Tami is an
Austronesian language on the Tami Islands and in a few villages at the tip of the
Huon Peninsula
Huon Peninsula is a large rugged peninsula on the island of New Guinea in Morobe Province, eastern Papua New Guinea. It is named after French explorer Jean-Michel Huon de Kermadec. The peninsula is dominated by the steep Saruwaged and Finisterr ...
in
Morobe Province
Morobe Province is a province on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea. The provincial capital and largest city is Lae. The province covers 33,705 km2, with a population of 674,810 (2011 census), and since the division of Southern Highlands ...
,
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 ...
. It is not closely related to the other
Huon Gulf languages
The Huon Gulf languages are Western Oceanic languages spoken primarily in Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea. They may form a group of the North New Guinea languages, perhaps within the Ngero–Vitiaz branch of that family.
Unusually for Oceani ...
, but like other
North New Guinea languages
The North New Guinea languages of Papua New Guinea and Indonesia form a possible linkage of Western Oceanic languages. They have been in heavy contact with Papuan languages.
Classification
According to Lynch, Ross, & Crowley (2002), the struct ...
in Morobe Province, its basic
word order
In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...
is SVO.
Phonology
Tami distinguishes five vowels (i, e, a, o, u) and the following consonants (Colich 1995). Voiced obstruents do not occur in syllable-final position, while glottal stop only occurs at the end of a syllable.
Numerals
Traditional Tami counting practices begin with the fingers of the hands, then continue on the feet to reach twenty, which translates as 'whole person'. Higher numbers are multiples of 'whole person'. Nowadays, most counting above five is done in Tok Pisin. An alternate form of the numeral one, , functions as an indefinite article. Distributive numerals are formed via
reduplication: 'two by two', 'three by three' and so forth (Bamler 1900:204).
References
* Bamler, G. (1900). 5: 198–253.
* Colich, Kim (1995). Tami organized phonology data. Ukarumpa: SIL.
External links
* Paradisec has two collections of
Arthur Cappell's materials
AC1AC2
and one collection of Malcolm Ross's
MR1
that include Sobei language materials.
Footnotes
Ngero–Vitiaz languages
Languages of Morobe Province
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