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| Uneapa | |
|---|---|
| Bali | |
| Uniapa | |
| Native to | Papua New Guinea |
| Region | Bali Island,West New Britain |
Native speakers | (10,000 cited 1998)[1] |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | bbn |
| Glottolog | unea1237 |
Uneapa (often called "Bali", nativelyUniapa) is anOceanic language spoken by about 10,000 people on the small island of Bali (Uneapa), north ofWest New Britain inPapua New Guinea. It is perhaps a dialect of neighboringVitu. Uneapa is one of the most conservative Oceanic languages, having retained most ofProto-Oceanic's final consonants with anecho vowel, such as*Rumaq 'house' >rumaka and*saqat 'bad' >zaɣata.
A sketch grammar of this language was published in 2002 by Malcolm Ross.
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The nameUneapa is a variation of the native nameUniapa for theisland. InVitu, the same island is calledUnea. Both names can come from a proto-form*Uniap or*Uneap, reflecting the addition of an echo vowel in Uneapa and the regular loss of final consonants in Vitu.
The alternative nameBali, used by foreigners, comes from the termbali meaning 'to be not'. It is not related etymologically to the more popularIndonesian island calledBali, which is home to a distantly related language calledBalinese.
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Uneapa, together with neighboringVitu, forms a subgroup within theMeso-Melanesian cluster of theOceanic languages. The two are sometimes considered to be a single language, called Bali-Vitu. However, there are some differences, particularly in their phonemic inventories, retention of final consonants (which is lost in Vitu), pronoun systems, and word choices. In general, Uneapa tends to be more conservative than Vitu in most respects.
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Phonemically, Uneapa has five vowels and fourteen consonants.
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Uneapa has a simple phonotactic structure, either V, CV, VV, CVV. Stress is located at thepenultimate syllable. Optionally, clitic-final vowels may be lost, such as underlyingbalitaza 'is not' becomingbaltaza.
The following sentence illustrates the conservatism of Uneapa relative toProto-Oceanic.[2]
Uneapa:
Proto-Oceanic: