Titan, also known as Manus, is an
East Manus language of the
Austronesian language family
The Austronesian languages ( ) are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan (by Taiwanese indigenous peoples). They are spoken b ...
spoken in the southeastern part of
Manus Island
Manus Island is part of Manus Province in northern Papua New Guinea and is the largest of the Admiralty Islands. It is the fifth-largest island in Papua New Guinea, with an area of , measuring around . Manus Island is covered in rugged jungles w ...
,
New Guinea
New Guinea (; Hiri Motu: ''Niu Gini''; , fossilized , also known as Papua or historically ) is the List of islands by area, world's second-largest island, with an area of . Located in Melanesia in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is ...
, and neighboring islands by about 4,000 people.
Titan has a
bilabial trill
The voiced bilabial trill is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the sound is , a small capital version of the Latin letter b, and the equivalent X-SAMPA ...
and
prenasalized consonant
Prenasalized consonants are phonetic sequences of a nasal and an obstruent (or occasionally a non-nasal sonorant) that behave phonologically like single consonants. The primary reason for considering them to be single consonants, rather than ...
s, as in 'girls' and 'wooden plate'.
Phonology
Phonology of the Titan language:
Consonant sounds in parentheses are only inferred to exist in Titan, or to exist in other dialects of Titan.
An /e/ sound may also be interchangeable with an open-mid sound /ɛ/.
References
Further reading
* Bowern, Claire (2011). ''Sivisa Titan: Sketch grammar, texts, vocabulary based on material collected by P. Josef Meier and Po Minis.'' Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication No. 38. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
* Ladefoged, Peter (2005). ''Vowels and Consonants'' (2nd ed.) Blackwell.
External links
*
Kaipuleohone Kaipuleohone is a digital ethnographic archive that houses audio and visual files, photographs, as well as hundreds of textual material such as notes, dictionaries, and transcriptions relating to small and endangered languages. The archive is stored ...
's collection of
Robert Blust
Robert A. Blust (; zh, c=白樂思, p=Bái Lèsī; 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 Uni ...
's field materials include
audio recordings and
written materials for Titan
*
Paradisec ha
a number of collections with Titan language materials
Manus languages
Languages of Manus Province
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