Ongan, also called Angan, South Andamanese or Jarawa–Onge, is a phylum of two

Andamanese languages The Andamanese languages are a pair of language families spoken by the Andamanese peoples of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. The two language families are Great Andamanese and Ongan, while the Sentinelese language is spoken by an uncon ...

, Önge and Jarawa, spoken in the southern Andaman Islands. The two known extant languages are: * Önge or Onge ( transcribes ); 96 speakers (

Onge The Onge (also Önge, Ongee, and Öñge) are an Andamanese ethnic group, indigenous to the Andaman Islands in Southeast Asia at the Bay of Bengal, currently administered by India. They are traditionally hunter-gatherers and fishers, but al ...

) in 1997, mostly monolingual * Jarawa or Järawa; estimated at 200 speakers ( Jarawa) in 1997, monolingual *A third language, Sentinelese, the presumed language of the

Sentinelese people The Sentinelese, also known as the Sentineli and the North Sentinel Islanders, are an indigenous people who inhabit North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal in the northeastern Indian Ocean. Designated a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group ...

, is thought to be related to the Ongan languages, but this is uncertain, as very little is known about the Sentinelese; estimated 15–500 speakers. *Another language, Jangil, extinct sometime between 1895 and 1920, is reported to have been unintelligible with but to have had noticeable connections with Jarawa.

External relationships

The

fall into two clear families, Great Andamanese and Ongan, plus one presumed but unattested language, Sentinelese. The similarities between Great Andamanese and Ongan are mainly of a typological and morphological nature, with little demonstrated common vocabulary. Linguists, including long-range researchers such as

Joseph Greenberg Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages. Life Early life and education Joseph Greenberg was born on ...

, have expressed doubts as to the validity of Andamanese as a family.Greenberg, Joseph (1971). "The Indo-Pacific Hypothesis." ''Current Trends in Linguistics Vol. 8'', ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, 807.71. The Hague: Mouton. It has since been proposed (by Juliette Blevins 2007) that Ongan (but not Great Andamanese) is distantly related to Austronesian in a family called Austronesian–Ongan. However, the proposal of a genealogical connection between Austronesian and Ongan has not been well-received by other linguists. George Van Driem (2011) considers Blevins' evidence as "not compelling", although he leaves the possibility open that some resemblances could be the result of contact/borrowing, a position also held by Hoogervorst (2012).

Robert Blust Robert A. Blust (; ; May 9, 1940 – January 5, 2022) was an American linguist who worked in several areas, including historical linguistics, lexicography and ethnology. He was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Blus ...

(2014) argues that Blevins' conclusions are not supported by her data, and that of her first 25 reconstructions, none are reproducible using the comparative method. Blust concludes that the grammatical comparison does not hold up, and also cites non-linguistic (such as cultural, archaeological, and biological) evidence against Blevins' hypothesis.Blust, Robert (2014). "Some Recent Proposals Concerning the Classification of the Austronesian Languages", ''Oceanic Linguistics'' 53:2:300–391. "To put it bluntly, the AON hypothesis is a castle built on sand, an elaborate illusion fostered by the misplaced hope that a major discovery has been made that somehow eluded the investigations of all other scholars."

Reconstruction

The two attested Ongan languages are relatively close, and the historical sound reconstruction mostly straightforward: *ə appears to be allophonic for *e before a nasal coda.

Grammar

The Ongan languages are

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative lang ...

, with an extensive prefix and suffix system. They have a

noun class In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some a ...

system based largely on body parts, in which every

noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, ...

and

adjective In linguistics, an adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ma ...

may take a prefix according to which body part it is associated with (on the basis of shape, or functional association). Another peculiarity of terms for body parts is that they are inalienably possessed, requiring a

possessive adjective Possessive determiners (from la, possessivus, translit=; grc, κτητικός / ktētikós - en. ktetic Lallu) are determiners which express possession. Some traditional grammars of English refer to them as possessive adjectives, though they ...

prefix to complete them, so one cannot say "head" alone, but only "my, or his, or your, etc. head". The Ongan pronouns are here represented by Önge: There is also an indefinite prefix ''ən-, on-'' "someone's". Jarawa does not have the plural series, but the singular is very close: ''m-, ŋ-'' or ''n-, w-, ən-''. From this, Blevins reconstructs Proto-Ongan *m-, *ŋ-, *gw-, *en-. Judging from the available sources, the Andamanese languages have only two

cardinal number In mathematics, cardinal numbers, or cardinals for short, are a generalization of the natural numbers used to measure the cardinality (size) of sets. The cardinality of a finite set is a natural number: the number of elements in the set. T ...

s: one and

two 2 (two) is a number, numeral and digit. It is the natural number following 1 and preceding 3. It is the smallest and only even prime number. Because it forms the basis of a duality, it has religious and spiritual significance in many cultur ...

and their entire numerical lexicon is one, two, one more, some more, and all.

References

External links

Freelang Onge Dictionary
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ongan Languages Agglutinative languages * Endangered languages Language families

External relationships

Reconstruction

Grammar

See also

References

Further reading

External links