Golin language

Golin (also Gollum, Gumine) is a Papuan language of Papua New Guinea.

"Golin" redirects here. For other uses, see Golin (disambiguation).
Golin
RegionGumine District, Simbu Province
Native speakers
(51,000 cited 1981)[1]
Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3gvf
Glottologgoli1247[2]

Phonology

Vowels
Front Back
High ɪ ɪː ʊ ʊː
Mid ɛ ɛː ɔ ɔː
Low ɑ ɑː

Diphthongs that occur are /ɑi ɑu ɔi ui/. The consonants /l n/ can also be syllabic.

Consonant
Bilabial Alveolar Palatal Velar
plain lab. plain Late. plain lab.
Nasal m n
Stop voiceless
/voiced		 p
b
(bʷ)		 t
d		 k
ɡ
(gʷ)
Fricative s~ʃ ɬ~
l
Approximant j w
Trill r

/bʷ ɡʷ/ are treated as single consonants by Bunn & Bunn (1970)[3], but as combinations of /b/ + /w/, /ɡ/ + /w/ by Evans et al. (2005).[4]

Two consonants appear to allow free variation in their realisations: [s] varies with [ʃ], and [l] with [ɬ].

/n/ assimilates to [ŋ] before /k/ and /ɡ/.

Tone

Golin is a tonal language, distinguishing high ([˧˥]), mid ([˨˧]), and low ([˨˩]) tone. The high tone is marked by an acute accent and the low tone by a grave accent, while the mid tone is left unmarked. Examples:[4]

  • High: mú [mu˧˥] 'type of snake'; wí [wi˧˥] 'scream (man)'
  • Mid: mu [mu˨˧] 'type of bamboo'; wi [wi˨˧] 'coming from the same ethnic group'
  • Low: mù [mu˨˩] 'sound of river'; wì [wi˨˩] 'cut (verb)'

Pronouns

Golin is notable for having a small pronominal paradigm. There are two basic pronouns:[5]

  • ná first person
  • í second person

There is no number distinction and no true third person pronoun. In fact, third person pronouns in Golin are in fact compounds derived from ‘man’ plus inín ‘self’:

  • yalíni ‘he’ < yál ‘man’ + inín ‘self’
  • abalíni ‘she’ < abál ‘woman’ + inín ‘self’
gollark: Wow, that is one horrible prebuilt.
gollark: A desktop at one price is *generally* going to be better than a laptop at maybe 1.5x that price at least.
gollark: Well, *most*.
gollark: Better?
gollark: Go desktops!

References
  1. Golin at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Golin". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
    • Bunn, Gordon; Bunn, Ruth (1970). "Golin phonology". Pacific Linguistics A. 23: 1–7.
  4. Evans, Nicholas; Besold, Jutta; Stoakes, Hywel; Lee, Alan (2005). Materials on Golin: Grammar, texts and dictionary. Parkville: The Dept. Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, The University of Melbourne.
  5. Foley, William A. (2018). "The morphosyntactic typology of Papuan languages". In Palmer, Bill (ed.). The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide. The World of Linguistics. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 895–938. ISBN 978-3-11-028642-7.
  • Bunn, Gordon (1974). "Golin grammar". Working Papers in New Guinea Linguistics. 5.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.