Huon Gulf | |
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Geographic distribution | Papua New Guinea |
Linguistic classification | Austronesian |
Proto-language | Proto-Huon Gulf |
Subdivisions | |
Glottolog | huon1245 |
The Huon Gulf languages are Western Oceanic languages spoken primarily in Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea. They may form a group of the North New Guinea languages, perhaps within the Ngero–Vitiaz branch of that family.[citation needed]
Unusually for Oceanic languages, two North Huon Gulf languages, Bukawa and Yabem, are tonal. The only other tonal Oceanic languages are found in New Caledonia.[1]
According to Lynch, Ross, & Crowley (2002), the structure of the family is as follows:[2]
Proto-Huon Gulf | |
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Reconstruction of | Huon Gulf languages |
Reconstructed ancestors | |
Lower-order reconstructions |
Proto-Huon Gulf was reconstructed by Malcolm Ross in 1988 in Proto-Oceanic and the Austronesian Languages of Western Melanesia. It is reconstructed on the basis of shared phonological, morphosyntactic and lexicosemantic innovations relative to Proto-Oceanic, such as the pervasive lenition of Proto-Oceanic *p to *v, the acquisition of a final *-c in some words, the idiosyncratic change of Proto-Oceanic *boRok 'pig' to Proto-Huon Gulf *boR, and the loss of all verb-deriving prefixes such as *pa- 'causative', *paRi- 'reciprocal', *ma- 'stative', and *ta- 'intransitive'.
The vowels of Proto-Huon Gulf, according to Ross, are:
Front | Central | Back | |
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Close | *i | *u | |
Close-mid | *e | *o | |
Open | *a |
The consonants of Proto-Huon Gulf, according to Ross, are:
Sarmi–Jayapura | |||||||||||||||||||
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Schouten |
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Huon Gulf |
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Ngero–Vitiaz |
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