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Austronesian–Ongan Languages
Austronesian–Ongan is a proposed connection between the Ongan and Austronesian language families, proposed by Juliette Blevins (2007). Ongan is a small family of two attested languages in the Andaman Islands, while Austronesian is one of the largest language families in the world, with a thousand languages spread across the Pacific. The proposed connection has been rejected by other linguists. Sound correspondences Blevins (2007) proposes the following sound correspondences: There is neutralization and sometimes loss of final nasals in Proto-Ongan, with final **n merged into Proto-Ongan *ŋ, and final **m and **ny partially merged into *ŋ. (The latter merger, and loss, may post-date Proto-Ongan.) Final (oral) stops are lost in multisyllabic words (unstressed syllables?) in Proto-Ongan. Initial **b drops from Proto-Ongan before **u and perhaps before **i. **qw and **kw become *kw in Proto-Ongan, and *q/k or *w in Proto-AN. Proto-Ongan and Proto-AN share a typologically o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Language Family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists therefore describe the ''daughter languages'' within a language family as being ''genetically related''. According to '' Ethnologue'' there are 7,151 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families. A living language is defined as one that is the first language of at least one person. The language families with the most speakers are: the Indo-European family, with many widely spoken languages native to Europe (such as English and Spanish) and South Asia (such as Hindi and Bengali); and the Sino-Tibetan famil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ongan Languages
Ongan, also called Angan, South Andamanese or Jarawa–Onge, is a phylum of two Andamanese languages, Önge and Jarawa, spoken in the southern Andaman Islands. The two known extant languages are: * Önge or Onge ( transcribes ); 96 speakers (Onge) in 1997, mostly monolingual *Jarawa or Järawa; estimated at 200 speakers (Jarawa) in 1997, monolingual *A third language, Sentinelese, the presumed language of the Sentinelese people, is thought to be related to the Ongan languages, but this is uncertain, as very little is known about the Sentinelese; estimated 15–500 speakers. *Another language, Jangil, extinct sometime between 1895 and 1920, is reported to have been unintelligible with but to have had noticeable connections with Jarawa. External relationships The Andamanese languages fall into two clear families, Great Andamanese and Ongan, plus one presumed but unattested language, Sentinelese. The similarities between Great Andamanese and Ongan are mainly of a typological and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jarawa Language (Andaman Islands)
Järawa or Jarwa is one of the Ongan languages. It is spoken by the Jarawa people inhabiting the interior and south central Rutland Island, central interior, and south interior South Andaman Island, and the west coast of Middle Andaman Island. ''Järawa'' means "foreigners" in Aka-Bea, the language of their traditional enemies. Like many peoples of the world, they call themselves "people" in their language, ''aong.'' The Jarawa language of the Andaman Islands is considered vulnerable. History Jarawa is a language used mainly by hunter-gatherer communities who would live along the western coast of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Jarawas are the only remaining Negrito remnants of the Andaman Islands out of four. Other than having a history as traditional hunter-forager-fishermen, they also had reputations as warriors and uncompromising defenders of their territory. The Jarawas managed to survive as a tribal entity despite suffering massive population loss from outside ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Juliette Blevins
Juliette Blevins is an American linguist whose work has contributed to the fields of phonology, phonetics, historical linguistics, and typology. She is currently Professor of Linguistics at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Career Blevins received her PhD in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985. She worked as the Senior Research Scientist at the Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig from 2004-2010. She has also worked as a professor at University of California, Berkeley, University of Luton, University of Western Australia, and University of Texas at Austin before joining the faculty of CUNY in 2010. Research Blevins's research spans several sub-disciplines and features Austronesian, Australian Aboriginal, Native American, and Andamanese languages. She is the founder of the approach of Evolutionary phonology. This approach seeks to explain the cross-linguistic similarity of sound patterns by exam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andaman Islands
The Andaman Islands () are an archipelago in the northeastern Indian Ocean about southwest off the coasts of Myanmar's Ayeyarwady Region. Together with the Nicobar Islands to their south, the Andamans serve as a maritime boundary between the Bay of Bengal to the west and the Andaman Sea to the east. Most of the islands are part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a Union Territory of India, while the Coco Islands and Preparis Island are part of the Yangon Region of Myanmar. The Andaman Islands are home to the Andamanese, a group of indigenous people that includes a number of tribes, including the Jarawa and Sentinelese. While some of the islands can be visited with permits, entry to others, including North Sentinel Island, is banned by law. The Sentinelese are generally hostile to visitors and have had little contact with any other people. The government protects their right to privacy. History Etymology In the 13th century, the name of Andaman appears in Late Middle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sound Correspondence
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards to infer the properties of that ancestor. The comparative method may be contrasted with the method of internal reconstruction in which the internal development of a single language is inferred by the analysis of features within that language. Ordinarily, both methods are used together to reconstruct prehistoric phases of languages; to fill in gaps in the historical record of a language; to discover the development of phonological, morphological and other linguistic systems and to confirm or to refute hypothesised relationships between languages. The comparative method was developed over the 19th century. Key contributions were made by the Danish scholars Rasmus Rask and Karl Verner and the German scholar Jacob Grimm. The first linguist to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Austronesian
Proto-Austronesian (commonly abbreviated as PAN or PAn) is a proto-language. It is the reconstructed ancestor of the Austronesian languages, one of the world's major language families. Proto-Austronesian is assumed to have begun to diversify 3,500–4,000 BCE on Taiwan. Lower-level reconstructions have also been made, and include Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, Proto-Oceanic, and Proto-Polynesian. Recently, linguists such as Malcolm Ross and Andrew Pawley have built large lexicons for Proto-Oceanic and Proto-Polynesian. Phonology Proto-Austronesian is reconstructed by constructing sets of correspondences among consonants in the various Austronesian languages, according to the comparative method. Although in theory the result should be unambiguous, in practice given the large number of languages there are numerous disagreements, with various scholars differing significantly on the number and nature of the phonemes in Proto-Austronesian. In the past, some disagreements concerned whe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inalienable Possession
In linguistics, inalienable possession (abbreviated ) is a type of possession in which a noun is obligatorily possessed by its possessor. Nouns or nominal affixes in an inalienable possession relationship cannot exist independently or be "alienated" from their possessor. Inalienable nouns include body parts (such as ''leg'', which is necessarily "someone's leg" even if it is severed from the body), kinship terms (such as ''mother''), and part-whole relations (such as ''top''). Many languages reflect the distinction but vary in how they mark inalienable possession. Cross-linguistically, inalienability correlates with many morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties. In general, the alienable–inalienable distinction is an example of a binary possessive class system in which a language distinguishes two kinds of possession (alienable and inalienable). The alienability distinction is the most common kind of binary possessive class system, but it is not the only one. Some ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pazeh Language
Pazeh (also spelled Pazih, Pazéh) and Kaxabu are dialects of an extinct language of the Pazeh and Kaxabu, neighboring Taiwanese indigenous peoples. The language was Formosan, of the Austronesian language family. The last remaining native speaker of the Pazeh dialect died in 2010. Classification Pazeh is classified as a Formosan language of the Austronesian language family. History Due to prejudice faced by the Pazeh, as well as other indigenous groups of Taiwan, Hoklo Taiwanese came to displace Pazeh. The last remaining native speaker of the Pazeh dialect, Pan Jin-yu, died in 2010 at the age of 96. Before her death, she offered Pazeh classes to about 200 regular students in Puli and a small number of students in Miaoli and Taichung. However, there are still efforts in revival of the language after her death. Phonology Pazeh has 17 consonants, 4 vowels, and 4 diphthongs (-ay, -aw, -uy, -iw). # and do not actually share the same place of articulation; is alve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Van Driem
George "Sjors" van Driem (born 1957) is a Dutch linguist associated with the University of Bern, where he is the chair of Historical Linguistics and directs the Linguistics Institute. Education * Leiden University, 1983–1987 (PhD, ''A Grammar of Limbu'') * Leiden University, 1981–1983 (MA Slavic, BA English, MA General Linguistics) * Leiden University, 1979–1981 (BA Slavic) * University of Virginia at Charlottesville, 1975–1979 (BA Biology) * Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen, 1978–1979 * Watling Island Marine Biological Station on San Salvador Island in the Bahamas, 1977 * Duke University at Durham, North Carolina, 1976 Research George van Driem has conducted field research in the Himalayas since 1983. He was commissioned by the Royal Government of Bhutan to codify a grammar of Dzongkha, the national language, design a phonological romanisation for the language known as Roman Dzongkha, and complete a survey of the language communities of the kingdom. He and native Dzo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Blust
Robert A. Blust (; ; May 9, 1940 – January 5, 2022) was an American linguist who worked in several areas, including historical linguistics, lexicography and ethnology. He was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Blust specialized in the Austronesian languages and made major contributions to the field of Austronesian linguistics. Early life and career Blust was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on May 9, 1940, and raised in California. He received both a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology in 1967 and a PhD in linguistics in 1974 from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. He taught at Leiden University in The Netherlands from 1976 to 1984, after which he returned to the Department of Linguistics at Mānoa for the rest of his career, serving as department chair from 2005 to 2008. He was a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. Austronesian languages Until 2018, he served as the review editor for ''Oceanic Linguistics'', an academic journal that covers the A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
