Cheke Holo (also called Maringe or Mariŋe, A’ara, Holo, Kubonitu) is an Oceanic language spoken in the

Solomon Islands Solomon Islands is an island country consisting of six major islands and over 900 smaller islands in Oceania, to the east of Papua New Guinea and north-west of Vanuatu. It has a land area of , and a population of approx. 700,000. Its capita ...

. Its speakers live on

Santa Isabel Island Santa Isabel Island (also known as Isabel, Ysabel and Mahaga) is the longest in Solomon Islands, the third largest in terms of surface area, and the largest in the group of islands in Isabel Province. Location and geographic data Choiseul lies t ...

Phonology

The

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

of Cheke Holo shows some peculiarities, shared with other Santa Isabel languages, like the aspirated stops and the voiceless sonorants. The five-vowel system instead conforms to the prototypical system of the Oceanic area . has /x/ rather than /ɣʰ/.

Morphosyntax

Verbs in Cheke Holo are marked neither for tense nor for person, although they can be prefixed with ''fa-'' (a causative marker) and they take enclitics. Among the possible clitics are the direct object pronouns, the completive aspect markers ''hi'' and ''hila'', and the continuative aspect marker ''u'' . Reduplication is commonly employed with verb roots to express iteration or intensification and as a valency changing device (from intransitive to transitive), although there are attested cases of adjective and (less so) noun reduplication . Different types of reduplications are possible in Cheke Holo: * Full reduplication ** /vra/ 'jump up' > /vravra/ 'be quick to act' * Partial (or White's rule) reduplication ** /bela/ 'wooden platform' > /beabela/ 'stack up firewood' * Syllable reduplication ** /nolo/ 'to walk' > /nonolo/ 'go walking about' ** /kmokhu/ 'stop' > /kmokmohu/ 'continue to cease' ** /fruni/ 'cover' > /fufruni/ 'cover completely' (when the second consonant of a cluster is /r/, this is dropped in the reduplicated syllable)

Notes

References

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External links

Keha Tarai Mala Lao Legu Narone
Anglican devotional material in Cheke Holo (1934)

Portions of the Book of Common Prayer in Cheke Holo (1973) digitized by Richard Mammana Languages of the Solomon Islands Ysabel languages {{Solomons-stub