Purari (Namau) is a

Papuan language The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian and non- Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. It is a strictly ge ...

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; , ; tpi, Papua Niugini; ho, Papua Niu Gini), officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea ( tpi, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; ho, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), is a country i ...

Names

Purari is also known as ''Koriki, Evorra, I'ai, Maipua,'' and ''Namau.'' "Namau" is a colonial term which means "deaf (lit.), inattentive, or stupid (Williams 1924: 4)." Today people of the Purari Delta find this term very offensive. F.E. Williams reports that the " interpreter suggests that by some misunderstanding the name had its origin in the despair of an early missionary, who, finding the natives turned a deaf ear to his teaching, dubbed them all 'Namau'." (Williams 1924: 4). Koriki, I'ai, and Maipua refer to self-defining groups that make up the six groups that today compose the people who speak Purari. Along with the Baroi (formerly known as the Evorra, which was the name of a village site), Kaimari and the Vaimuru, these groups speak mutually intelligible dialects of Purari. The name ''Baimuru'' (after Baimuru Rural LLG) is given in Petterson (2019).Petterson, Robert. 2019.
Interesting Features of Porome: An Isolate Language of PNG
'. Paper presented at the LSPNG 2019 Conference. 30pp.

Literature

Some literature exists in Purari, mainly Scripture portions produced by missionaries and Bible agencies. The first items in the language were a primer and hymnal published for the

London Missionary Society The London Missionary Society was an interdenominational evangelical missionary society formed in England in 1795 at the instigation of Welsh Congregationalist minister Edward Williams. It was largely Reformed in outlook, with Congregational m ...

in 1902. Later a New Testament, called 'Ene amua Iesu Keriso onu kuruei voa Nawawrea Eire', was published by the

British and Foreign Bible Society The British and Foreign Bible Society, often known in England and Wales as simply the Bible Society, is a non-denominational Christian Bible society with charity status whose purpose is to make the Bible available throughout the world. The So ...

in 1920, which was republished in 1947.

Classification

Noting that the few similarities with the

Eleman languages The Eleman languages are a family spoken around Kerema Bay, Papua New Guinea. Languages and classification The five languages of Eleman proper are clearly related. They were identified as a family by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1907, and would later ...

may be because of loanwords, Pawley and Hammarström (2018) leave it as unclassified rather than as part of Trans-New Guinea.

Pronouns

Pronouns are 1sg ''nai'', 2sg ''ni'', 1pl ''enei''. The first may resemble Trans–New Guinea *na, but Purari appears to be related to the Binanderean–Goilalan languages.

Phonology

Unlike most other neighboring Papuan languages, Purari (Baimuru) is non-tonal.

Vocabulary

The following basic vocabulary words are from Franklin (1973), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database: :

References

External links

TransNewGuinea.org database
*Materials on Karnai are included in the open access Arthur Capell collections
AC1
an
AC2
held by Paradisec * Paradisec has an open access collection from Tom Dutton
TD1
that includes Purari language materials {{Papuan languages Binanderean–Goilalan languages Languages of Gulf Province