Eipo (Eipomek), or Lik, is a
Mek language of the eastern highlands of Eipumek District,
Pegunungan Bintang Regency
Pegunungan Bintang Regency, or Bintang Mountains Regency is a regency in the Indonesian province of Highland Papua. It covers an area of 15,683 km2, and had a population of 65,434 at the 2010 Census and 77,872 at the 2020 Census. The administ ...
,
West Papua. It spoken by the
Eipo people who live along the
Eipo River. A large percentage of its vocabulary is shared with
Una
Una and UNA may refer to:
Places
* 160 Una, the asteroid "Una", an asteroid named after the Faerie Queene character
* Una River (disambiguation), numerous rivers
* Una, Himachal Pradesh, a town in India
** Una, Himachal Pradesh Assembly constit ...
and
Tanime, and they form one dialect area.
Classification
Eipo belongs to the Eastern branch of
Mek languages
The Mek languages are a well established family of Papuan languages spoken by the Mek peoples. They form a branch of the Trans–New Guinea languages (TNG) in the classifications of Stephen Wurm (1975) and of Malcolm Ross (2005).
Mek, then cal ...
, which is a family of closely related languages belonging to the larger grouping of
Trans-New Guinea languages.
Geographic distribution
The Eipo language is spoken by about 3,000 people along the
Eipo River in the valley of
Eipomek, which is situated in the eastern highlands of
West Papua.
Phonology
Consonants
Eipo exhibits the following 16 phonemic consonants:
* /p/ indicates a labialized
ʷɵ
* /c/ indicates a palatalized
ʲ
Vowels
Eipo has five phonemic vowels:
Diphthongs are not regarded as separate phonemes.
Grammar
Morphology
Eipo is generally isolating language, but exhibits an elaborate system of agglutination in verb formation.
Syntax
The usual word order of Eipo is
subject-object-verb (SOV).
Deictics
Eipo has only four basic spatial
deictic
In linguistics, deixis (, ) is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words ''tomorrow'', ''there'', and ''they''. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their de ...
s, which are usually accompanied by pointing gestures, since the deictics are used during face-to-face communication to refer to positions relative to the person.
*''a-'' ‘here’
*''ei-'' ‘up there’
*''ou-, u-'' ‘down there’
*''or-, er-'' ‘across there’ (‘across-valley’)
Interrogatives
Eipo has many compound interrogatives:
*''yate'' ‘what?, which?, what kind of?’
**''yate anye'' ‘who?’
**''yate ate'' ‘why? (what for)’
**''yate arye'' ‘why? (what reason)’
**''yate-barye'' ‘why?’
**''yate-sum'' ‘when? (what day/time)’
*''dan-'' ‘where?, where to, whence’
**''dan-segum'' ‘whereabouts? (approximate location)’
**''dan-tam'' ("where side") ‘where, whence, whereto’
**''dan-ak'' ("where at") ‘where, whence, whereto’
Writing system
Eipo is not historically a written language, but in recent decades a
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...
has been devised for it. The letter values are mostly those of the IPA letters given above, with the exceptions of , , , and .
References
*
*Heeschen, Volker and Wulf Schiefenhövel. 1983. ''Wörterbuch der Eiposprache: Eipo-Deutsch-Englisch''. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.
{{Mek languages
Mek languages
Languages of western New Guinea