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Trans-New Guinea languages

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Trans-New Guinea (TNG) is a hypothetical family of Papuan languages spoken in New Guinea and neighboring islands. There have been three main versions of the proposed family.

Contents

History of the proposal

Although Papuan languages for the most part are poorly documented, several of the branches of Trans-New Guinea have been recognized for some time. The Eleman languages were first proposed by S. Ray in 1907, parts of Marind were recognized by Ray and JHP Murray in 1918, and the Rai Coast languages in 1919, again by Ray.

The original Trans-New Guinea proposal was published in 1970 by C.L. Voorhoeve and Kenneth McElhanon. They noted 91 lexical resemblances between the Finisterre–Huon languages and the Central and South New Guinea languages. Although they did not work out regular sound correspondances, and so could not distinguish between cognates due to genealogical relationship, cognates due to borrowing, and chance resemblances, their research was taken seriously. The name Trans-New Guinea was chosen because this new family was the first to cover large areas of eastern New Guinea.

Then in 1975 Stephen Wurm expanded TNG into an enormous language phylum that covered most of the island of New Guinea, as well as Timor and neighboring islands, and included over 500 languages spoken by some 2 300 000 people. However, part of the evidence for this revision was typological, and Wurm stated that he did not expect it to stand up well to scrutiny. Although he based the phylum on characteristic personal pronouns, several of the branches had no pronouns in common with the rest of the family, or even had pronouns related to non-TNG families, but were included because they were grammatically similar to TNG. Other families which had typical TNG pronouns were excluded because they did not resemble other TNG families in their grammatical structure.

Because grammatical typology is readily borrowed — many of the Austronesian languages in New Guinea have grammatical structures similar to their Papuan neighbors, for example, and conversely many Papuan languages resemble typical Austronesian languages typologically, — later linguists such as William Foley rejected Wurm's results, and broke TNG into its constituent parts: several dozen small but clearly valid families, plus a number of apparent isolates

In 2005 Malcolm Ross published a draft proposal re-evaluating Trans-New Guinea, and found what he believed to be overwhelming evidence for a reduced version of the phylum, based solely on lexical resemblances, which retained as much as 85% of Wurm's hypothesis.

The strongest lexical evidence for any language family is shared morphological paradigms. For example, if the only recorded German words were gut "good" and besser "better", that alone would be enough to demonstrate that in all probability German is related to English. However, because of the great morphological complexity of many Papuan languages, and the poor state of documentation of nearly all, in New Guinea this approach is essentially restricted to comparing pronouns. Ross reconstructed pronouns sets for Foley's basic families and compared these reconstructions, rather than using a direct mass comparison of all Papuan languages; attempted to then reconstruct the ancestral pronouns of the proto-Trans-New Guinea language, such as *ni "we", *ŋgi "you", *i "they"; and then compared poorly supported branches directly to this reconstruction. Families required at least two apparent cognates to be included.

Ross also included in his proposal several better-attested families for non-pronominal evidence, despite a lack of pronouns common to other branches of TNG, and he suggested that there may be other families that would have been included if they had been better attested. Several additional families are only tentatively linked to TNG. Note also that because the boundaries of Ross's proposal is based primarily on a single parameter, pronouns, all internal structure remains tentative.

The languages

Most TNG languages are spoken by only a few thousand people, with only four (Melpa, Enga, Western Dani, and Ekari) being spoken by more than 100 000. The most populous language outside of mainland New Guinea is Makasai in Timor, with 70 000.

The greatest linguistic diversity in Ross's Trans-New Guinea proposal, and therefore perhaps the location of the proto-Trans-New Guinea homeland, is in the interior highlands of Papua New Guinea, in the central-to-eastern New Guinea cordilera. Indonesian Papua and the southeastern peninsula of New Guinea (the "bird's tail") have fewer and more widely extended branches of TNG, and were therefore likely settled by TNG speakers after the protolanguage broke up. Ross speculates that the TNG family may have spread with the high population densities that resulted from the domestication of taro, settling quickly in the highland valleys along the length of the cordilera but spreading much more slowly into the malarial lowlands, and not at all into areas such as the Sepik River valley where the people already had yam agriculture and thus supported high population densities. Ross suggests that TNG may have arrived at its western limit, the islands near Timor, perhaps four to 4.5 thousand years ago, before the expansion of Austronesian into this area.

Classification

Wurm's TNG

An updated version of Wurm's 1975 classification can be found at Ethnologue [here]. Wurm identifies the subdivisions of his Papuan classification as families (on the order of relatedness of the Germanic languages), stocks (on the order of the Indo-European languages), and phyla (on the order of the Afro-Asiatic languages). Trans-New Guinea is a phylum in this terminology. A language that is not related to any other at a family level or below is called an isolate in this scheme.

Ross' TNG

Ross does not use specialized terms for different levels of classification. In the list given here, the uncontroversial families that are accepted by Foley and other Papuanists and which are the building blocks of Ross's TNG are printed in boldface. Language isolates are printed in italics.

Ross removed about 100 languages from Wurm's proposal, and only tentatively retained a few dozen more, but in one instance he added a language, the erstwhile isolate Porome.

Ross did not have sufficient evidence to classify all Papuan groups. In addition, the lower-level classification of a few of the groups illustrated here are taken from Ethnologue, which is based on Wurm.

Trans-New Guinea phylum (Ross 2005)

Wurmian TNG languages left unclassified by Ross

Although Ross based his classification on pronoun systems, many languages in New Guinea are too poorly documented for even this to work. Thus there are several isolates that were placed in TNG by Wurm but which cannot be addressed by Ross's classification.

Wurmian TNG languages moved to other families by Ross

Ross removed 95 languages from TNG. These are small families with no pronouns in common with TNG languages, but which are typologically similar, perhaps due to long periods of contact with TNG languages.

Pronouns

Ross reconstructs the following pronominal paradigm for Trans-New Guinea, with *a~*i ablaut for singular~non-singular:

I *na we *ni
thou *ga you *gi
s/he *(y)a, *ua they *i

There is a related but less commonly attested form for 'we', *nu, as well as a *ja for 'you', which Ross speculates may have been a polite form. In addition, there were dual suffixes *-li and *-t, and a plural suffix *-nV, as well collective number suffixes *-pi- (dual) and *-m- (plural) which functioned as inclusive we when used in the first person. (Reflexes of the collective suffixes, however, are limited geographically to the central and eastern highlands, and so might not be as old as proto-Trans New Guinea.)

See also

Reference

  • Malcom Ross (2005). "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages." In: Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Robin Hide and Jack Golson, eds, Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples, 15-66. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
  • Pawley, Andrew (1998). "The Trans New Guinea Phylum hypothesis: A reassessment." In: Jelle Miedema, Cecilia Odé and Rien A.C. Dam, eds, Perspectives on the Bird's Head of Irian Jaya, Indonesia, 655-90. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

 

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