Mussau-Emira language

Mussau-Emira
Native to	Papua New Guinea
Region	Islands of Mussau and Emira (New Ireland Province)
Native speakers	5,000 (2003)[1]
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Oceanic St. Matthias Mussau-Emira; ; ; ;
Language codes
ISO 639-3	emi
Glottolog	muss1246[2]

The Mussau-Emira language is spoken on the islands of Mussau and Emirau in the St. Matthias Islands in the Bismarck Archipelago.

Phonology

Phonemes

Consonants

Mussau-Emira distinguishes the following consonants.

	Bilabial	Alveolar	Velar
Nasal	m	n	ŋ
Plosive	p b	t	k ɡ
Fricative		s
Liquid		l r

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Stress

In most words the primary stress falls on the penultimate vowel and secondary stresses fall on every second syllable preceding that. This is true of suffixed forms as well, as in níma 'hand', nimá-gi 'my hand'; níu 'coconut', niyúna 'its coconut'.

Morphology

Pronouns and person markers

Free pronouns

Person	Singular	Plural	Dual	Trial
1st person inclusive		ita	ita lua
1st person exclusive	agi	ami	ami lua
2nd person	io	aŋa	aŋa lua	aŋa tolu
3rd person	ia	ila	ila lua

Subject prefixes

Prefixes mark the subjects of each verb:

(agi) a-namanama 'I'm eating'
(io) u-namanama 'you're (sing.) eating'
(ia) e-namanama 'he's/she's eating'

Sample vocabulary

Numbers

kateba
qalua
kotolu
qaata
qalima
qaonomo
qaitu
qaoalu
qasio
kasagaula

gollark: Also small.

gollark: So now some data will be stored with LZW compression, which is not very *good* but is extremely fast.

gollark: I was implementing compression into potatOS, you see, so it uses less server storage space.

gollark: Great, I have no idea about compatibility but it works now!

gollark: I fear that that's specifically a CC:T thing

References

Mussau-Emira at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Mussau-Emira". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

External links

Kaipuleohone has archived a word list of Mussau language
Materials on Mussau-Emira are included in the open access Arthur Capell (AC1) and Malcolm Ross (MR1) collections held by Paradisec.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.

[e18-1] Mussau-Emira at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)

[Glottolog-2] Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Mussau-Emira". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.