors, appear to have three-vowel systems, , that distinguish only vowel height in a vertical vowel system. Phonetic are a result of palatal and labial assimilation to adjacent consonants. It is suspected that the Ndu languages may reduce this to a two-vowel system, with epenthetic (Foley 1986). Classification The Sepik languages consist of two branches of Kandru's Laycock's Sepik–Ramu proposal, the Sepik subphylum and Leonhard Schultze stock. According to Malcolm Ross, th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Papuan Languages
The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian and non-Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply a genetic relationship. The concept of Papuan (non-Austronesian) speaking Melanesians as distinct from Austronesian-speaking Melanesians was first suggested and named by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1892. New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse region in the world. Besides the Austronesian languages, there are some (arguably) 800 languages divided into perhaps sixty small language families, with unclear relationships to each other or to any other languages, plus many language isolates. The majority of the Papuan languages are spoken on the island of New Guinea, with a number spoken in the Bismarck Archipelago, Bougainville Island and the Solomon Islands to the east, and in Halmahera, Timor and the A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Whistled Speech
Whistled languages use whistling to emulate speech and facilitate communication. A whistled language is a system of whistled communication which allows fluent whistlers to transmit and comprehend a potentially unlimited number of messages over long distances. Whistled languages are different in this respect from the restricted codes sometimes used by herders or animal trainers to transmit simple messages or instructions. Generally, whistled languages emulate the tones or vowel formants of a natural spoken language, as well as aspects of its intonation and prosody, so that trained listeners who speak that language can understand the encoded message. Whistled language is rare compared to spoken language, but it is found in cultures around the world. It is especially common in tone languages where the whistled tones transmit the tones of the syllables (tone melodies of the words). This might be because in tone languages the tone melody carries more of the functional load of comm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; , ; tpi, Papua Niugini; ho, Papua Niu Gini), officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea ( tpi, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; ho, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), is a country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and its offshore islands in Melanesia (a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean north of Australia). Its capital, located along its southeastern coast, is Port Moresby. The country is the world's third largest island country, with an area of . At the national level, after being ruled by three external powers since 1884, including nearly 60 years of Australian administration starting during World War I, Papua New Guinea established its sovereignty in 1975. It became an independent Commonwealth realm in 1975 with Elizabeth II as its queen. It also became a member of the Commonwealth of Nations in its own right. There are 839 known languages of Papua New Guinea, one of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Glottal Consonant
Glottal consonants are consonants using the glottis as their primary articulation. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the glottal fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have, while some do not consider them to be consonants at all. However, glottal consonants behave as typical consonants in many languages. For example, in Literary Arabic, most words are formed from a root ''C-C-C'' consisting of three consonants, which are inserted into templates such as or . The glottal consonants and can occupy any of the three root consonant slots, just like "normal" consonants such as or . The glottal consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet are as follows: Characteristics In many languages, the "fricatives" are not true fricatives. This is a historical usage of the word. They instead represent transitional states of the glottis ( phonation) without a specific place of articulation, and may behave as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arjen Lock
Arjen (also spelled as Arjan) is a given name, a variant of the Dutch/Finnish name Adrian. Arjen (sometimes also Ariën) is derived from the Latin name Adrianus. The name Adrianus means "native of, from Adria", a place near Venice. Adria is associated with Latin ater, meaning "dull black" or "dark", a reference to the dark sands along the coast of the Adriatic Sea. Hadrian is the name of a famous Roman emperor (his family was from Hadria in the Picenum countryside). Adrian VI (1522-1523) was the first Dutch pope. The name Arjen is mainly found in the Netherlands. Notable people with the name include: *Arjen Anthony Lucassen (born 1960), Dutch composer and musician *Arjen Douwes Dekker (born 1996), Dutch-Spanish historian *Arjen Eggebeen (born 1996), Dutch music producer known by the name Ahrix *Arjen Lenstra (born 1956), Dutch mathematician *Arjen Lubach (born 1979), Dutch comedian *Arjen Robben (born 1984), Dutch former professional footballer *Arjen Roelofs (1754–1828), Dutch a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oceanic Linguistics
''Oceanic Linguistics'' is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on the indigenous languages of the Oceanic area and parts of Southeast Asia, including the indigenous Australian languages, the Papuan languages of New Guinea, and the languages of the Austronesian (or Malayo-Polynesian) family. Monographs on the same languages are published as'' Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications''. History The journal was established in 1962 by George W. Grace (Southern Illinois University, later University of Hawaii). It has been published by the University of Hawaii Press since 1966 (vol. 5). In 1992, the editorship passed to Byron W. Bender (University of Hawaii) and in 2007 it passed to John Lynch (University of the South Pacific). In 2019, he was succeeded by Daniel Kaufman, Yuko Otsuka, and Antoinette Schapper. The journal's first electronic edition appeared in 2000 on Project MUSE. Back volumes up to three years behind the current volumes of both the journal an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Donald Laycock
Donald Laycock (1936–1988) was an Australian linguist and anthropologist. He is best remembered for his work on the languages of Papua New Guinea. Biography He was a graduate of University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia and later worked as a researcher at the University of Adelaide in Anthropology. He undertook his Ph.D. at the Australian National University in linguistics and became one among the leading authorities on the languages of Papua New Guinea.Dutton, T., Ross, M. and Tryon, D. (eds.). 1992. ''The Language Game: Papers in memory of Donald C. Laycock''. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. He performed several pioneering surveys of the languages of the Sepik region of New Guinea. The first of these, his Ph.D. research under the supervision of Stephen Wurm, was published as ''The Ndu languages'' (1965), and established the existence of this closely related group of languages. In subsequent surveys, Laycock found the Ndu languages were part of a larger language fa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Gender
In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called ''gender''; the values present in a given language (of which there are usually two or three) are called the ''genders'' of that language. Whereas some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", others use different definitions for each; many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to sex. Gender systems are used in approximately one half of the world's languages. According to one definition: "Genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behaviour of associated words." Overview Languages with grammatical gender usually have two to four different genders, but some are attested with up to 20. #Gender contras ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Noun Class
In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others consider these different concepts. Noun classes should not be confused with noun classifiers. Notion There are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into noun classes: * according to similarities in their meaning (semantic criterion); * by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphology); * through an arbitrary convention. Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent. Noun classes form a system of grammatical agreement. A noun in a given class may require: * agreement affixes on adjectives, pronouns, numerals, etc. in the same noun phrase, * agreement affixes on the ve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semivowel
In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel, glide or semiconsonant is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary, rather than as the nucleus of a syllable. Examples of semivowels in English are the consonants ''y'' and ''w'', in ''yes'' and ''west'', respectively. Written in IPA, ''y'' and ''w'' are near to the vowels ''ee'' and ''oo'' in ''seen'' and ''moon,'' written in IPA. The term ''glide'' may alternatively refer to any type of transitional sound, not necessarily a semivowel. Classification Semivowels form a subclass of approximants. Although "semivowel" and "approximant" are sometimes treated as synonymous, most authors use the term "semivowel" for a more restricted set; there is no universally agreed-upon definition, and the exact details may vary from author to author. For example, do not consider the labiodental approximant to be a semivowel, while proposes that it should be considered one. In the International Phonet ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
