Yuat languages

The Yuat languages are an independent family of five Papuan languages spoken along the Yuat River in East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. They are an independent family in the classification of Malcolm Ross, but are included in Stephen Wurm's Sepik–Ramu proposal. However, Foley and Ross could find no lexical or morphological evidence that they are related to the Sepik or Ramu languages.

Not to be confused with Yuat language (Australia) or Upper Yuat languages.
Yuat
Middle Yuat River
Geographic
distribution		Yuat River area, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea
Linguistic classificationOne of the world's primary language families
Subdivisions
Glottologyuat1252[1]

It is named after the Yuat River of northern Papua New Guinea. Yuat languages spoken mostly in Yuat Rural LLG of East Sepik Province.[2][3]

Languages

The Yuat languages proper are:

Classification

Foley (2018) provides the following classification.[4]

Yuat family

Changriwa and Mekmek are attested only by short words, and are tentatively grouped as separate branches by Foley (2018: 226) due to scanty evidence.

Pronouns

The pronouns Ross (2005) reconstructs for proto-Yuat are:

I*ŋunwe*amba
thou*ndiyou*mba
s/he*wuthey?

Mundukumo and Miyak pronouns are:[4]

personMundukumoMiyak
1sg ŋəŋə
2sg dədə
3sg uu
1excl ini
1incl abəaba
2pl yabe
3pl wavara

Grammar

Yuat languages distinguish inclusive and exclusive first person pronouns, a feature not found in most other Papuan languages. This tyopological feature has also diffused from Yuat into the Grass languages, which are spoken contiguously to the Yuat languages.[4]

Yuat grammar and phonology are similar to those of the neighboring Ramu languages.[4] Yuat verbal morphology is relatively simple.[4]:230

Yuat languages are accusative, unlike many other Papuan languages, e.g., Trans New Guinea, East Cenderawasih Bay, Lakes Plain, South Bougainville, which are all ergative.[5]

Word order in Yuat languages, like in the Yawa languages, is rigidly SOV, whereas in many other Papuan families, OSV word order is often permitted (as long as the verb is final).[5]:920

gollark: * attention
gollark: RNNs with attentions, which is of course ridiculous because attention is all you need.
gollark: Huh, the coral translator thing™ actually does use RNNs and not transformers?
gollark: We may convert you into Cauchy sequences at random.
gollark: In what way?

See also

References
  1. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Yuat". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  2. Eberhard, David M.; Simons, Gary F.; Fennig, Charles D., eds. (2019). "Papua New Guinea languages". Ethnologue: Languages of the World (22nd ed.). Dallas: SIL International.
  3. United Nations in Papua New Guinea (2018). "Papua New Guinea Village Coordinates Lookup". Humanitarian Data Exchange. 1.31.9.
  4. Foley, William A. (2018). "The Languages of the Sepik-Ramu Basin and Environs". 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. 197–432. ISBN 978-3-11-028642-7.
  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.
  • Ross, Malcolm (2005). "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages". In Andrew Pawley; Robert Attenborough; Robin Hide; Jack Golson (eds.). Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pp. 15–66. ISBN 0858835622. OCLC 67292782.
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