Yessan-Mayo (also known as Yesan, Mayo, and natively known as Yamano
) is a
Papuan language
The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian and non-Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. It is a strictly geogra ...
spoken by 2000 people in
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 spoken in Maio () and Yessan () villages of Yessan ward,
Ambunti Rural LLG,
East Sepik Province.
Phonology
The phonology of Yessan-Mayo is described in Foley (2018)
as such:
Vowels
Consonants
Pronouns
Foreman (1974)
describes two kinds of pronouns in Yessan-Mayo: non-emphatic and
emphatic pronoun An intensive pronoun (or self-intensifier) adds emphasis to a statement; for example, "I did it ''myself''." While English intensive pronouns (e.g., ''myself'', ''yourself'', ''himself, herself'', ''ourselves'', ''yourselves'', ''themselves'') use t ...
s.
In addition to the non-emphatic pronouns, there is also the
reflexive pronoun ''kwarara'' (self), as well as the
demonstrative pronouns ''op'' (this) and ''otop'' (that).
Non-emphatic
Emphatic
External links
*
Paradisec
The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) is a cross-institutional project that supports work on endangered languages and cultures of the Pacific and the region around Australia. They digitise reel-to ...
has a collection of
Don Laycock's
DL2 that includes Yessan-Mayo language materials.
References
Tama languages
Languages of East Sepik Province
Languages of Sandaun Province
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