Monday 28 April 2014

Miluk transitive verb morphology

Hierarchical marking

The system of case-role marking in Miluk has two levels. On the clause level, noun phrases have an ergative pattern of case marking, as we have seen in Section 3. However, at the level of morphological marking on the verb interacting with the enclitic person markers, Miluk displays a direct-inverse system, quite similar to the one found in Algonquian languages.

The basic theorectical framework of the direct-inverse system is described in Doty's dissertation, so I will concentrate on the mophological features here. The core system is made up of four categories:


Local:


Inverse:



Direct:
First person acting on second person:
Second person acting on first person:

Third person acting on first/second person:



First/second/third person acting on third person:
-ām̓i
-ai

-ūn
-īn
-ət

-a1-, -ā1-
-a2-, -ā2-
-a


Read more at page: http://ezlinguistics.blogspot.de/p/miluk-transitive.html


Tuesday 22 April 2014

The Mendawai language of Central Kalimantan

The term Mendawai refers to an ethnic group and their language which is located in the town of Pangkalanbun. Pangkalanbun is the administrative center of kabupaten Kotawaringin Barat (Central Kalimantan) and was the seat of court of the Kotawaringin kingdom. The Mendawai community is Muslim, like their Malay neighbors, but culturally they see their roots with the Dayak people.

The Mendawai language has received little attention so far in linguistic research. Not only Mendawai, but many other closely related lects (e.g. Pembuang) have been simply overlooked, or subsumed as variants of the dominant local Malayic langauges. Although Mendawai is heavily influenced lexically by Banjar and other Malayic lects, its basic fundament is clearly non-Malayic, and rather related to Ngaju, Bakumpai and other Dayak languages of the southern branch of the so-called "West Barito" subgroup of Austronesian languages.

The strong influence of Banjar is seen in such basic expressions such as kuman nasi "eat rice" and mihup banyu "drink water". The verbs kuman and mihup are also found in Ngaju etc., whereas the nouns nasi and banyu are of Banjar origin.

Ngaju
kuman bari
mihop danum
Mendawai
kuman nasi
mihup banyu
Banjar
makan nasi
minum banyu

"eat rice"
"drink water"


In spite of the strong lexical impact of Banjar on Mendawai, it is basically unintelligible to Banjar speakers. Even for Ngaju speakers, many of which also speak Banjar as a language of wider regional communication, Mendawai is barely intelligible, since some of the basic vocabulary including functors are completely different.

The following examples shall give an impression of some distinct features of Mendawai:

Ngaju
tege
jatun
dia
narai
mbuhen
intu kueh
kan kueh
hai
hanjewu
mamili
i-
-ah
Mendawai
ada
mida
humbui
e'en
emen
ting isen
ji isen
datuh
susung
mengkiri
nye-
-ya

"there is"
"there is not"
"not"
"what"
"why"
"where"
"where to"
"big"
"morning"
"buy"
passive prefix
third person possessive


The sentence E'en yang nyengkiriya te? ("What did she buy?") is completely incomprehensible to Ngaju speakers, cf. the corresponding sentence in Ngaju: Narai je mili ah te?

Several of these features are not restricted to Mendawai, but are also found in closely related Pembuang (spoken in the neighbouring kabupaten Seruyan), such as mida, humbui, e'en or -ya.

A particular phonetic feature is the weakening of the vowel /a/ to [ə] in antepenult syllable, which can be attributed to the influence of the local, coastal variant of Malay. Mendawai thus has i.e. mənduan "take" where all other related lects from Pembuang to Ngaju have manduan.

[TO BE CONTINUED]