The Nimboran languages are a small language family, family of Papuan languages, spoken in the Grime River watershed, that had been part of Stephen Wurm's Trans–New Guinea languages, Trans–New Guinea proposal. However, when proto-Nimboran pronouns are reconstructed ''(*genam'' "I" and ''kom'' or ''komot'' "thou"), they have little resemblance to the proto-TNG pronouns ''*na'' and ''*ga.'' Usher places them in a North Papuan languages, North Papuan stock that resembles Cowan's proposal.
[
William A. Foley, Foley (2018) classifies the Nimboran languages separately as an independent language family.]
Classification
The languages are:[
*Nimboran (Grime River)
**East
***Mekwei language, Mekwei (Moi)
***Gresi–Kemtuik
****Kemtuik language, Kemtuik
****Gresi language, Gresi
**West
***Mlap language, Mlap (Kuangsu)
***Namblong language, Namblong (Nimboran)
]
Proto-language
Pronouns
The pronouns Ross (2005) reconstructs for proto-Nimboran are,
:
Below are pronouns in the Nimboran languages as given by Foley (2018):
Basic vocabulary
Some lexical reconstructions by Usher (2020) are:[Grime River]
New Guinea World.
:
Vocabulary comparison
The following basic vocabulary words are from Voorhoeve (1975), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database:
References
External links
Nimboran word lists from Voorhoeve (1975)
(TransNewGuinea.org)
Grime River
New Guinea World.
{{Tor–Kwerba languages
Nimboran languages,
Foja Range languages