Yareban languages

The Yareban or Musa River languages are a small family of Trans–New Guinea languages spoken near the Musa River in the "Bird's Tail" (southeastern peninsula) of New Guinea. They are classified within the Southeast Papuan branch of Trans–New Guinea.

Yareban
Musa River
Geographic
distribution		Southeastern peninsula of Papua New Guinea:
Oro Province
Linguistic classificationTrans–New Guinea
  • Papuan Peninsula
    • Owen Stanley Range[1]
      • Mailu–Yareban
        • Yareban
Glottologyare1250[2]

Phonemes

Usher (2020) reconstructs the consonant inventory as follows:[3]

*m*n
*pʰ*tʰ[*s]*kʰ*ʔ
*b*d[*dz][*g]
*w*ɾ*j

*s and *dz were acquired through loans, but may have already been present in the protolanguage. *ʔ and *g may have been allophones.

Vowels are *a *e *i *o *u.

Pronouns

Usher (2020) reconstructs the pronouns as:[3]

sgdupl
1excl *na*ewa
1incl *uwa*i[j]a
2 *a*ja
3 *dawa*ema(wa)

Languages

The languages are,

Barijian is suggested by lexicostatistics in Dutton (1971).

The only pronouns which are known in enough languages to reconstruct are na 1sg and a 2sg, which are common to all Yareban languages.

Evolution

Yareban reflexes of proto-Trans-New Guinea (pTNG) etyma are:[4]

Yareba language:

  • ama ‘breast’ < *amu
  • uyau ‘cassowary’ < *ku(y)a
  • rarara ‘dry’ < *(ŋg,k)atata
  • baba ‘father’ < *mbapa
  • iji ‘hair’ < *iti[C]
  • ifu ‘name’ < *imbi
  • kofiti ‘head’ < *kV(mb,p)(i,u)tu
  • ogo ‘water’ < *ok[V]
  • eme ‘man’ < *ambi

Abia language:

  • amai ‘mother’ < *am(a,i)
  • sagai ‘sand’ < *sa(ŋg,k)asiŋ

References
  1. New Guinea World, Owen Stanley Range
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Yareban". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. New Guinea World, Musa River
  4. Pawley, Andrew; Hammarström, Harald (2018). "The Trans New Guinea family". In Palmer, Bill (ed.). The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide. The World of Linguistics. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 21–196. ISBN 978-3-11-028642-7.
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