Pyu is a
language isolate
Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The num ...
spoken in
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 ...
. As of 2000, the language had about 100 speakers. It is spoken in Biake No. 2 village () of Biake ward,
Green River Rural LLG
Green River Rural LLG is a local-level government (LLG) of Sandaun Province, Papua New Guinea. It is located along the border with Keerom Regency, Papua Province, Indonesia.
Rivers
Rivers that flow through the LLG include the Samaia River.
Lan ...
in
Sandaun Province
Sandaun Province (formerly West Sepik Province) is the northwesternmost mainland province of Papua New Guinea. It covers an area of 35,920 km2 (13868 m2) and has a population of 248,411 (2011 census). The capital is Vanimo. In July 1998 the a ...
.
Classification
Timothy Usher links the Pyu language to its neighbors, the
Left May languages
The Left May or Arai languages are a small language family of half a dozen closely related but not mutually intelligible languages in the centre of New Guinea, in the watershed of the Left May River. There are only about 2,000 speakers in all. F ...
and the
Amto–Musan languages, in as Arai–Samaia stock.
An automated computational analysis (
ASJP
The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) is a collaborative project applying computational approaches to comparative linguistics using a database of word lists. The database is open access and consists of 40-item basic-vocabulary lists ...
4) by Müller et al. (2013)
[Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ]
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013)
'. found lexical similarities with
Kimki. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.
Based on limited lexical evidence, Pyu had been linked to the putative
Kwomtari–Fas family, but that family is apparently spurious and Foley (2018) notes that Pyu and Kwomtari are highly divergent from each other. Some similar pronoun found in both
Kwomtari and Pyu:
:
Vocabulary
The following basic vocabulary words are from Conrad & Dye (1975) and Voorhoeve (1975), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database:
:
References
External links
Pyu language word list at TransNewGuinea.org
{{language families
Language isolates of New Guinea
Languages of Papua New Guinea
Endangered language isolates
Arai–Samaia languages