Nen (or Nen Zi, Nenium, Wekamara) is a
Yam
Yam or YAM may refer to:
Plants and foods
*Yam (vegetable), common name for members of ''Dioscorea''
* Taro, known in Malaysia and Singapore as yam
* Sweet potato, specifically its orange-fleshed cultivars, often referred to as yams in North Amer ...
language spoken in the Bimadbn village in the
Western Province of
Papua New Guinea, with 250 speakers as of a 2002
SIL
SIL, Sil and sil may refer to:
Organizations
* Servis Industries Limited, Pakistan
* Smithsonian Institution Libraries
* SIL International, formerly Summer Institute of Linguistics
* Apex Silver Mines (former American Stock Exchange ticker symb ...
survey. It is situated between the speech communities of
Nambu and
Idi.
Nen has unusual lexicalization patterns in its verbs. It has very few intransitive verbs, and where some verbs would be intransitive in most other languages, Nen has a class of morphologically "middle" verbs in their place. Many of the few intransitive verbs that Nen does have are positional verbs, which refer to spatial positions and postures.
Phonology
The Nen phonemic inventory includes 22 consonants:
*/h/ occurs rarely in a few interactional and deictic words.
;Vowels: i, ɪ, e, æ, a, (ə), o, u
*/ã, ẽ/ occur rarely in a few interactional and deictic words.
Morphology
Number
The realization of different grammatical meanings of Number in the noun depends on the syntactic function and case marking. The noun in the dative overtly differentiates 4 grammatical meaning of number: singular, dual, paucal and plural; the noun in the oblique shows singular ~ dual ~ paucal/plural opposition, while the
ergative −
singular ~
dual
Dual or Duals may refer to:
Paired/two things
* Dual (mathematics), a notion of paired concepts that mirror one another
** Dual (category theory), a formalization of mathematical duality
*** see more cases in :Duality theories
* Dual (grammatical ...
/
paucal ~
plural, and the noun in
absolutive cannot be distinguished according to number.
Direction
The verb expresses three grammatical meaning of motion: neutral − /Ø-/, towards speaker /n-/, and away from speaker /ng-/: ''n-Ø-armbte'' '(s)he is ascending' ~ ''n-n-armbte