| Huon Gulf | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution | Papua New Guinea |
| Linguistic classification | Austronesian |
| Proto-language | Proto-Huon Gulf |
| Subdivisions | |
| Language codes | |
| Glottolog | huon1245 |
TheHuon Gulf languages areWestern Oceanic languages spoken primarily inMorobe Province ofPapua New Guinea. They may form a group of theNorth New Guinea languages, perhaps within the Ngero–Vitiaz branch of that family.[citation needed]
Unusually for Oceanic languages, twoNorth Huon Gulf languages,Bukawa andYabem, are tonal. The only other tonal Oceanic languages are found inNew Caledonia.[1]
According to Lynch, Ross, & Crowley (2002), the structure of the family is as follows:[2]
| Proto-Huon Gulf | |
|---|---|
| Reconstruction of | Huon Gulf languages |
Reconstructed ancestors | |
| Lower-order reconstructions | |
Proto-Huon Gulf was reconstructed byMalcolm Ross in 1988 inProto-Oceanic and the Austronesian Languages of Western Melanesia. It is reconstructed on the basis of sharedphonological,morphosyntactic andlexicosemantic 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 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | *i | *u | |
| Close-mid | *e | *o | |
| Open | *a |
The consonants of Proto-Huon Gulf, according to Ross, are:
| Labiovelar | Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop | voiced | *b | *d | *ɟ | *g | ||
| voiceless | *p | *t | *c | *k | |||
| Nasal | *mʷ | *m | *n | *ɲ | *ŋ | ||
| Fricative | *v | *s | *ɣ | ||||
| Approximant | *w | *l, *r | *j | *ʀ | |||