The Dhao language, better known to outsiders by its
Rotinese name Ndao (Ndaonese, Ndaundau), is the language of
Ndao Island in Indonesia. Traditionally classified as a
Sumba language in the Austronesian family, it may actually be a non-Austronesian (
Papuan) language. It was once considered a dialect of
Hawu, but is not
mutually intelligible
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an ...
.
Phonology
Dhao phonology is similar to that of Hawu, but somewhat more complex in its consonants.
Consonants of the column are
apical, 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 ...
. are found in Malay loan words. In a practical orthography developed for writing the language, implosives are written , the affricates (the ''dh'' is slightly
retroflex), and the voiced glottal onset as a double vowel. The is sometimes silent, but contrasts with a glottal stop onset in vowel-initial words within a phrase. Its phonemic status is not clear. It has an "extremely limited distribution", linking
noun phrases ( 'small', 'small child') and clauses ( 'and', 'also').
Vowels are , with written . Phonetic long vowels and diphthongs are vowel sequences. The penultimate syllable/vowel is stressed. (Every vowel constitutes a syllable.)
'this.
', 'this', 'thinking', 'senile', 'wind'.
A stressed schwa lengthens the following consonant: 'yesterday', 'night'.
Syllables are consonant-vowel or vowel-only.
f, q, v, w, x, y and z are only used in loanwords and foreign names.
Grammar
Dhao has a
nominative–accusative subject–verb–object word order, unlike Hawu. Within noun phrases, modifiers follow the noun. There are a set of independent pronouns, and also a set of pronominal
clitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a w ...
s.
When the clitics are used for objects, there are proximal forms in the third person, ' 'this one' and ' 'these', the latter also for
collective plural
In linguistics, a collective noun is a word referring to a collection of things taken as a whole. Most collective nouns in everyday speech are not specific to one kind of thing. For example, the collective noun "group" can be applied to people (" ...
s. When used for subjects and the verb begins with a vowel, they drop their vowel with a few irregularities: ' 'to know'. Many words that translate prepositions in English are verbs in Dhao, and inflect as such. Dhao also has a single '
intradirective' verb, ' 'to go', in which the clitics follow: ' or ' () ''.''
Demonstratives distinguish proximal (here, now, this), distal (there, then, that), and remote (yonder, yon).
Sample clauses ().
[Compare the Hawu equivalents at Hawu language#Grammar.]
Notes
References
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External links
Alphabet and pronunciation
{{Languages of Indonesia
Savu languages
Languages of Indonesia