Kele or Gele’ is a language spoken in the easterly section of inland

Manus Island Manus Island is part of Manus Province in northern Papua New Guinea and is the largest of the Admiralty Islands. It is the fifth-largest island in Papua New Guinea, with an area of , measuring around . Manus Island is covered in rugged jungles w ...

New Guinea New Guinea (; Hiri Motu Hiri Motu, also known as Police Motu, Pidgin Motu, or just Hiri, is a language of Papua New Guinea, which is spoken in surrounding areas of Port Moresby (Capital of Papua New Guinea). It is a simplified version of ...

. Its name comes from the Kele word for "there".Crowley, Terry; Lynch, John; Ross, Malcolm (2002). ''The Oceanic Languages''. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 123-25

Phonology

The syllable structure of Kele is (C)V(C). are often trilled sup>b ^d Additionally, are

prenasalized Prenasalized consonants are phonetics, phonetic sequences of a nasal consonant, nasal and an obstruent (or occasionally a non-nasal sonorant such as ) that behave phonology, phonologically like single consonants. The primary reason for considering ...

when not occurring before another consonant. Kele has five vowels: , , , and . Vowels can also be elongated. Ross (2002) describes this vowel length as non-phonemic, and instead as part of one of four different disyllabic patterns in words. He also notes that no word contains more than one long vowel.

Grammar

Kele has eleven pronouns, distinguishing first person inclusive and exclusive pronouns as well as

dual Dual or Duals may refer to: Paired/two things * Dual (mathematics), a notion of paired concepts that mirror one another ** Dual (category theory), a formalization of mathematical duality *** see more cases in :Duality theories * Dual (grammatical ...

and plural number. Different versions of each pronoun can be prefixed to show the subject and suffixed to show possession. Nearly all verbs require a preceding subject prefix; however, a few verbs instead require a possessor suffix to indicate the subject.

Sample vocabulary

Nouns

Verbs

References

External links

Kaipuleohone Kaipuleohone is a digital ethnographic archive that houses audio and visual files, photographs, as well as hundreds of textual material such as notes, dictionaries, and transcriptions relating to small and endangered languages. The archive is stored ...

Robert Blust Robert A. Blust (; ; May 9, 1940 – January 5, 2022) was an American linguist who worked in several areas, including historical linguistics, lexicography and ethnology. He was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Blus ...

collection includes notes on Kele Manus languages Languages of Manus Province {{admiralty-lang-stub