The Central Solomon languages are the four
Papuan languages
The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian and non- Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. It is a strictly geogr ...
spoken in the state of 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 capit ...
.
The four languages are, listed from northwest to southeast,
*
Bilua of
Vella Lavella
Vella Lavella is an island in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands. It lies to the west of New Georgia, but is considered one of the New Georgia Group. To its west are the Treasury Islands.
Environment
The island of Vella Lavella is lo ...
and
Ghizo islands,
*
Touo (also known as ''Baniata)'' of
Rendova Island
Rendova is an island in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, east of Papua New Guinea.
Geography
Rendova Island is a roughly rectangularly-shaped island, located in the South Pacific in the New Georgia Islands. The ...
,
*
Lavukaleve of the
Russell Islands :''See also Russell Island (disambiguation).''
The Russell Islands are two small islands ( Pavuvu and Mbanika), as well as several islets, of volcanic origin, in the Central Province of Solomon Islands. They are located approximately northwest o ...
, and
*
Savosavo of
Savo Island
Savo Island is an island in Solomon Islands in the southwest South Pacific ocean. Administratively, Savo Island is a part of the Central Province of the Solomon Islands. It is about from the capital Honiara. The principal village is Alialia, i ...
.
Classification
The four Central Solomon languages were identified as a
family
Family (from la, familia) is a group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or affinity (by marriage or other relationship). The purpose of the family is to maintain the well-being of its members and of society. Idea ...
by
Wilhelm Schmidt in 1908. The languages are at best distantly related, and evidence for their relationship is meager. Dunn and Terrill (2012) argue that the lexical evidence vanishes when Oceanic loanwords are excluded. Ross (2005) and Pedrós (2015), however, accept a connection, based on similarities among pronouns and other grammatical forms.
Pedrós (2015) suggests, tentatively, that the branching of the family is as follows.
;Central Solomons
*
Lavukaleve–
Touo
*
Savosavo–
Bilua
Savosavo and
Bilua, despite being the most distant languages geographically, both split more recently than Lavukaleve and Touo according to Pedrós.
Palmer (2018) regards the evidence for Central Solomons as tentative but promising.
An automated computational analysis (
ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)
[Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ]
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013)
'. grouped
Touo,
Savosavo, and
Bilua together.
Lavukaleve was not included. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.
Pronoun reconstructions
Pedrós (2015) argues for the existence of the family through comparison of pronouns and other gender, person and number
morphemes
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone a ...
and based on the existence of a common
syncretism
Syncretism () is the practice of combining different beliefs and various schools of thought. Syncretism involves the merging or assimilation of several originally discrete traditions, especially in the theology and mythology of religion, thu ...
between 2nd person nonsingular and
inclusive. He performs an
internal reconstruction
Internal reconstruction is a method of reconstructing an earlier state in a language's history using only language-internal evidence of the language in question.
The comparative method compares variations between languages, such as in sets of c ...
for the pronominal morphemes of each language and then proposes a
reconstruction
Reconstruction may refer to:
Politics, history, and sociology
* Reconstruction (law), the transfer of a company's (or several companies') business to a new company
*''Perestroika'' (Russian for "reconstruction"), a late 20th century Soviet Unio ...
of some of the pronouns of the claimed family. The reconstructions are the following:
Numerals
Central Solomon numerals from Pedrós (2015):
:
As the comparisons indicate, lexical evidence for the relatedness of the four languages is limited.
Vocabulary comparison
The following basic vocabulary words are from Tryon & Hackman (1982), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database. The Savosavo data is from Claudia Wegener's field notes.
:
Syntax
All Central Solomon languages have
SOV word order SOV may refer to:
* SOV, Service Operations Vessel
* SOV, a former ticker symbol for Sovereign Bank
* SOV, a legal cryptocurrency created by the Sovereign Currency Act of 2018 of the Republic of the Marshall Islands
* SOV, the National Rail statio ...
except for
Bilua, which has
SVO word order SVO may refer to:
* Saturn Valley Online, an EarthBound MMORPG
* Sheremetyevo International Airport, one three major airports serving Moscow, Russia, IATA Airport Code
* Social value orientations, a psychological construct
* Sparse voxel octree, a ...
due to
Oceanic influence.
See also
*
Papuan languages
The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian and non- Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. It is a strictly geogr ...
*
Temotu languages, Oceanic but with heavy Papuan substrate influence
**
Reefs-Santa Cruz languages
Further reading
*Simon J Greenhill, & Robert Forkel. (2019). lexibank/tryonsolomon: Solomon Islands Languages (Version v3.0)
ata set Zenodo.
References
*Ross, Malcolm, 2001. "Is there an East Papuan phylum? Evidence from pronouns", in ''The boy from Bundaberg. Studies in Melanesian linguistics in honour of Tom Dutton'', ed. by Andrew Pawley, Malcolm Ross and Darrell Tryon: 301-322. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
*''Structural Phylogenetics and the Reconstruction of Ancient Language History''. Michael Dunn, Angela Terrill,
Ger Reesink
Gerard P. Reesink (more commonly known as Ger Reesink) is a Dutch linguist who specializes in Papuan languages.
Education
He studied psychology at Utrecht University. He obtained his PhD in linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, where he com ...
, Robert A. Foley, Stephen C. Levinson. ''Science'' magazine, 23 Sept. 2005, vol. 309, p 2072.
*Ross, Malcolm, 2005. "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages", in ''Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan speaking peoples'', ed. by Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Robin Hide and Jack Golson: 15-65. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
*Pedrós, Toni, 2015. "New arguments for a Central Solomons family based on evidence from pronominal morphemes". ''Oceanic Linguistics'', vol. 54, no. 2 (358-395).
External links
Central Solomons languages database at TransNewGuinea.orgCentral Solomons word lists(Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database)
{{Language families
East Papuan languages
Languages of the Solomon Islands
Language families