| Trans–New Guinea | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Geographic distribution | Indonesia (Western New Guinea,East Nusa Tenggara (Alor,Pantar) East Timor Papua New Guinea | |||
| Linguistic classification | One of the world's primarylanguage families | |||
| Proto-language | Proto-Trans–New Guinea | |||
| Subdivisions |
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| Language codes | ||||
| ISO 639-5 | ngf | |||
| ISO 639-3 | – | |||
| Glottolog | None nucl1709 (Nuclear Trans–New Guinea, partial overlap) | |||
 The extent of various proposals for Trans–New Guinea. Families accepted by Usher[1] Other families proposed by Ross (2005) Other Papuan languages Austronesian languages Uninhabited | ||||
 The various families constituting Ross' conception of Trans–New Guinea. The greatest TNG diversity is in the eastern highlands. (After Ross 2005.)
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Trans–New Guinea (TNG) is an extensivefamily ofPapuan languages spoken on the island ofNew Guinea and neighboring islands, a region corresponding to the countryPapua New Guinea as well asparts ofIndonesia.
Trans–New Guinea is perhaps thethird-largest language family in the world by number of languages. The core of the family is considered to be established, but its boundaries and overall membership are uncertain. The languages are spoken by around 3 million people.[2] There have been several main proposals as to its internal classification.
Although Papuan languages for the most part are poorly documented, several of the branches of Trans–New Guinea have been recognized for some time. TheEleman languages were first proposed by S. Ray in 1907, parts ofMarind were recognized by Ray and JHP Murray in 1918, and theRai Coast languages in 1919, again by Ray.
The precursor of the Trans–New Guinea family wasStephen Wurm's 1960 proposal of anEast New Guinea Highlands family. Although broken up byMalcolm Ross in 2005, it united different branches of what became TNG for the first time, linking Engan, Chimbu–Wahgi, Goroka, and Kainantu. (Duna and Kalam were added in 1971.) Then in 1970,Clemens Voorhoeve andKenneth McElhanon noted 91 lexical resemblances between theCentral and South New Guinea (CSNG) andFinisterre–Huon families, which they had respectively established a few years earlier. Although they did not work out regular sound correspondences, and so could not distinguish between cognates due to genealogical relationship, cognates due to borrowing, and chance resemblances, their research was taken seriously. They chose the nameTrans–New Guinea because this new family was the first to span New Guinea, from theBomberai Peninsula of western West Irian to theHuon Peninsula of eastern PNG. They also noted possible cognates in other families Wurm would later add to TNG: Wurm's East New Guinea Highlands,Binandere in the 'Bird's Tail' of PNG, and two families thatJohn Z'graggen would later (1971, 1975) unite in his 100-languageMadang–Adelbert Range family.
In 1975, Wurm accepted Voorhoeve and McElhanon's suspicions about further connections, as well as Z'graggen's work, and postulated additional links to, among others, the languages of the island ofTimor to the west of New Guinea,Angan,Goilalan,Koiarian,Dagan,Eleman,Wissel Lakes, the erstwhileDani-Kwerba family, and the erstwhileTrans-Fly–Bulaka River family (which he had established in 1970), expanding TNG into an enormous language phylum that covered most of the island of New Guinea, as well as Timor and neighboring islands, and included over 500 languages spoken by some 2,300,000 people. However, part of the evidence for this wastypological, and Wurm stated that he did not expect it to stand up well to scrutiny. Although he based the phylum on characteristicpersonal pronouns, several of the branches had no pronouns in common with the rest of the family, or even had pronouns related to non-TNG families, but were included because they were grammatically similar to TNG. Other families that had typical TNG pronouns were excluded because they did not resemble other TNG families in their grammatical structure.
Because grammatical typology is readily borrowed—many of theAustronesian languages in New Guinea have grammatical structures similar to their Papuan neighbors, for example, and conversely many Papuan languages resemble typical Austronesian languages typologically—other linguists were skeptical.William A. Foley rejected Wurm's and even some of Voorhoeve's results, and he broke much of TNG into its constituent parts: several dozen small but clearly valid families, plus a number of apparentisolates.
In 2005,Malcolm Ross published a draft proposal re-evaluating Trans–New Guinea, and found what he believed to be overwhelming evidence for a reduced version of the phylum, based solely on lexical resemblances, which retained as much as 85% of Wurm's hypothesis, though some of it tentatively.
The strongest lexical evidence for any language family is sharedmorphological paradigms, especially highly irregular orsuppletive paradigms with bound morphology, because these are extremely resistant to borrowing. For example, the fact that German wordsgut "good" andbesser "better" resemble their English counterparts would be stronger evidence that German is related to English than the mere lexical correspondence between Germanrot and Englishred for the color. However, because of the great morphological complexity of many Papuan languages, and the poor state of documentation of nearly all, in New Guinea this approach is essentially restricted to comparingpronouns. Ross reconstructed pronouns sets for Foley's basic families and compared these reconstructions, rather than using a direct mass comparison of all Papuan languages; attempted to then reconstruct the ancestral pronouns of the proto-Trans–New Guinea language, such as*ni "we",*ŋgi "you",*i "they"; and then compared poorly supported branches directly to this reconstruction. Families required two apparent cognates to be included. However, if any language in a family was a match, the family was considered a match, greatly increasing the likelihood of coincidental resemblances, and because the plural forms are related to the singular forms, a match of 1sg and 1pl, although satisfying Ross's requirement of two matches, is not actually two independent matches, again increasing the likelihood of spurious matches.[citation needed] In addition, Ross counted forms like *a as a match to 2sg *ga, so that/ɡV,kV,ŋɡV,V/ all counted as matches to *ga. And although/n/ and/ɡ/ occur in Papuan pronouns at twice the level expected by their occurrence in pronouns elsewhere in the world, they do not correlate with each other as they would if they reflected a language family. That is, it is argued that Ross's pronouns do not support the validity of Trans–New Guinea, and do not reveal which families might belong to it.[3]
Ross also included in his proposal several better-attested families for non-pronominal evidence, despite a lack of pronouns common to other branches of TNG, and he suggested that there may be other families that would have been included if they had been better attested. Several additional families are only tentatively linked to TNG. Because the boundaries of Ross's proposal are based primarily on a single parameter, the pronouns, all internal structure remains tentative.[citation needed]
Most TNG languages are spoken by only a few thousand people, with only seven (Melpa,Kuman,Enga,Huli,Western Dani,Makasae, andEkari) being spoken by more than 100,000.[4] The most populous language outside of mainland New Guinea isMakasae ofEast Timor, with 100,000 speakers throughout the eastern part of the country.Enga is the most populous Trans-New Guinea language spoken inNew Guinea, with more than 200,000 speakers.Golin,Sinasina, Mid Grand Valley Dani,Kamano, andBunaq have between 50,000 and 100,000 speakers (Galela ofHalmahera, usually not classified as Trans-New Guinea, also has between 50,000 and 100,000 speakers.) All other Trans–New Guinea languages have fewer than 50,000 speakers.[4]
The greatest linguistic diversity in Ross's Trans–New Guinea proposal, and therefore perhaps the location of the proto-Trans–New Guinea homeland, is in the interior highlands of Papua New Guinea, in the central-to-eastern New Guinea cordillera where Wurm first posited his East New Guinea Highlands family. IndonesianPapua and thePapuan Peninsula of Papua New Guinea (the "bird's tail") have fewer and more widely extended branches of TNG, and were therefore likely settled by TNG speakers after theproto-language broke up.
Ross speculates that the TNG family may have spread with the high population densities that resulted from the domestication oftaro, settling quickly in the highland valleys along the length of the cordillera but spreading much more slowly into themalarial lowlands, and not at all into areas such as theSepik River valley where the people already had yam agriculture, which thus supported high population densities. Ross suggests that TNG may have arrived at its western limit, the islands nearTimor, perhaps four to 4.5 thousand years ago, before the expansion of Austronesian into this area.Roger Blench associates the spread of Trans–New Guinea languages with the domestication of thebanana.[5]
Wurm et al. identify the subdivisions in their Papuan classification asfamilies (on the order of relatedness of theGermanic languages),stocks (on the order of theIndo-European languages), andphyla (on the order of theNostratic hypothesis). Trans-New Guinea is a phylum in this terminology. A language that is not related to any other at afamily level or below is called anisolate in this scheme.[6]
Trans-New Guinea phylum (Wurm et al. 1975) |
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('Family-level' groups are listed inboldface)
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As of 2003,William A. Foley accepted the core of TNG: "The fact, for example, that a great swath of languages in New Guinea from the Huon Peninsula to the highlands of Irian Jaya mark the object of a transitive verb with a set of verbal prefixes, a first person singular in /n/ and second person singular in avelar stop, is overwhelming evidence that these languages are all genetically related; the likelihood of such a system being borrowed vanishingly small."[7] He considered the relationship between the Finisterre–Huon, Eastern Highlands (Kainantu–Gorokan), and Irian Highlands (Dani – Paniai Lakes) families (and presumably some other smaller ones) to be established, and he said that it is "highly likely" that the Madang family belongs as well. He considered it possible, but not yet demonstrated, that the Enga, Chimbu, Binandere, Angan, Ok, Awyu, Asmat (perhaps closest to Ok and Awyu), Mek, Sentani, and the seven small language families of the tail of Papua New Guinea (Koiarian, Goilalan, etc., which he maintains have not been shown to be closely related to each other) may belong to TNG as well.
| Irian Jaya, W to E South Bird's Head West Trans–New Guinea Kaure–Kapori Pauwasi Mek Asmat–Kamoro Awyu–Dumut Ok Kayagar Marind Kolopom | PNG highlands, W to E Awin–Pa East Strickland Duna Bosavi Engan West Kutubuan East Kutubuan Chimbu–Wahgi Kainantu–Goroka Madang Finisterre–Huon | Southern PNG, E to W Binanderean Southeast Papuan Angan Eleman Teberan Turama–Kikorian Kiwai–Porome Inland Gulf Gogodala–Suki Tirio isolates* |
Ross does not use specialized terms for different levels of classification asDonald Laycock andStephen Wurm did. In the list given here, the uncontroversial families that are accepted by Foley and other Papuanists and that are the building blocks of Ross's TNG are printed inboldface. Language isolates are printed initalics.
Ross removed about 100 languages from Wurm's proposal, and only tentatively retained a few dozen more, but in one instance he added a language, the isolatePorome.
Ross did not have sufficient evidence to classify all Papuan groups. In addition, the classification is based on a single feature – shared pronouns, especially 1sg and 2sg – and thus is subject to false positives as well as to missing branches that have undergone significant sound changes, since he does not have the data to establish regular sound correspondences.[according to whom?]
Although Ross based his classification on pronoun systems, many languages in New Guinea are too poorly documented for even this to work.[neutrality isdisputed] Thus there are several isolates that were placed in TNG by Wurm but that cannot be addressed by Ross's classification. A few of them (Komyandaret, Samarokena, and maybe Kenati) have since been assigned to existing branches (or ex-branches) of TNG, whereas others (Massep, Momuna) continue to defy classification.
Ross removed 95 languages from TNG. These are small families with no pronouns in common with TNG languages, but that are typologically similar, perhaps due to long periods of contact with TNG languages.
Trans–New Guinea phylum (Ross 2005) |
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Andrew Pawley andHarald Hammarström (2018) accept 35 subgroups as members of Trans-New Guinea.[9][4]
Trans–New Guinea phylum (Pawley and Hammarström 2018) | ||
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Groups and isolates considered by Pawley and Hammarström (2018) as having weaker or disputed claims to membership in Trans-New Guinea (some of which they suggest may ultimately turn out to be Trans-New Guinea, but further evidence is needed):[9]
Groups and isolates sometimes classified as Trans-New Guinea, but rejected by Pawley and Hammarström (2018) as Trans-New Guinea:[9]
Glottolog, of which Hammarström is one of the editors, accepts 10 groups as part of aNuclear Trans–New Guinea family, based on Foley (2000), Pawley (2005) and Edgar Suter (1997).[10]
Matthew Dryer usedlexicostatistics to evaluate Pawley and Hammarström (2018), based on 40-wordSwadesh list data from theASJP database. Dryer concludes that the following language families are likely to be Trans–New Guinea. They are listed in order of highest to lowest score, i.e. starting with the most likely.[11]
Dryer does not consider that evidence based solely on pronouns and the word for 'louse' is sufficient to conclude that a family is a member of Trans-New Guinea. This is because they are more likely to be an areal form (Wanderwort) in the case of the word for 'louse' or to be highly conservative in the case of pronouns. Dryer states that similarities solely in pronouns mean that the families are related but that the relationship is so distant as to be "undetectable".[11]
Dryer notes that this is a preliminary quantitative analysis and only gives a rough prediction of the families that may or may not belong within Trans–New Guinea, and that the lexical similarities it is based on may be due to loanwords, areal forms (Wanderwörter) and so forth.[11]
Families likely to be Trans–New Guinea (Dryer 2022) | ||
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(Pawley and Hammarström (2018) do not classifyBayono–Awbono andDamal as Trans–New Guinea.) Dryer lists the following families as "borderline". They have a somewhat higher basic lexical similarity with Trans–New Guinea than with non-Trans–New Guinea families: (Pawley and Hammarström (2018) do not classifySouth Bird's Head,Timor–Alor–Pantar orTeberan as Trans–New Guinea.) Dryer lists the following families as less likely to be Trans–New Guinea. They have few basic vocabulary items in common with Trans–New Guinea: |
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Timothy Usher and Edgar Suter, in consultation with Papuan language researchers such asWilliam Croft,Matthew Dryer,John Lynch,Andrew Pawley, andMalcolm Ross,[12] have reconstructed low-level constituents of Trans–New Guinea to verify, through the establishment of regular sound changes, which purported members truly belong to it, and to determine their subclassification. In many cases Usher has created new names for the member families to reflect their geographic location. Much of Usher's classification is accepted byGlottolog, though under different names. As of 2024, his classification is as follows, including correspondences to the names in earlier classifications. He expects to expand the membership of the family as reconstruction proceeds.[13]
Trans–New Guinea phylum (Usher 2024) |
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These branches may cluster together (the southwestern branches, for example, may group together), but the details are as yet unclear. |
The families from the Ross and Glottolog classifications that are not included are Kaure, Pauwasi, Engan, Chimbu–Wahgi, Madang, Eleman, Kiwaian, Binanderean, Goilalan, and the severalPapuan Gulf families. Usher only includes families that have a regular reflex of the 2sg pronoun, so there may be additional TNG families that have changed their pronouns.
A number ofcolexification patterns (called 'semantic conflations' byDonald Laycock), particularly in thenominal domain, are commonly found among Trans–New Guinea languages:[9]
Ross, Malcolm (2005). "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages". InAndrew Pawley; Robert Attenborough; Robin Hide; Jack Golson (eds.).Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pp. 15–66.doi:10.15144/PL-572.ISBN 0858835622.OCLC 67292782.
