The South Babar languages of Southwest Maluku

The Southwest Maluku Regency (Kabupaten Maluku Barat Daya, traditionally also known as "Tenggara Jauh") is located between Timor Island to the west and the Tanimbar Islands to the east, and comprises a number of small islands and island groups, with a population of around 70.000. The largest island is Babar with an area of approximately 800 km², and which is the eastern-most island in Southwest Maluku.

On Babar island and the smaller neighboring Masela island, we can find a subgroup of the Austronesian language family which is highly innovative with respect to its phonological history. This group was called South Babar by Mark Taber in his survey of the languages of Southwestern Maluku ("Toward a Better Understanding of the Indigenous Languages of Southwestern Maluku." Oceanic Linguistics, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 389-441. University of Hawai'i); this term is also used in the Ethnologue.

Seven South Babar lects are documented by Taber, which can grouped into three branches:

a. Central Masela
b. Masela-Southeast Babar
East Masela
Serili
SE Babar
c. Southwest Babar
Emplawas
Tela-Masbuar
Imroing

Taber included Central Masela in his "Masela-SE Babar Cluster". Because of several differences in phonological history, Central Masela is better put into a branch of its own.

The sound changes in this subgroup are quite far-reaching, leading to hardly recognizable reflexes of Proto Austronesian etyma. Examples from Emplawas, the most innovative South Babar language, shall illustrate this:

*hangin
*tələn
*daləm
*anak
*hikan
*maRi
*manipis

> usi-e
> kes-e
> rap-e
> un-e
> il-e
> pe-e
> pilit-i

Although it is not obvious at all at the first sight, each of the Emplawas reflexes here is the result of regular and predicatable sound change.

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Valency changing morphology in Miluk

The dynamic passive

The dynamic passive has two forms, the u-passive and the m-passive. Both are agent-suppressing passives, i.e. the agent cannot be explicitly expressed in the clause, whereas the object is promoted to the role of the single intranstive subject. Pragmatically, it is mostly used to express the action of a backgrounded plural actor (usually recoverable from context) on a foreground participant.


Read more at page: http://ezlinguistics.blogspot.de/p/valency-changing.html