Fuyug (Fuyuge, Fuyughe, Mafulu) is a language of
Papua New Guinea spoken in the
Central Province of the country. The language's 14,000 speakers live in 300 villages in the
Goilala District
Goilala District is a district of Central Province in Papua New Guinea. It is one of the four administrative districts that make up the province.
Local-level government areas
* Guari Rural
* Tapini Rural
* Woitape Rural
Towns and major vill ...
.
Phonology
The usual orthographic convention used to transcribe Fuyug is to use ''a'' for , ''e'' for , ''y'' for , and the corresponding IPA characters for the remaining phonemes.
Vowels
Fuyug possesses five vowel
phonemes.
The vowel is pronounced as the
diphthong
A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech o ...
when word-final as well as before a word-final consonant. For example, ''ateg'' ("truth") is pronounced and ''ode'' ("where") as .
All vowels are
nasalised
In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is .
In the Internationa ...
before a nasal consonant, as in ''in'' ("
pandanus
''Pandanus'' is a genus of monocots with some 750 accepted species. They are palm-like, dioecious trees and shrubs native to the Old World tropics and subtropics. The greatest number of species are found in Madagascar and Malaysia. Common names ...
") , ''ung'' ("nose") , ''em'' ("house") .
Consonants
Fuyug has 14 consonant phonemes.
The voiceless plosive are
aspirated in a word-final position and before : ''endanti'' ("outside") , ''oki'' ("fire") , ''eyak'' ("return") .
The nasal phoneme
assimilates before a velar consonant becoming : ''yangos'' ("rain") .
The pronunciation of the liquid is in
free variation
In linguistics, free variation is the phenomenon of two (or more) sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers.
Sociolinguists argue that describing such v ...
between a
lateral and a
flap . However, with the exception of
words of foreign origin where the word in the source language is written with an ''r'', this is represented in the orthography as ''l''.
Syllables
Fuyug
syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...
s come in the shape (C)V(C)(C). There cannot be more than two consonants adjacent to one another word-internally and the only final clusters permitted are ''mb'', ''nd'' and ''ng''. Within a word vowels may not follow one another.
Stress
Stress in Fuyug is predictable. Stress falls on the final syllable in mono- and disyllabic words and on the antepenult in words of three of four syllables.
Affix
In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ar ...
es do not alter the stressed syllable.
Morphophonology
Certain suffixes (notably the
illative
In grammar, the illative case (; abbreviated ; from la, illatus "brought in") is a grammatical case used in the Finnish, Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Hungarian languages. It is one of the locative cases, and has the basic meaning of "int ...
''-ti'') cause a change in the end of the word to which it is attached:
* ''m'' assimilates to ''n'' before ''t'': ''im'' + ''-ti'' → ''inti'' ("in the eye")
* ''l'' is elided before ''t'': + ''-ti'' → ("in the heart")
* Voiced plosives are devoiced at the end of a word when the following word begins with a vowel or a voiceless consonant: + → ("a road"), + → ("a lot of sand").
* an ''i'' is
inserted between two consonant if the first is not ''l'' or a nasal: ''ev'' + ''-ti'' → ''eviti'' ("in the Sun"). With certain verbal suffixes an ''e'' is inserted: ''id'' + ''-ngo'' → ''idengo'' ("is sleeping").
* When a root with a final vowel has suffix or clitic attached to it that begins with a vowel, the first vowel is deleted: ''ne'' + ''-a'' → ''na'' ("he eats").
Grammar
Personal pronouns
Fuyug has
personal pronouns for three
numbers (singular,
dual
Dual or Duals may refer to:
Paired/two things
* Dual (mathematics), a notion of paired concepts that mirror one another
** Dual (category theory), a formalization of mathematical duality
*** see more cases in :Duality theories
* Dual (grammatical ...
, plural) but not
gender distinction.
These pronouns can take four different suffixes: the
genitive
In grammar, the genitive case (abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can al ...
''-l'' or ''-le'', the emphatic ''-ni'', the
comitative ''-noy'' and the contrastive ''-v''.
Numerals
Numerals in Fuyug are very restricted, having only ''fidan'' ("one") and ("two"). The numbers 3, 4 and 5 are composed of 1 and 2:
* 3: ("two its other")
* 4: ("two and two") ;
* 5: ("two and two and its other").
After five English numerals are used (numbers less than five often do so as well). The
quantifier ("a lot") is also used after three.
References
Bibliography
* {{cite book , last=Bradshaw , first= Robert L. , year=2007 , url=https://www.sil.org/resources/archives/23773 , title=Fuyug Grammar Sketch , series=Data Papers on Papua New Guinea Languages , volume= 53 , publisher=SIL-PNG Academic Publications , isbn=9980-0-3353-3
Languages of Central Province (Papua New Guinea)
Goilalan languages