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.

Read more at page: http://ezlinguistics.blogspot.de/p/south-babar.html

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

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

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]

Miluk morphology

Post moved to page: http://ezlinguistics.blogspot.de/p/miluk-morphology.html

Focus and relative clauses in Miluk

Post moved to page: http://ezlinguistics.blogspot.de/p/focus-relative-clause.html

Miluk sounds

Post moved to page: http://ezlinguistics.blogspot.de/p/1-phonology.html

Miluk basic phrase and clause structure

Post moved to page: http://ezlinguistics.blogspot.de/p/phrase-clause-structure.html

I'm back...

Austronesian languages...linguistics in general...these were the things I had chosen at some time of my life to become the focus of my activities, trying to pursue an academic career in the fields of Southeast Asian Studies and Linguistics. After having attended several conferences, published two articles, and experienced the support and encouragement of Prof. Dr. Bernd Nothofer of Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität to whom I will be eternally grateful, and after having great and inspiring encounters and discussions with eminent scholars of the field - yet, my life took a different turn and I had to postpone my studies and ended up in an admittedly tedious but still challenging job quite outside of my field, which left me with little time to pursue my initial dreams, and left the world with an embarassing reference (Zobel, Erik. A comparative study of Austronesian verb morphology and syntax, dissertation-in-very-slow-progress-if-any-at-all).

That was in 2002, and ever since I have had little contact with my fellow Austronesianists. But in my leisure time, I still have found the opportunity to glean over my notes and drafts, to work on my material collected in earlier fieldwork, and to work on published data from other scholars. With the help of the internet and social media, I have even been able to gather new material from several languages of Indonesia, some of them not or little documented. Nothing of the material has been fully brushed up to a full-blown paper, but is scattered on several files on my old and weary PC.

But now, to cite a Keane song, "I'm getting tired and I need somewhere to begin...". So therefore, hoping (modesty aside) that my thoughts might be of interest for specialists in the field or maybe even for a broader audience, I have eventually decided to share the humble results of my ongoing private research in a non-academic format, after a hiatus of so many years.

Next to work on Austronesian languages, this blog will also present my thoughts on some Native American languages on which I have done some philological research. Serious comments are welcome.

BTW...This is my first attempt at web publishing, so I am still fighting with trivial things such as formatting. As you say in Indonesian...dimaklumin yaaa :)

My encounter with Miluk Coos

For many years, and initially somehow by mere chance, I have been fascinated by the Native American languages of the Pacific Northwest. Being so completely different from the Austronesian languages which have been "my life" for so many years, I felt a real challenge of approaching a world of ejective stops, voiceless laterals and vowel-less roots, literally twisting my Austronesian tongue. One particular language captured my attention, viz. Miluk Coos (or Miluk), since it was quite well-documented by a good number of texts collected by the linguist-anthropologist Melville Jacobs, and at the same time had not been subject to any detailed descriptive research, at least by 2008 when I started studying the Melville corpus (Coos Narrative and Ethnographic Texts / Coos Myth Texts, University of Washington Publications in Anthropology, vol. 8. Seattle, WA: The University of Washington).

Miluk was spoken by a relatively small ethnic group living along the Coquille river and at Coos Bay in Oregon, in close contact with Hanis Coos speakers and ethnic groups speaking Athabascan languages. Miluk quicky vanished as a spoken language in the first half of the 20th century, due to the turmoil of displacement as a result of the genocidal relocation policy of the US government and army in the late 19th century. It is Jacobs' great merit of describing the loss not just of a language, but of a complete culture, with apparent empathy, which is a particular trait also felt in his text collections from other Native American languages.

Genetically, Miluk Coos has long been grouped together with Hanis Coos as one of the two Coosan languages, mostly based on a large number of lexical agreements. Within the framework of the larger classification schemes of Native American languages, Coosan is placed together with Alsea and Siuslaw in the Coast Oregon branch of Penutian. The Penutian hypothesis, which groups together a number of languages and language groups along the American West Coast, is still disputed, and the inclusion of Miluk Coos within Penutian is at best speculative at the current stage.

Only recently, I stumbled across the 2012 dissertation by Christopher S. Doty on the genetic relation of Miluk (http://www.csdoty.com/resources/Doty-Dissertation.pdf). I read it with great excitement: in the first place to see how far Doty's analysis would agree or differ with mine, but also with an anxious feeling that the results of my amateur research might simply become obsolete in the light of a full treatment by an academic scholar. As a matter of fact, Doty's dissertation gives an excellent first impression of Miluk structure, with many features for the first time being correctly decribed. Yet, there are several points where I still believe the I can contribute to a better understanding of Miluk grammar, even by using this non-academic platform to distribute my results.

In this blog, I want to present my research results on Miluk as a work in progress, focussing on several aspects of phonology, morphology and syntax. Hopefully and if time allows, I will later be able to arrange my material in a format that is appropriate to appear as an article in a peer-revised journal. But even before that stage, I hope that my small pieces presented here nevertheless will be of interest to fellow linguists.


Next: Phonology >>