Big Nambas ( native name ''V'ənen Taut'') is an

Oceanic language The approximately 450 Oceanic languages are a branch of the Austronesian languages. The area occupied by speakers of these languages includes Polynesia, as well as much of Melanesia and Micronesia. Though covering a vast area, Oceanic languages ...

spoken by about people () in northwest

Malekula Malakula, also spelled Malekula, is the second-largest island in the nation of Vanuatu, formerly the New Hebrides, in Melanesia, a region of the Pacific Ocean. Location Malakula is separated from the islands of Espiritu Santo and Malo by the B ...

Vanuatu Vanuatu ( or ; ), officially the Republic of Vanuatu (; ), is an island country in Melanesia located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago, which is of volcanic origin, is east of northern Australia, northeast of New Caledonia, east o ...

. Approximately nineteen villages in the Big Nambas region of the Malekula Interior use the language exclusively with no variation in dialect. It was studied in-depth over a period of about 10 years by missionary Greg. J. Fox, who published a grammar and dictionary in 1979. A Big Nambas translation of the Bible has been completed recently by Andrew Fox.

Phonology

The

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

s of Big Nambas are as shown in the following table: * are aspirated word finally. is not noted as behaving likewise. * are rounded before the front vowels * The voiced fricatives are devoiced word initially and finally. * is realized as word finally or when adjacent to , and as when adjacent to word medially. Big Nambas has a 5-

vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

system with the following

s: Big Nambas has a complex

syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

structure with a large amount of

consonant clusters In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...

possible. Additionally, clusters of up to four vowels are permitted (e.g. nauei "water"). Stress in Big Nambas is phonemic, but partly predictable. The consonants /t β r l n/ all exhibit phonemic

gemination In phonetics and phonology, gemination (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), or consonant lengthening, is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...

when two identical ones occur between syllables. Linguolabial consonants are often marked with an apostrophe in the

orthography An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national ...

to distinguish them from their bilabial counterparts.

Grammar

Big Nambas is a synthetic, head-marking language.

Nouns

Nouns in Big Nambas are capable of phrasal expansion. There are three noun classes in Big Nambas: # Obligatorily possessed nouns, most commonly constituent parts of any object (body parts, tree parts, ordinals,

possessive A possessive or ktetic form (Glossing abbreviation, abbreviated or ; from ; ) is a word or grammatical construction indicating a relationship of possession (linguistics), possession in a broad sense. This can include strict ownership, or a numbe ...

) # Optionally possessed nouns, with the subclasses: ## Nouns taking the third singular possessives ''nan'' or ''nen'' ## Nouns taking the prefix ''ar-'' "all" ## Title nouns (names and kinship terms) # Unpossessed nouns (personal and interrogative pronouns) Big Nambas features a system of complex nouns, formed by

derivation Derivation may refer to: Language * Morphological derivation, a word-formation process * Parse tree or concrete syntax tree, representing a string's syntax in formal grammars Law * Derivative work, in copyright law * Derivation proceeding, a ...

. Derived nouns can be of one of five types: # Abstract nouns, formed by suffixing -ien to verb stems (e.g. tkar "be pregnant" vs. tkar-ien "pregnancy") # Articled nouns, formed by prefixing na- or n- to a verb stem beginning with a vowel (i-u "it rains" vs. n-u "(the) rain") # Ordinal nouns, formed by prefixing the nominalizer ni- and suffixing the possessive -a (tl "three" vs. ni-tl-a "the third of") # Determinative nouns, formed by prefixing ter- to some adjective stems (p'arei "long" vs. ter-p'arei "the long one") # Reverential nouns, formed by suffixing -et to some nouns (nut "place" vs. nutet "a sacred place", cf. nap' "fire" vs. nep'et "sacred fire") Nouns in Big Nambas may be compounded by following them with a verb stem.

References

Bibliography

External links

V'enen Taut recordings

Video about the language
{{authority control Malekula languages Languages of Vanuatu