Abau Language
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/ ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean north of Australia. It has Indonesia–Papua New Guinea border, a land border with Indonesia to the west and neighbours Australia to the south and the Solomon Islands to the east. Its capital, on its southern coast, is Port Moresby. The country is the world's third largest list of island countries, island country, with an area of . The nation was split in the 1880s between German New Guinea in the North and the Territory of Papua, British Territory of Papua in the South, the latter of which was ceded to Australia in 1902. All of present-day Papua New Guinea came under Australian control following World War I, with the legally distinct Territory of New Guinea being established out of the former German colony as a League of Nations mandate. T ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Velar Consonant
Velar consonants are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (also known as the "velum"). Since the velar region of the roof of the mouth is relatively extensive and the movements of the dorsum are not very precise, velars easily undergo assimilation, shifting their articulation back or to the front depending on the quality of adjacent vowels. They often become automatically ''fronted'', that is partly or completely palatal before a following front vowel, and ''retracted'', that is partly or completely uvular before back vowels. Palatalised velars (like English in ''keen'' or ''cube'') are sometimes referred to as palatovelars. Many languages also have labialized velars, such as , in which the articulation is accompanied by rounding of the lips. There are also labial–velar consonants, which are doubly articulated at the velum and at the lips, such as . This distinction disappea ... [...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, meaning "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. 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 Lenstra (born 1956), Dutch mathematician * Arjen Lubach (born 1979), Dutch comedian *Arjen Robben Arjen Robben (; born 23 January 1984) is a Dutch former professional Association football, footballer who played as a Winger (association football), winger. Known for his Dribbling#Association football, dribbling skills, speed, and long-range s ... (born 1984), Dutch former professional footballer * Arjen Roelofs (1754–1828), Dutch astronomer * Arjen Teeuwissen (born 197 ... [...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 jour ... [...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 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Guillaume Jacques
Guillaume Jacques (, born 1979) is a French linguist who specializes in the study of Sino-Tibetan languages: Old Chinese, Tangut, Tibetan, Gyalrongic and Kiranti languages. He also performs research on the Algonquian and Siouan language families and publishes about languages of other families such as Breton. His case studies in historical phonology are set in the framework of panchronic phonology, aiming to formulate generalizations about sound change that are independent of any particular language or language group. Jacques is one of the main contributors to the Pangloss Collection, an open archive of endangered-language data. Guillaume Jacques was awarded the CNRS Bronze Medal in 2015. Biography Guillaume Jacques studied linguistics at the University of Amsterdam and Paris Diderot University. He obtained his doctorate in 2004 with a dissertation on the phonology and morphology of the Japhug language (one of the Gyalrongic languages), which was based on fieldwork c ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Periodic Tense
Periodic tense is a subtype of the grammatical category of tense, which encodes that the event expressed by the verb occurs within a particular period of the day (such as 'at night', 'in the morning' etc.) or of the year ('in winter', 'in summer' etc.). Jacques (2023). Its does not encode a relation to a particular point of reference, unlike ''deictic tense'', the grammatical expression of time reference (usually past, present or future) relative either to the moment of speaking (absolute tense) or to another point of reference (relative tense). Periodic tense is geographically restricted to Northern America, the Western Amazon region, the Sepik region, Arnhem land and it is almost entirely absent from languages of Africa and Eurasia, which the exception of Chukotkan languages. Periodic tense in Nez Perce Periodic tense can be illustrated with data from Nez Perce The Nez Perce (; autonym in Nez Perce language: , meaning 'we, the people') are an Indigenous people of the P ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Grammatical Gender
In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. 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. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", whereas others use different definitions for each. Many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to Sex–gender distinction, sex or gender. According to one estimate, gender is used in approximately half of the world's languages. According to one definition: "Genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words." Overview Languages with grammatical gender usually h ... [...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 ... [...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 ''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. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the diacritic attached to non-syllabic vowel lett ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Flap Consonant
In phonetics, a flap or tap is a type of consonantal sound, which is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator (such as the tongue) is thrown against another. Contrast with stops and trills The main difference between a tap or flap and a stop is that in a tap/flap there is no buildup of air pressure behind the place of articulation and consequently no release burst. Otherwise a tap/flap is similar to a brief stop. Taps and flaps also contrast with trills, where the airstream causes the articulator to vibrate. Trills may be realized as a single contact, like a tap or flap, but are variable, whereas a tap/flap is limited to a single contact. When a trill is brief and made with a single contact it is sometimes erroneously described as an (allophonic) tap/flap, but a true tap or flap is an active articulation whereas a trill is a passive articulation. That is, for a tap or flap the tongue makes an active gesture to contact the target place of artic ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Fricative
A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in the case of German (the final consonant of '' Bach''); or the side of the tongue against the molars, in the case of Welsh (appearing twice in the name '' Llanelli''). This turbulent airflow is called frication. A particular subset of fricatives are the sibilants. When forming a sibilant, one still is forcing air through a narrow channel, but in addition, the tongue is curled lengthwise to direct the air over the edge of the teeth. English , , , and are examples of sibilants. The usage of two other terms is less standardized: "Spirant" is an older term for fricatives used by some American and European phoneticians and phonologists for non-sibilant fricatives. "Strident" could mean just "sibilant", but some authors include also lab ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |