Ponosakan is an
Austronesian language spoken in the vicinity of the town of ,
North Sulawesi
North Sulawesi ( id, Sulawesi Utara) is a province of Indonesia. It is located on the Minahasa Peninsula of Sulawesi, south of the Philippines and southeast of Sabah, Malaysia. It borders the Philippine province of Davao Occidental and Soccsks ...
,
Indonesia
Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...
. This language is almost extinct, with only four fluent speakers left as of November 2014.
Classification
The locals in North Sulawesi often falsely identify Ponosakan as a
Minahasan
The Minahasans (alternative spelling: Minahassa) are an ethnic group native to the North Sulawesi province of Indonesia, formerly known as North Celebes. The Minahasa people sometimes refer to themselves as Manado people. Although the Minahasan p ...
language. However, there is no doubt among scholars that this language actually belongs to the
Gorontalo–Mongondow subgroup. The Gorontalo–Mongondow languages are commonly classified as a part of the
Philippine
The Philippines (; fil, Pilipinas, links=no), officially the Republic of the Philippines ( fil, Republika ng Pilipinas, links=no),
* bik, Republika kan Filipinas
* ceb, Republika sa Pilipinas
* cbk, República de Filipinas
* hil, Republ ...
subfamily;
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 ...
specifically includes it in the
Greater Central Philippine languages, alongside—among others—
Tagalog and
Visayan languages
The Bisayan languages or Visayan languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages spoken in the languages of the Philippines, Philippines. They are most closely related to Tagalog language, Tagalog and the Bikol languages, all of which ar ...
.
In comparison to other Gorontalo–Mongondow languages, Ponosakan is relatively conservative in terms of phonology and structure.
Demography and distribution
Ponosakan is spoken at the eastern end of Gorontalo–Mongondow languages' distribution. This language has been spoken by the Ponosakan people in and around from at least the 17th century. Before
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, Ponosakan was the most spoken language not only in Belang, but also in several other settlements around it. But even in the 1920s, its number of speakers was already in decline. Influx of migrants from other areas also altered the region's demography; when World War II started, already half of Belang residents were newcomers who did not speak Ponosakan. By the second half of the 20th century, "virtually no ethnic Ponosakans were learning the language anymore".
In November 2014, there were reportedly only four elderly people who could still speak Ponosakan fluently. Ponosakan has the fewest speakers among the Gorontalo–Mongondow languages.
Phonology
There are 16 consonants and 5 vowels in Ponosakan. In addition, the phoneme only occurs in loanwords.
Grammar
Pronouns
As with other Philippine languages,
pronouns
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the part of speech, parts o ...
in Ponosakan are distinguished by
case
Case or CASE may refer to:
Containers
* Case (goods), a package of related merchandise
* Cartridge case or casing, a firearm cartridge component
* Bookcase, a piece of furniture used to store books
* Briefcase or attaché case, a narrow box to c ...
(nominative, genitive, and oblique);
number
A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers c ...
(singular and plural); and, for the first person plural pronouns,
clusivity
In linguistics, clusivity is a grammatical distinction between ''inclusive'' and ''exclusive'' first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called ''inclusive " we"'' and ''exclusive "we"''. Inclusive "we" specifically includes the addressee ...
(inclusive and exclusive). Other than the contrast between the singular and plural forms, Ponosakan also exhibits "count forms" for second and third person pronouns. These forms are always followed by a number, as in 'the three of them' and 'the four of them'. In contrast, plural forms cannot be followed by a number. Both the count and plural forms can be used to represent any number of people, although there is a preference towards using the count forms for smaller numbers.
Case markers
There are three cases in Ponosakan: nominative, genitive, and oblique. Each case has its own marker, although the same marker is used for both nominative and genitive cases in common nouns.
Demonstratives
There are three root words for
demonstrative
Demonstratives (abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic; their meaning depending on a particular frame ...
s in Ponosakan: (1) 'near speaker (whether or not also near addressee)', (2) 'near addressee (but not speaker)', and (3) or 'far from both speaker and addressee'. Examples of usage:
:
Interrogatives
There are at least 16
interrogative word
An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask a question, such as ''what, which'', ''when'', ''where'', ''who, whom, whose'', ''why'', ''whether'' and ''how''. They are sometimes called wh-words, because in English most o ...
s in Ponosakan. Most of them contain one of the following three roots: , , and . The form by itself means 'what', but this root form can also be found in 'when', 'why', 'how much', and 'how many times'. The form when used in isolation means 'where' (used after verbs only), but this base can also be found in 'where', 'how (manner)', and 'which'. The base is prefixed with case markers for personal names to form personal interrogatives (see table 3): 'who (nominative)', 'who (genitive)', and 'to whom (oblique)'; or, for the plural forms, , , and . The only interrogative word which doesn't show any of the above base forms is 'why'.
Negators
Negation
In logic, negation, also called the logical complement, is an operation that takes a proposition P to another proposition "not P", written \neg P, \mathord P or \overline. It is interpreted intuitively as being true when P is false, and false ...
in Ponosakan is found in several forms. The word 'no' negates verbs, adjectives, existence or location. The word 'don't!' is used to negate commands. The word 'not' negates nouns and equational sentences. There are also which means 'don't like, doesn't like' and which means 'I don't know'.
References
Footnotes
Bibliography
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External links
Ponosakan word list from the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary DatabasePonosakan Talking Dictionary from the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languagescontains 382 separate entries with an audio recording for each of them.
{{Austronesian languages
Gorontalo–Mongondow languages
Languages of Sulawesi