Keuw (Keu, Kehu) is an
unclassified language of
New Guinea
New Guinea (; Hiri Motu: ''Niu Gini''; id, Papua, or , historically ) is the world's second-largest island with an area of . Located in Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is separated from Australia by the wide Torr ...
.
Keuw is spoken in a swampy lowland region along the Poronai River in Keuw village (kampung) of
Wapoga District,
Nabire Regency
Nabire Regency is one of the regencies (''kabupaten'') in the Indonesian province of Central Papua. It covers an area of 12,010.65 km2, and had a population of 129,893 at the 2010 Census and 169,136 at the 2020 Census, comprising 87,688 males and ...
,
Papua province, Indonesia. According to oral folklore, the Keuw were originally from Woisaru, and then moved to Sanawado, which may be locations in Wapoga District.
Classification
Mark Donohue (2007) said that Kehu is "probably a
Geelvink Bay language, but no one knows enough about those languages, systematically, to say this with confidence for
ny of thembeyond Barapasi, T(ar)unggare and Bauzi."
Timothy Usher (2018) classifies it as a
Lakes Plain language
The Lakes Plain languages are a family of Papuan languages, spoken in the Lakes Plain of Indonesian New Guinea. They are notable for being heavily tonal and for their lack of nasal consonants.
Classification
The Lakes Plain languages were tenta ...
, closest to
Awera and
Rasawa–
Saponi
The Saponi or Sappony are a Native American tribe historically based in the Piedmont of North Carolina and Virginia.Raymond D. DeMaillie, "Tutelo and Neighboring Groups," pages 286–87. They spoke a Siouan language, related to the languages of ...
. According to Foley, based on some lexical and phonological similarities, Keuw may possibly share a deep relationship with the Lakes Plain languages.
Palmer (2018) treats Keuw as a
language isolate.
Phonology
Phonology of Keuw from Kamholz (2012), quoted in
Foley (2018):
[Kamholz, David. 2012. The Keuw isolate: preliminary materials and classification. ''Language and Linguistics in Melanesia Special Issue: History, Contact and Classification of Papuan Languages'': 243–268.]
Consonants
Keuw has ten consonants.
Vowels
Keuw has five vowels.
Tone
Keuw has contrastive
tone. Some
minimal pair
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate ...
s demonstrating phonemic tonal contrasts:
*''áalìyò'' ‘tongue’, ''áalíyò'' ‘house’
*''kíilyô'' ‘possum’, ''kíilyò'' ‘arrow’
*''úukyò'' ‘grandfather’, ''úunyô'' ‘woman’
Syntax
Keuw has
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 ...
, as exemplified by the sentence below. The morphemic suffixes remain unglossed.
Basic vocabulary
Basic vocabulary of Keuw from Kamholz (2012), quoted in
Foley (2018):
:
The following basic vocabulary words are from the Trans-New Guinea database:
:
References
External links
Keuw field recordings
{{Papuan languages
Endangered languages
Language isolates of New Guinea
Endangered language isolates
Wapoga languages
Tonal languages