The Sepik or Sepik River languages are a family of some 50 Papuan languages spoken in the Sepik river basin of northern Papua New Guinea , proposed by Donald Laycock in 1965 in a somewhat more limited form than presented here. They tend to have simple phonologies, with few consonants or vowels and usually no tones.
15-504: The Middle Sepik languages comprise diverse groups of Sepik languages spoken in northern Papua New Guinea . The Middle Sepik grouping is provisionally accepted by Foley (2018) based on shared innovations in pronouns, but is divided by Glottolog . They are spoken in areas surrounding the town of Ambunti in East Sepik Province . Unlike most other Sepik languages, Middle Sepik languages do not overtly mark gender on nouns, although
30-500: A vertical vowel system . Phonetic [i e o u] are a result of palatal and labial assimilation to adjacent consonants. It is suspected that the Ndu languages may reduce this to a two-vowel system, with /ɨ/ epenthetic (Foley 1986). The Sepik languages consist of two branches of Kandru's Laycock's Sepik–Ramu proposal, the Sepik subphylum and Leonhard Schultze stock. According to Malcolm Ross ,
45-428: A higher tendency toward isolation generally exhibit a morpheme-per-word ratio close to 1:1. In an ideal isolating language, visible morphology would be entirely absent, as words would lack any internal structure in terms of smaller, meaningful units called morphemes. Such a language would not use bound morphemes like affixes . The morpheme-to-word ratio operates on a spectrum, ranging from lower ratios that skew toward
60-688: A result of phallic imagery), while small or short objects are typically classified as feminine. In some languages, objects can be classified as either masculine or feminine, depending on the physical characteristics intended for emphasis. To illustrate, below is an example in Abau , an Upper Sepik language: Except for the Middle Sepik languages , most Sepik languages overtly mark nouns using gender suffixes. Many Sepik languages from different branches, including Awtuw , May River Iwam , Abau or Alamblak , encode periodic tense in their verbal morphology, though
75-605: Is perfectly possible for a language to have one inflectional morpheme yet more than one unit of meaning. For example, the Russian word vídyat /видят "they see" has a morpheme per word ratio of 2:1 since it has two morphemes. The root vid- /вид- conveys the imperfective aspect meaning, and the inflectional morpheme -yat /-ят inflects for four units of meaning (third- person subject, plural subject, present/future tense , indicative mood ). Effectively, it has four units of meaning in one inseparable morpheme: -yat /-ят. Languages with
90-405: Is that of an analytic language , which uses unbound morphemes or syntactical constructions to indicate grammatical relationships. Isolating and analytic languages tend to overlap in linguistic scholarship. Isolating languages contrast with synthetic languages , also called inflectional languages , where words often consist of multiple morphemes. That linguistic classification is subdivided into
105-745: The Leonhard Schultze languages separately as an independent language family. The pronouns Ross reconstructs for proto-Sepik are: Note the similarities of the dual and plural suffixes with those of the Torricelli languages . Ross reconstructs two sets of pronouns for "proto–Upper Sepik" (actually, Abau–Iwam and Wogamusin (Tama)). These are the default set (Set I), and a set with "certain interpersonal and pragmatic functions" (table 1.27): Most Sepik languages have reflexes of proto-Sepik *na ~ *an for 1sg, *no for 1pl, and *ni for 2sg. Proto-Sepik forms reconstructed by Foley (2018) that are widespread across
120-437: The classifications fusional , agglutinative , and polysynthetic , which are based on how the morphemes are combined. Although historically, languages were divided into three basic types ( isolating , inflectional , agglutinative ), the traditional morphological types can be categorized by two distinct parameters: A language is said to be more isolating than another if it has a lower morpheme per word ratio. To illustrate
135-613: The family: Even internally within Sepik subgroups, languages in the Sepik family can have vastly different typological profiles varying from isolating to agglutinative , with example languages listed below. In contrast, languages within the Ramu , Lower Sepik , and Yuat families all have relatively uniform typological profiles. Like the isolate Taiap , but unlike the Lower Sepik-Ramu , Yuat , and Upper Yuat families, Sepik languages distinguish masculine and feminine genders , with
150-453: The feminine gender being the more common default unmarked gender. Proto-Sepik gender-marking suffixes are reconstructed by Foley (2018) as: In Sepik languages, gender-marking suffixes are not always attached to the head noun, and can also be affixed to other roots in the phrase. Typically, the genders of lower animals and inanimate objects are determined according to shape and size: big or long objects are typically classified as masculine (as
165-646: The following classification, with 6 main branches recognized. Like the neighboring Torricelli languages , but unlike the rest of the Sepik languages, the Ram and Yellow River languages do not have clause chaining constructions (for an example of a clause chaining construction in a Trans-New Guinea language, see Kamano language#Clause chaining ). Foley (2018) suggests that many of the Ram and Yellow River-speaking peoples may have in fact been Torricelli speakers who were later assimilated by Sepik-speaking peoples. Foley classifies
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#1733085336773180-574: The markers themselves are not cognate. Isolating language An isolating language is a type of language with a morpheme per word ratio close to one, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples of widely spoken isolating languages are Yoruba in West Africa and Vietnamese (especially its colloquial register ) in Southeast Asia. A closely related concept
195-753: The most promising external relationship is not with Ramu, pace Laycock, but with the Torricelli family . Palmer (2018) classifies the Leonhard Schultze languages as an independent language phylum. In the cladogram below, the small, closely related families in bold at the ends of the branches are covered in separate articles. Walio family Papi family ( Papi , Suarmin/Asaba ) Abau Iwam family Ram family Yellow River family Amal – Kalou Tama family Nukuma family Yerakai Ndu family Sanio Hewa–Paka: Niksek (Paka, Gabiano), Piame , Hewa Bahinemo family Alamblak family Foley (2018) provides
210-464: The relationship between words and morphemes, the English term "rice" is a single word, consisting of only one morpheme ( rice ). This word has a 1:1 morpheme per word ratio. In contrast, "handshakes" is a single word consisting of three morphemes ( hand , shake , -s ). This word has a 3:1 morpheme per word ratio. On average, words in English have a morpheme per word ratio substantially greater than one. It
225-507: The third-person singular pronoun does distinguish between masculine and feminine genders (e.g., Proto- Ndu *nd- ' 3SG . M ' and *l- ' 3SG . F ' ). The languages are: Sepik languages The best known Sepik language is Iatmul . The most populous are Iatmul's fellow Ndu languages Abelam and Boiken , with about 35,000 speakers each. The Sepik languages, like their Ramu neighbors, appear to have three-vowel systems, /ɨ ə a/ , that distinguish only vowel height in
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