Elseng (Morwap, Janggu, Sawa, Tabu
) is a poorly documented
Papuan language spoken by about 300 people (in 1991) in the
Indonesian province of
Papua. It is also known as Morwap, which means "what is it?" ‘Morwap’ is vigorously rejected as a language name by speakers and government officials.
Elseng is spoken in
Omon village,
Gresi Selatan district,
Jayapura Regency; it is also called ''Tabu'' or ''Tapu''.
Classification
Laycock classified Elseng as 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 ...
, but noted pronominal similarities with the
Border languages
The Border or Upper Tami languages are an independent family of Papuan languages in Malcolm Ross's version of the Trans–New Guinea proposal.
Unlike the neighboring Sepik languages and many other Papuan language families of northern New Guine ...
. Ross included it in Border because of these similarities, but noted that it does not appear to share any lexical similarities with the family. However, this may be an effect of the paucity of data on Elseng. Foley similarly classifies Elseng as an isolate.
An automated computational analysis (
ASJP 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)
'. also found lexical similarities with the
Border languages
The Border or Upper Tami languages are an independent family of Papuan languages in Malcolm Ross's version of the Trans–New Guinea proposal.
Unlike the neighboring Sepik languages and many other Papuan language families of northern New Guine ...
.
Phonology
Pronouns
Pronouns are:
Basic vocabulary
Elseng basic vocabulary from Menanti (2005), quoted in
Foley (2018):
[Menanti, Jackie. 2005. ''Sociolinguistic Report on the Elseng Language in Sia-Sia Village, Keerom County, Papua, Indonesia''. Unpublished report. Jayapura: SIL Indonesia.]
:
The following basic vocabulary words are from Voorhoeve (1971, 1975), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database:
:
Sentences and phrases
Example sentences and phrases in Elseng:
References
External links
Elseng language word list at TransNewGuinea.orgBurung, Wiem. 2000. "A brief note on Elseng." SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2000-001
{{Border languages (New Guinea)
Border languages (New Guinea)
Languages of western New Guinea
Unclassified languages of New Guinea