The Hawu language (Hawu: ) is the language of the
Savu people
The Savunese people, also known as orang Sabu or Sawu (Bahasa Indonesia) or dou Hawu (Savunese language), are the people of Savu and smaller neighbouring Raijua in East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia.
Savu had little to interest traders from Europe, ...
of
Savu Island
Savu ( id, Sawu, also known as Sabu, Havu, and Hawu) is the largest of a group of three islands, situated midway between Sumba and Rote, west of Timor, in Indonesia's eastern province, East Nusa Tenggara. Ferries connect the islands to Waingapu ...
in Indonesia and of
Raijua Island off the western tip of Savu. Hawu has been referred to by a variety of names such as Havu, Savu, Sabu, Sawu, and is known to outsiders as Savu or Sabu (thus Havunese, Savunese, Sawunese).
[Walker, Alan T. (1982). A grammar of Sawu. Jakarta: Badan Penyelenggara Seri NUSA, Universitas Atma Jaya.] Hawu belongs to the
Malayo-Polynesian
The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, with approximately 385.5 million speakers. The Malayo-Polynesian languages are spoken by the Austronesian peoples outside of Taiwan, in the island nations of Southeas ...
branch of the
Austronesian language family, and is most closely related to
Dhao
''Tao'' or ''Dao'' is the natural order of the universe, whose character one's intuition must discern to realize the potential for individual wisdom, as conceived in the context of East Asian philosophy, East Asian religions, or any other philo ...
(spoken on Rote) and the languages of
Sumba. Dhao was once considered a dialect of Hawu, but the two languages are not
mutually intelligible.
Dialects
The Seba ( in Hawu) dialect is dominant, covering most of Savu Island and the main city of
Seba. Timu ( in Hawu) is spoken in the east, Mesara ( in Hawu) in the west, and Liae on the southern tip of the island. Raijua is spoken on the island of the same name ( 'Jua Island'), just off-shore to the west of Savu.
Linguistic Structure
The following description is based on Walker (1982) and Grimes (2006).
Phonology
Hawu *s, attested during the
Portuguese colonial era, has
debuccalized to , a change that has not happened in Dhao. The Hawu consonant inventory is smaller than that of Dhao:
Consonants of the column are
apical
Apical means "pertaining to an apex". It may refer to:
*Apical ancestor, refers to the last common ancestor of an entire group, such as a species (biology) or a clan (anthropology)
*Apical (anatomy), an anatomical term of location for features loc ...
, those of the column
laminal
A laminal consonant is a phone (speech sound) produced by obstructing the air passage with the blade of the tongue, the flat top front surface just behind the tip of the tongue in contact
with upper lip, teeth, alveolar ridge, to possibly, as ...
. In common orthography, the implosives are written . is pronounced or . A wye sound (written ) is found at the beginning of some words in Seba dialect where Timu and Raijua dialects have .
Vowels are , with written in common orthography. Phonetic long vowels and diphthongs are vowel sequences. The penultimate syllable/vowel is stressed. (Every vowel constitutes a syllable.) A stressed schwa lengthens the following consonant:
'with', 'what?', 'eat, food', 'senile', 'wind'.
Syllables are consonant-vowel (CV) or vowel-only (V).
Implosives
Hawu shares
implosive
Implosive consonants are a group of stop consonants (and possibly also some affricates) with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism.''Phonetics for communication disorders.'' Martin J. Ball and Nicole Müller. Ro ...
(or perhaps
pre-glottalized) consonants with several other languages of the Lesser Sundas, including
Bimanese,
Kambera,
Komodo
Komodo may refer to:
Computers
* Komodo Edit, a free text editor for dynamic programming languages
* Komodo IDE an integrated development environment (IDE) for dynamic programming languages
* Komodo (chess), a chess engine
People
* Komodo ...
,
Li'o,
Ngad'a, and
Riung
Riung is a language of central Flores, in East Nusa Tenggara Province, 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, ...
. While these languages are somewhat geographically close, they are not necessarily closely-related. Many belong to different high-order Austronesian subgroups. As a result, implosives seem to be an areal feature—perhaps motivated by language contact and the reduction of homorganic nasal clusters in some languages—as opposed to an innovated feature.
Hawu, however, is the only language in the region with four implosives in its phonological inventory. All four implosives can occur both word-initially and intervocalically.
Historical vowel metathesis
The phonological history of Hawu is characterized by an unusual, but fully regular vowel
metathesis, which affects the
Proto-Malayo-Polynesian
Proto-Malayo-Polynesian (PMP) is the reconstructed ancestor of the Malayo-Polynesian languages, which is by far the largest branch (by current speakers) of the Austronesian language family. Proto-Malayo-Polynesian is ancestral to all Austronesi ...
(PMP) vowel sequences *uCa/*uCə and *iCa/*iCə. The former changes into ''əCu'', the latter into ''əCi'', as illustrated in the following table.
Grammar
Hawu is an
ergative–absolutive language with ergative preposition (Seba dialect), (Dimu), or (Raijua).
Clauses are usually
verb-initial. However, the presence of the ergative preposition allows for a freer word order. Among monovalent verbs, S may occur before or after the verb. According to speakers, there is no difference in meaning between the two following constructions.
In the absence of the ergative preposition, bivalent constructions have strict AVO word order.
When the ergative preposition is present, word order becomes quite free. In addition, with the presence of the ergative preposition, many transitive verbs have a special form to indicate singular number of the
object
Object may refer to:
General meanings
* Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept
** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place
** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter
* Goal, an ...
by replacing the final vowel of the verb with "-e" when the verb ends in , , or (e.g. 'touch them', 'touch it') or "-o" when the verb ends in (, 'to forget'). Verbs that end in have no alternation. The following examples (from the Seba dialect) present a few of the word order options available, and also show the alternation of the verb 'to eat' to when is present.
Within noun phrases, modifiers usually follow the noun, though there are some possibly lexicalized exceptions, such as 'many people' (compare Dhao 'people many').
Apart from this, and unlike in Dhao, all pronominal reference uses independent pronouns. These are:
The demonstratives are complex and poorly understood. They may be contrasted by number (see Walker 1982), but it is not confirmed by Grimes.
These can be made locative (here, now, there, then, yonder) by preceding the ''n'' forms with ; the neutral form optionally contracting to . 'Like this/that' is marked with or , with the ''n'' becoming ''h'' and the neutral form appearing irregularly as .
Sample clauses (Grimes 2006). (Compare the Dhao equivalents at
Dhao language#Grammar.)
Language resources
The Alan T. Walker Collection contains a number of resources produced through Hawu language documentation, including audio recordings, handwritten field notes, and narrative texts. An accompanying ''Finding Aid and Inventory''
was created for the collection in order to more easily navigate its contents in th
PARADISECarchive.
The "Results of Linguistic Fieldwork and Documentation Training Program in East Nusa Tenggara" collection, which is also archived with PARADISEC, contains audio recordings of Hawu conversations, narratives, elicitation, genealogies, and wordlists. Several are also accompanied by video files.
Notes
References
*
*
{{Languages of Indonesia
Savu languages
Languages of Indonesia