Tayap (also spelled Taiap; called Gapun in earlier literature, after the name of the village in which it is spoken) is an
endangered
An endangered species is a species that is very likely to become extinct in the near future, either worldwide or in a particular political jurisdiction. Endangered species may be at risk due to factors such as habitat loss, poaching and inva ...
Papuan language spoken by fewer than 50 people in
Gapun
Gapun is a village in Marienberg Rural LLG, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, located near the mouth of the Sepik River. The language isolate Tayap is traditionally spoken in Gapun by the Tayap people. Gapun village is the sole Tayap settlem ...
village of
Marienberg Rural LLG
Marienberg Rural LLG (also Marienberg Hills Rural LLG) is a local-level government (LLG) of East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. The Marienberg languages are spoken in this LLG, as well as various Lower Sepik-Ramu languages and the isolate Ta ...
in
East Sepik Province
East Sepik is a province in Papua New Guinea. Its capital is Wewak. East Sepik has an estimated population of 433,481 people (2010 census) and is 43,426 km square in size.
History
Cherubim Dambui was appointed as East Sepik's first premier ...
,
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 ...
(, located just to the south of the
Sepik River
The Sepik () is the longest river on the island of New Guinea, and the second largest in Oceania by discharge volume after the Fly River. The majority of the river flows through the Papua New Guinea (PNG) provinces of Sandaun (formerly West Sepi ...
mouth near the coast).
It is being replaced by the national language and
lingua franca
A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups ...
Tok Pisin
Tok Pisin (,Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student’s Handbook'', Edinburgh ; Tok Pisin ), often referred to by English speakers as "New Guinea Pidgin" or simply Pidgin, is a creole language spoken throughout Papua New Guinea. It is an ...
.
History
The first European to describe Tayap was , a German missionary-linguist, in 1937. Höltker spent three hours in the village and collected a word list of 125 words, which he published in 1938. He wrote that “it will be awhile before any other researcher ‘stumbles across’ Gapun, if only because of the small chances of worthwhile academic yields in this tiny village community, and also because of the inconvenient and arduous route leading to this linguistic island”.
Höltker's list was all that was known about Tayap in literature until the early 1970s, when the Australian linguist
Donald Laycock
Donald Laycock (1936–1988) was an Australian linguist and anthropologist. He is best remembered for his work on the languages of Papua New Guinea.
Biography
He was a graduate of University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia and later ...
travelled around the lower Sepik to collect basic vocabulary lists that allowed him to identify and propose classifications of the many languages spoken there. Tayap and its speakers have been extensively studied by linguistic anthropologist
Don Kulick
Don Kulick (born 5 September 1960) is professor of anthropology at Uppsala University in Sweden. Kulick works within the frameworks of both cultural and linguistic anthropology, and has carried out field work in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Italy and ...
since the mid-1980s. The language is described in detail in ''Tayap Grammar and Dictionary: The Life and Death of a Papuan Language'' and in ''A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea''.
Until World War II, when Japanese soldiers occupied the area and caused the villagers to flee into the rainforest,
Gapun
Gapun is a village in Marienberg Rural LLG, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, located near the mouth of the Sepik River. The language isolate Tayap is traditionally spoken in Gapun by the Tayap people. Gapun village is the sole Tayap settlem ...
was located on a hill that several thousand years earlier had been an island in the sea that receded and formed the lower Sepik River. This indicates that Tayap may be the descendant of an ancient, autochthonous language that was already in place before the various waves of migration from the inland to the coast began occurring thousands of years ago. Foley (2018) also speculates that Tayap could have been part of a larger language family that was spoken on the island before the arrival of Lower Sepik speakers. As the coastline moved further northeast, Lower Sepik speakers migrated from the foothills into the new land areas created by the receding waters.
Sociolinguistics
Up to 2018,
Gapun
Gapun is a village in Marienberg Rural LLG, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, located near the mouth of the Sepik River. The language isolate Tayap is traditionally spoken in Gapun by the Tayap people. Gapun village is the sole Tayap settlem ...
was the only village where Tayap is spoken, although some speakers of the language also lived in neighboring villages such as Wongan and Watam, having moved there because of marriage or as a result of conflicts over land or sorcery in Gapun. However, in 2018, Gapun village was burned down and abandoned due to violence among households. The former residents fled to the nearby villages of Wongan (), Watam (), and Boroi.
As a result of colonial activity, Gapun villagers subconsciously associate Tok Pisin with Christianity, modernity and masculinity, and they associate Tayap with paganism, "backwardness" , disruptive femininity and childish stubbornness. As a result, Tayap is being increasingly, but neither consciously nor deliberately, replaced by
Tok Pisin
Tok Pisin (,Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student’s Handbook'', Edinburgh ; Tok Pisin ), often referred to by English speakers as "New Guinea Pidgin" or simply Pidgin, is a creole language spoken throughout Papua New Guinea. It is an ...
,
even though the villagers all express positive sentiments towards it and insist that they want their children to speak the language. Villagers express bewilderment towards the fact that their children no longer actively speak Tayap, and believe that they have, out of stubbornness, decided to reject Tayap entirely, and that they have chosen to speak Tok Pisin instead.
Unlike the neighboring patrilineal
Lower Sepik-Ramu
Lower may refer to:
*Lower (surname)
*Lower Township, New Jersey
*Lower Receiver (firearms)
*Lower Wick
Lower Wick is a small hamlet located in the county of Gloucestershire, England. It is situated about five miles south west of Dursley, eight ...
speakers, Tayap speakers are matrilineal.
Tayap is typologically very different from the neighboring Lower Sepik-Ramu languages.
Tayap also has many loanwords from the
Kopar and
Adjora languages.
Classification
Tayap is not related to the neighboring Lower Sepik languages, though a relationship to the more distant
Torricelli family has been proposed by Usher (2020).
[New Guinea World – Taiap](_blank)
/ref>
In the 1970s Australian linguist Donald Laycock
Donald Laycock (1936–1988) was an Australian linguist and anthropologist. He is best remembered for his work on the languages of Papua New Guinea.
Biography
He was a graduate of University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia and later ...
classified Tayap (which he called "Gapun
Gapun is a village in Marienberg Rural LLG, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, located near the mouth of the Sepik River. The language isolate Tayap is traditionally spoken in Gapun by the Tayap people. Gapun village is the sole Tayap settlem ...
") as a sub-phylum of the Sepik-Ramu language phylum, on the basis of Georg Höltker's 1938 word list and a few verb paradigms that Laycock gathered from two speakers.
Kulick and Terrill (2019) found no evidence that Tayap is related to the Lower Sepik languages, another branch of the erstwhile Sepik-Ramu phylum. They conclude that Tayap is a language isolate
Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The num ...
, though they do not compare it to other language families, as would be required to establish Tayap as an independent language family. Comparative vocabulary demonstrates the lexical aberrancy of Tayap as compared to the surrounding Lower Sepik languages: e.g. ''sene'' 'two' (cf. proto-Lower Sepik *ri-pa-), ''neke'' 'ear' (*kwand-), ''ŋgino'' 'eye' (*tambri), ''tar'' 'hear' (*and-), ''min'' 'breast' (*nɨŋgay), ''nɨŋg'' 'bone' (*sariŋamp), ''malɨt'' 'tongue' (*minɨŋ), ''mayar'' 'leaf' (*nɨmpramp) among the Holman ''et al.'' (2008) ranking of the Swadesh list
The Swadesh list ("Swadesh" is pronounced ) is a classic compilation of tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. Translations of the Swadesh list into a set of languages allow researchers to quantify the interrelatedness ...
. Cultural vocabulary such as 'village', 'canoe', 'oar', and 'lime', as well as the basic words ''awin'' 'water' (cf. *arɨm) and ''a'' 'eat' (cf. *am ~ *amb), may be shared with Lower Sepik languages. The word ''karep'' 'moon' is shared specifically with Kopar (''karep''). However, most basic vocabulary items have no apparent cognates in surrounding languages.
Phonology
Pronouns
Tayap pronouns are:
:
Grammar
Like many Sepik languages, Tayap is a synthetic language
A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express Syntax, syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the ...
. Verbs are the most elaborated area of the grammar. They are complex, fusional
Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features.
For e ...
and massively suppletive In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even ...
, with opaque verbal morphology including unpredictable conjugation class, both in terms of membership and formal marking.
Tayap distinguishes between realis
A realis mood (abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood which is used principally to indicate that something is a statement of fact; in other words, to express what the speaker considers to be a known state of affairs, as in declarative sentences. Mos ...
and irrealis
In linguistics, irrealis moods (abbreviated ) are the main set of grammatical moods that indicate that a certain situation or action is not known to have happened at the moment the speaker is talking. This contrasts with the realis moods.
Every ...
stems and suffixes. Verbal suffixes distinguish between Subject/Agent (S/A) and Object (O), which is marked by discontinuous morphemes in some conjugations. The ergative case
In grammar, the ergative case (abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that identifies the noun as the agent of a transitive verb in ergative–absolutive languages.
Characteristics
In such languages, the ergative case is typically marked (most ...
(A) is marked by free pronouns and noun phrases, while the absolutive
In grammar, the absolutive case (abbreviated ) is the case of nouns in ergative–absolutive languages that would generally be the subjects of intransitive verbs or the objects of transitive verbs in the translational equivalents of nominative– ...
(S/O) does not have marked forms. As in many ergative Papuan languages, the ergative marker is not always included, as it is optional.
Nouns
Nouns generally do not mark number themselves, although there is a small class of largely human nouns which mark plural, and a smaller class which mark 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 ...
. These categories, where marked, are largely marked by partial or full suppletion. Oblique case
In grammar, an oblique (abbreviated ; from la, casus obliquus) or objective case (abbr. ) is a nominal case other than the nominative case, and sometimes, the vocative.
A noun or pronoun in the oblique case can generally appear in any role exc ...
s, largely local, are marked by 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 attached to the end of the oblique noun phrase
In linguistics, a noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently oc ...
.
Gender
Like many languages of the Sepik
The Sepik () is the longest river on the island of New Guinea, and the second largest in Oceania by discharge volume after the Fly River. The majority of the river flows through the Papua New Guinea (PNG) provinces of Sandaun (formerly West Sepi ...
-Ramu
The Ramu River is a major river in northern Papua New Guinea. The headwaters of the river are formed in the Kratke Range from where it then travels about northwest to the Bismarck Sea.
Along the Ramu's course, it receives numerous tributaries ...
basin (particularly the Sepik languages
The Sepik or Sepik River languages are a family of some 50 Papuan languages spoken in the Sepik river basin of northern Papua New Guinea, proposed by Donald Laycock in 1965 in a somewhat more limited form than presented here. They tend to have ...
), Tayap has masculine and feminine genders.
There are two genders, masculine and feminine, marked not on the noun itself but on 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, the ergative marker, suppletive verbal stems and verbal affixes. The unmarked, generic form of all nouns, including animate nouns, even humans, is feminine: however, a male referent may be masculine. Another criterion is size and shape: long, thin and large referents tend to be masculine; short, stocky and small referents tend to be feminine. This type of gender-assignment system is typical of the Sepik region. Gender is only ever marked in the singular, never in the dual or plural.
Lexicon
Selected Tayap words from :
Vertebrates
:
Invertebrates
:
Sago-related vocabulary
:
In Tayap, a felled sago palm
Sago palm is a common name for several plants which are used to produce a starchy food known as sago. Sago palms may be "true palms" in the family Arecaceae, or cycads with a palm-like appearance. Sago produced from cycads must be detoxified before ...
tree can be divided into 7 parts. The Tayap names are listed below, from the base (''wot'') to the crown (''mar'').
*''wot''
*''wotŋa orom''
*''orom''
*''ndagŋa orom''
*''ndag''
*''marŋa orom''
*''mar''
The word ''orom'' means ‘in the vicinity of’.
Clan names
There are five Tayap clans:
:
See also
* Linguistic anthropology#Identity and intersubjectivity
*Gapun
Gapun is a village in Marienberg Rural LLG, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, located near the mouth of the Sepik River. The language isolate Tayap is traditionally spoken in Gapun by the Tayap people. Gapun village is the sole Tayap settlem ...
*Don Kulick
Don Kulick (born 5 September 1960) is professor of anthropology at Uppsala University in Sweden. Kulick works within the frameworks of both cultural and linguistic anthropology, and has carried out field work in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Italy and ...
Notes
References
*
*
*
*
*
*
{{language families
Endangered Papuan languages
Sepik Coast languages
Languages of East Sepik Province
Language isolates of New Guinea