The West Bomberai languages are a family of

Papuan languages 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 geogr ...

spoken on the Bomberai Peninsula of western New Guinea and in

East Timor East Timor (), also known as Timor-Leste (), officially the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, is an island country in Southeast Asia. It comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor, the exclave of Oecusse on the island's north-west ...

and neighboring islands of Indonesia.

Languages

Two of the languages of the mainland, Baham and Iha, are closely related to each other; the third is distant, forming a third branch of the family along with the Timor–Alor–Pantar languages:New Guinea World, West Bomberai
/ref> * Mbahaam–Iha: Baham (Mbaham), Iha * Karas * Timor–Alor–Pantar Ross (2005) classified Timor–Alor–Pantar with the mainland West Bomberai languages, although this connection is not universally accepted. Usher found that the Timor–Alor–Pantar languages resides within the West Bomberai languages, and is not just their closest relative. This suggests that Timor–Alor–Pantar may have been the result of a relatively recent migration from New Guinea, perhaps arriving in the Timor area shortly before the Austronesian languages did.

Classification

Ross (2005) classifies Timor–Alor–Pantar with the West Bomberai languages, the two groups forming a branch within West Trans–New Guinea. Based on a careful examination of new lexical data, Holton & Robinson (2014) find little evidence to support a connection between TAP and TNG. However, Holton & Robinson (2017) concede that a relationship with Trans-New Guinea and West Bomberai in particular is the most likely hypothesis, though they prefer to leave it unclassified for now. Usher (2020) finds that the two mainland branches of the family are no closer to each other than they are to the Timor–Alor–Pantar languages, and has begun to reconstruct the West Bomberai protolanguage.

Phonemes

Usher (2020) reconstructs the consonant and vowel inventories as: Prenasalized plosives do not occur initially, having merged with the voiceless plosives. The vowels are *i *u *e *o *a *ɒ and the diphthong *ai.

Pronouns

Usher (2020) reconstructs the free pronouns as: :

Cognates

Protoforms of the 40 most-stable items in the

Swadesh list The Swadesh list ("Swadesh" is pronounced ) is a classic compilation of tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. Translations of the Swadesh list into a set of languages allow researchers to quantify the interrelatednes ...

include the following. :

Lexical comparison

The following basic vocabulary words are from Voorhoeve (1975), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database: : The following lexical data comparing West Bomberai with other languages of the Bomberai Peninsula and Geelvink Bay is from the Trans-New Guinea database and Usher (2020), unless noted otherwise.

References

External links

* Timothy Usher, New Guinea World
Proto–West Bomberai
{{Papuan languages Languages of Indonesia