Kalamang, sometimes also called Karas, is a divergent
Trans–New Guinea language spoken on the biggest of the
Karas Islands off the
Bomberai Peninsula
Bomberai Peninsula () is located in the Western New Guinea region. It is south of the Bird's Head Peninsula, and Bintuni Bay separates the two peninsulas. To the west lies the Sebakor Bay and to the south Kamrau Bay. On the southeast Arguni ...
, that is part of the
West Bomberai family. It is spoken in Antalisa and Mas villages on Karas Island.
Phonology
* The consonants /f/ and /h/ are marginal.
* The vowels /a e i/ are reduced to
�in unstressed syllables in fast or casual speech.
Additionally, the following diphthongs are present: /ei/, /oi/, /ou/, /ui/.
Pronouns
Cowan (1953) records the following pronouns for Karas.
Visser (2020) records the following pronouns for Karas of Maas village:
The free possessives and possessive suffixes can occur together.
Machine Translation from One Book
In 2023, Kalamang was used by
machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...
researchers for a benchmark called "Machine Translation from One Book". It was chosen because of its negligible presence in the Internet and because field research materials were collected by Eline Visser, who published "A grammar of Kalamang" as her PhD thesis. Although Kalamang is primarily oral language, it can be written in the
Indonesian alphabet
Indonesian orthography refers to the official spelling system used in the Indonesian language. The current system uses the Latin alphabet and is called (EYD), commonly translated as ''Enhanced Spelling'', ''Perfected Spelling'' or ''Improved Spel ...
. Researchers used all existing materials (grammar book, short dictionary, and small set of Kalamang-English sentences) to test how
large language model
A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially language generation.
The largest and most capable LLMs are g ...
s (LLM) can learn a language from a single source, and tested the quality of translations. In 2024, researchers from Google showed that their latest LLM,
Gemini 1.5, can translate English to Kalamang with similar quality to a human who learned from the same resources.
References
Sources
*
*
* Visser, Eline. 2021. . In: Key, Mary Ritchie & Comrie, Bernard (eds.) ''The
Intercontinental Dictionary Series
The Intercontinental Dictionary Series (commonly abbreviated as IDS) is a large database of topical vocabulary lists in various world languages. The general editor of the database is Bernard Comrie of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary An ...
''. Leipzig:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (, shortened to MPI EVA) is a research institute based in Leipzig, Germany, that was founded in 1997. It is part of the Max Planck Society network.
Well-known scientists currently based at ...
.
CLDF dataset
External links
* Timothy Usher, New Guinea World
Kalamang
{{West Trans–New Guinea languages
Languages of Western New Guinea
Severely endangered languages
West Bomberai languages