Ogea or Erima is a Papuan

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...

spoken by approximately 2210 people living in an area 18 kilometers south of the town of

Madang Madang (old German name: ''Friedrich-Wilhelmshafen'') is the capital of Madang Province and is a town with a population of 27,420 (in 2005) on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. It was first settled by the Germans in the 19th century. Histo ...

, in the

Madang Province Madang is a province of Papua New Guinea. The province is on the northern coast of mainland Papua New Guinea and has many of the country's highest peaks, active volcanoes and its biggest mix of languages. The capital is the town of Madang. ...

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; , ; tpi, Papua Niugini; ho, Papua Niu Gini), officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea ( tpi, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; ho, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), is a country i ...

.Ethnologue's report about Ogea
/ref>

Language characteristics

Phonemically, Ogea has a 15

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...

system with 17

consonants In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wit ...

. Syntactically, Ogea is a Subject-

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 ...

Verb A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...

(SOV) language, with

adjective In linguistics, an adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ma ...

s following

noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, ...

s, and

deictic In linguistics, deixis (, ) is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words ''tomorrow'', ''there'', and ''they''. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their de ...

s following adjectives—the reverse of

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

. Morphologically, Ogea is a highly inflected, suffixing language, with most of the complexity occurring with

verb A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...

s. There are over 100 basic verbal suffixes, the number of which is significantly multiplied by

allomorph In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant phonetic form of a morpheme, or, a unit of meaning that varies in sound and spelling without changing the meaning. The term ''allomorph'' describes the realization of phonological variations for a specif ...

ic variants. Ogea

sentences ''The Four Books of Sentences'' (''Libri Quattuor Sententiarum'') is a book of theology written by Peter Lombard in the 12th century. It is a systematic compilation of theology, written around 1150; it derives its name from the '' sententiae'' ...

are often composed of chains of verbs, with suffixes indicating sentence medial versus final positions. Ogea verbs encode inter-clausal temporality (temporal succession—one action occurs following another—and temporal overlap—actions occur simultaneously). They also

encode The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) is a public research project which aims to identify functional elements in the human genome. ENCODE also supports further biomedical research by "generating community resources of genomics data, software ...

switch reference.

Switch reference In linguistics, switch-reference (SR) describes any clause-level morpheme that signals whether certain prominent arguments in 'adjacent' clauses are coreferential. In most cases, it marks whether the subject of the verb in one clause is corefe ...

indicates whether the referents of the clause in question are referents in the following clause. It is useful to classify Ogea verbal suffixes into two major categories:

endocentric In theoretical linguistics, a distinction is made between endocentric and exocentric constructions. A grammatical construction (for instance, a phrase or compound) is said to be ''endocentric'' if it fulfils the same linguistic function as one o ...

and exocentric, following the lead of Staalesen and Wells. Endocentric suffixes occur between the verb root and the exocenter. Endocentric suffixes include manner, object, and benefactive suffixes, among others. The same set of endocentric suffixes are used with varying sets of exocentric suffixes. The endocenter is composed of the verb root plus the endocentric suffixes. Exocentric suffixes encode inter-clausal temporality, tense, mood, subject, and switch reference. They are termed exocentric because they may contain suffixes that relate to the clause that follows. That is, the inter-clausal temporality and switch reference relate the current clause to the one that follows it.

References

General reference

{{Madang languages Rai Coast languages Languages of Madang Province Subject–object–verb languages