The Yareban or Musa River languages are a small family of
Trans–New Guinea languages spoken near the
Musa River
The Musa is a river on the eastern side of the Papuan Peninsula, in Papua New Guinea. It is one of the primary rivers on Oro Province. Its mouth exits into Dyke Ackland Bay Dyke Ackland Bay is a large bay in the Oro Province of Papua New Guin ...
in the "
Bird's Tail" (southeastern peninsula) of New Guinea. They are classified within the
Southeast Papuan branch of Trans–New Guinea.
Languages
The languages are,
*
Moikodi (Doriri)
*
Aneme Wake (Abia)
*Barijian:
Bariji,
Nawaru (Sirio)
*
Yareba
Barijian is suggested by lexicostatistics in Dutton (1971).
The only pronouns which are known in enough languages to reconstruct are ''na'' 1sg and ''a'' 2sg, which are common to all Yareban languages.
Proto-language
Phonemes
Usher (2020) reconstructs the consonant inventory as follows:
[New Guinea World, Musa River]
/ref>
:
*s and *dz were acquired through loans, but may have already been present in the protolanguage. *ʔ and *g may have been allophones.
Vowels are *a *e *i *o *u.
Pronouns
Usher (2020) reconstructs the pronouns as:[
:
]
Basic vocabulary
Some lexical reconstructions by Usher (2020) are:[
:
]
Evolution
Yareban reflexes of proto-Trans-New Guinea (pTNG) etyma are:cassowary
Cassowaries ( tpi, muruk, id, kasuari) are flightless birds of the genus ''Casuarius'' in the order Casuariiformes. They are classified as ratites (flightless birds without a keel on their sternum bones) and are native to the tropical fore ...
’ < *ku(y)a
*''rarara'' ‘dry’ < *(ŋg,k)atata
*''baba'' ‘father’ < *mbapa
*''iji'' ‘hair’ < *iti *''ifu'' ‘name’ < *imbi
*''kofiti'' ‘head’ < *kV(mb,p)(i,u)tu
*''ogo'' ‘water’ < *ok *''eme'' ‘man’ < *ambi
Abia language:
*''amai'' ‘mother’ < *am(a,i)
*''sagai'' ‘sand’ < *sa(ŋg,k)asiŋ
References
External links
* Timothy Usher, New Guinea World
Owen Stanley Range
* (ibid.
Proto–Musa River
{{Papuan languages
Mailu–Yareban languages
Languages of Oro Province