Elseng (Morwap, Janggu, Sawa, Tabu
) is a poorly documented
Papuan language
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 geogra ...
spoken by about 300 people (in 1991) in the
Indonesia
Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...
n province of
Papua. It is also known as Morwap, which means "what is it?" ‘Morwap’ is vigorously rejected as a language name by speakers and government officials.
Elseng is spoken in
Omon
OMON (russian: ОМОН – Отряд Мобильный Особого Назначения , translit = Otryad Mobil'nyy Osobogo Naznacheniya , translation = Special Purpose Mobile Unit, , previously ru , Отряд Милиции Осо ...
village,
Gresi Selatan district,
Jayapura Regency
Jayapura Regency is one of the regencies (''kabupaten'') in Papua Province of Indonesia. It is situated to the west of but does not include the city of Jayapura. Previously covering most of the north-east portion of Papua province, it was reduce ...
; it is also called ''Tabu'' or ''Tapu''.
Classification
Laycock classified Elseng as a
language isolate, but noted pronominal similarities with the
Border languages. Ross included it in Border because of these similarities, but noted that it does not appear to share any lexical similarities with the family. However, this may be an effect of the paucity of data on Elseng. Foley similarly classifies Elseng as an isolate.
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)
'. also found lexical similarities with the
Border languages.
Phonology
Pronouns
Pronouns are:
Basic vocabulary
Elseng basic vocabulary from Menanti (2005), quoted in
Foley (2018):
[Menanti, Jackie. 2005. ''Sociolinguistic Report on the Elseng Language in Sia-Sia Village, Keerom County, Papua, Indonesia''. Unpublished report. Jayapura: SIL Indonesia.]
:
The following basic vocabulary words are from Voorhoeve (1971, 1975), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database:
:
Sentences and phrases
Example sentences and phrases in Elseng:
References
External links
Elseng language word list at TransNewGuinea.orgBurung, Wiem. 2000. "A brief note on Elseng." SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2000-001
{{Border languages (New Guinea)
Border languages (New Guinea)
Languages of western New Guinea
Unclassified languages of New Guinea