Big Nambas ( native name ''V'ənen Taut'') is an Oceanic language spoken by about people () in northwest Malekula,

Vanuatu Vanuatu ( or ; ), officially the Republic of Vanuatu (; ), is an island country in Melanesia located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago, which is of volcanic origin, is east of northern Australia, northeast of New Caledonia, east o ...

. Approximately nineteen villages in the Big Nambas region of the Malekula Interior use the language exclusively with no variation in dialect. It was studied in-depth over a period of about 10 years by missionary Greg. J. Fox, who published a grammar and dictionary in 1979. A Big Nambas translation of the Bible has been completed recently by Andrew Fox.

Phonology

The

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

s of Big Nambas are as shown in the following table: * are aspirated word finally. is not noted as behaving likewise. * are rounded before the front vowels * The voiced fricatives are devoiced word initially and finally. * is realized as word finally or when adjacent to , and as when adjacent to word medially. Big Nambas has a 5-

vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

system with the following

s: Big Nambas has a complex

syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

structure with a large amount of consonant clusters possible. Additionally, clusters of up to four vowels are permitted (e.g. nauei "water"). Stress in Big Nambas is phonemic, but partly predictable. The consonants /t β r l n/ all exhibit phonemic

gemination In phonetics and phonology, gemination (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), or consonant lengthening, is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...

when two identical ones occur between syllables. Linguolabial consonants are often marked with an apostrophe in the

orthography An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national ...

to distinguish them from their bilabial counterparts.

Grammar

Big Nambas is a synthetic, head-marking language.

Nouns

Nouns in Big Nambas are capable of phrasal expansion. There are three noun classes in Big Nambas: # Obligatorily possessed nouns, most commonly constituent parts of any object (body parts, tree parts, ordinals,

possessive A possessive or ktetic form (Glossing abbreviation, abbreviated or ; from ; ) is a word or grammatical construction indicating a relationship of possession (linguistics), possession in a broad sense. This can include strict ownership, or a numbe ...

) # Optionally possessed nouns, with the subclasses: ## Nouns taking the third singular possessives ''nan'' or ''nen'' ## Nouns taking the prefix ''ar-'' "all" ## Title nouns (names and kinship terms) # Unpossessed nouns (personal and interrogative pronouns) Big Nambas features a system of complex nouns, formed by derivation. Derived nouns can be of one of five types: # Abstract nouns, formed by suffixing -ien to verb stems (e.g. tkar "be pregnant" vs. tkar-ien "pregnancy") # Articled nouns, formed by prefixing na- or n- to a verb stem beginning with a vowel (i-u "it rains" vs. n-u "(the) rain") # Ordinal nouns, formed by prefixing the nominalizer ni- and suffixing the possessive -a (tl "three" vs. ni-tl-a "the third of") # Determinative nouns, formed by prefixing ter- to some adjective stems (p'arei "long" vs. ter-p'arei "the long one") # Reverential nouns, formed by suffixing -et to some nouns (nut "place" vs. nutet "a sacred place", cf. nap' "fire" vs. nep'et "sacred fire") Nouns in Big Nambas may be compounded by following them with a verb stem.

References

Bibliography

External links

V'enen Taut recordings

Video about the language
{{authority control Malekula languages Languages of Vanuatu