Yele – West New Britain is a tentative
language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in h ...
proposal by
Malcolm Ross that unites three languages:
Anêm and
Ata (Wasi) of western
New Britain, and more dubiously
Yélî Dnye (Yele) of
Rossel Island
Rossel Island (named after de Rossel, a senior officer on the French expedition of d'Entrecasteaux, 1791-1793; also known as Yela) is the easternmost island of the Louisiade Archipelago, within the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea. Tree Isl ...
. These were classified as
East Papuan languages
The East Papuan languages is a defunct proposal for a family of Papuan languages spoken on the islands to the east of New Guinea, including New Britain, New Ireland, Bougainville, Solomon Islands, and the Santa Cruz Islands. There is no eviden ...
by
Stephen Wurm, but this does not now seem tenable. While Anêm and Ata do appear to be related, Yele may turn out to be an Austronesian language.
Pronouns
The evidence for the Yele – West New Britain family comes from the pronouns. Each language has two distinct sets of pronouns, and both sets correspond across the three languages. The forms illustrated here are the free pronouns and subject prefixes of Anêm and Ata, and the free and possessive/prepositional pronouns of Yele. Anêm and Ata make a distinction between
inclusive and exclusive we
In linguistics, clusivity is a grammatical distinction between ''inclusive'' and ''exclusive'' first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called ''inclusive " we"'' and ''exclusive "we"''. Inclusive "we" specifically includes the addressee ...
. Yele also has
dual pronouns which aren't shown.
:
:
:
See also
*
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 ...
References
*''Structural Phylogenetics and the Reconstruction of Ancient Language History''. Michael Dunn, Angela Terrill,
Ger Reesink
Gerard P. Reesink (more commonly known as Ger Reesink) is a Dutch linguist who specializes in Papuan languages.
Education
He studied psychology at Utrecht University. He obtained his PhD in linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, where he com ...
, Robert A. Foley, Stephen C. Levinson. ''Science'' magazine, 23 Sept. 2005, vol. 309, p 2072.
*
Malcolm Ross (2005). "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages." In: Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Robin Hide and Jack Golson, eds, ''Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples,'' 15-66. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Yele - West New Britain languages
East Papuan languages
Papuan languages
Proposed language families
Languages of Papua New Guinea