Monday 16 June 2014

West Damar and the Dawe-Damar subgroup of Southwest Maluku

The West Damar language is spoken in the village of Batumerah on Damar Island, which is part of the Barat Daya island chain in Southwest Maluku. There are two sources for West Damar: Taber (1993) and Chlenova & Chlenov (2006).

In Taber's lexico-statistical classification of the Southwest Maluku languages, West Damar appears as an isolate, neither related to his version of a Southwest Maluku soubgroup, nor to the Babar subgroup. In a paper on the genetic affiliation of West Damar, Van Engelenhoven (2010) identified the Babar languages as the closest relatives of West Damar, mainly based on the following shared consonant reflexes: PMP *z > h, *s > d. Starting from this initial hypothesis, I will provide evidence here for the closest link of West Damar within the Babar languages, viz. with Dai and Dawera-Daweloor. These languages are spoken on three small islands located to the north of Babar. The subgroup comprising West Damar, Dai and Dawera-Daweloor will be called "Dawe-Damar" here. The main source for Dawera-Daweloor is Chlenova (2002). Taber (1993) contains data for Dai and Dawera-Daweloor.

Read more at page: http://ezlinguistics.blogspot.de/p/the-dawe-damar.html