The Mbahaam–Iha languages are a pair of
Papuan languages
The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands in Indonesia, Solomon Islands, and East Timor. It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply ...
spoken on the
Bomberai Peninsula
Bomberai Peninsula () is located in the Western New Guinea region. It is south of the Bird's Head Peninsula, and Bintuni Bay separates the two peninsulas. To the west lies the Sebakor Bay and to the south Kamrau Bay. On the southeast Arguni ...
of western New Guinea.
The two languages,
Baham (Mbaham) and
Iha, are closely related to each other.
Proto-language
Phonemes
Usher (2020) reconstructs the consonant and vowel inventories as:
[New Guinea World, Mbaham–Iha]
/ref>
:
Prenasalized plosives do not occur initially, having merged with the voiceless plosives.
The vowels are *i *u *ɛ *ɔ *a and the diphthongs *iɛ *ɛi.
Pronouns
Usher (2020) reconstructs the free pronouns as:[
:
]
Basic vocabulary
Some lexical reconstructions by Usher (2020) are:[
:
Protoforms of the 20 most-stable items][Holman, Eric W., Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Viveka Velupillai, André Müller, Dik Bakker (2008). "Explorations in Automated Language Classification". Folia Linguistica, Vol. 42, no. 2, 331–354] in the Swadesh list
A Swadesh list () is a compilation of cultural universal, tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. That is, a Swadesh list is a list of forms and concepts which all languages, without exception, have terms for, such as ...
include the following.[
:
]
References
*Usher, Timothy and Antoinette Schapper, 2018. "The lexicons of the Papuan languages of the Onin Peninsula and their influences". In Antoinette Schapper, ed. ''Contact and substrate in the languages of Wallacea'' part 2. NUSA 64: 3963.
External links
* Timothy Usher, New Guinea World
Proto–Mbahaam–Iha
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mbahaam-Iha languages
Languages of Indonesia
West Bomberai languages