East Bird's Head languages
| East Bird's Head | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution: | Papua |
| Linguistic classification: |
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| Subdivisions: |
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| Glottolog: | east1459[1] |
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East Bird's Head languages (in red) | |
The East Bird's Head languages form a language family of three languages in the "Bird's Head Peninsula" of western New Guinea, spoken by only 20,000 people in all.
Stephen Wurm identifies the subdivisions of his Papuan classification as families (on the order of the Germanic languages), stocks (on the order of the Indo-European languages), and phyla (on the order of the Nostratic hypothesis). East Bird's Head is a stock in this terminology. A language that is not related to any other at a family level, such as Greek within Indo-European, will be called an isolate in this scheme.
Classification
East Bird's Head stock (3 languages)
- Mantion (Manikion) isolate
- Meax family: Meax, Meninggo (Moskona)
- ? Saponi (contradictory evidence)
Pronouns
The pronouns Ross reconstructs for the family's proto-language are:
Number Person Singular Plural exclusive inclusive 1st *da, *di- *meme, *me- *mimi, *mi- 2nd *ba, *bi- *ia, *i- 3rd *e, *- *rua, *ri-
See also
References
- ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "East Bird's Head". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
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