Social:Yareban languages

From HandWiki
Yareban
Musa River
Geographic
distribution
Southeastern peninsula of Papua New Guinea:
Oro Province
Linguistic classificationTrans–New Guinea
  • Papuan Peninsula
    • Owen Stanley Range[1]
      • Mailu–Yereban
        • Yareban
Glottologyare1250[2]

The Yareban languages are a small family of Trans–New Guinea languages spoken in the "Bird's Tail" (southeastern peninsula) of New Guinea. They are sometimes included in a speculative Southeast Papuan branch of Trans–New Guinea (TNG), but the Southeast Papuan families have not been shown to be any more closely related to each other than they are to other TNG families.

Languages

The languages are,

  • Moikodi (Doriri)
  • Aneme Wake (Abia)
  • Barijian: Bariji, Nawaru (Sirio)
  • Yareba

Barijian is suggested by lexicostatistics in Dutton (1971).

The only pronouns which are known in enough languages to reconstruct are na 1sg and a 2sg, which are common to all Yareban languages.

Evolution

Yareban reflexes of proto-Trans-New Guinea (pTNG) etyma are:[3]

Yareba language:

  • ama ‘breast’ < *amu
  • uyaucassowary’ < *ku(y)a
  • rarara ‘dry’ < *(ŋg,k)atata
  • baba ‘father’ < *mbapa
  • iji ‘hair’ < *iti[C]
  • ifu ‘name’ < *imbi
  • kofiti ‘head’ < *kV(mb,p)(i,u)tu
  • ogo ‘water’ < *ok[V]
  • eme ‘man’ < *ambi

Abia language:

  • amai ‘mother’ < *am(a,i)
  • sagai ‘sand’ < *sa(ŋg,k)asiŋ

References

  1. New Guinea World, Owen Stanley Range
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds (2017). "Yareban". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/yare1250. 
  3. Pawley, Andrew; Hammarström, Harald (2018). "The Trans New Guinea family". in Palmer, Bill. The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide. The World of Linguistics. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 21-196. ISBN 978-3-11-028642-7. 
  • Ross, Malcolm (2005). "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages". in Andrew Pawley. Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pp. 15–66. ISBN 0858835622. OCLC 67292782.