Sinaugoro is an Austronesian language of
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean n ...
. It is mainly spoken in the
Rigo District
Rigo District is a district of Central Province in Papua New Guinea. It is one of the five administrative districts that make up the province.
Local-level government areas
* Rigo Central Rural
* Rigo Coastal Rural
* Rigo Inland Rural
Town ...
of
Central Province by some 15,000 people. The language is closely related to
Motu.
Phonology
Consonants
* /i/ is heard as a glide
when in word-initial position before a vowel, or within a syllable or syllable-initial onset.
* /ÉŁ/ is heard as palatal
ťwhen before front vowels.
Vowels
* Sounds /e, o/ are heard as
›, É”when in stressed syllables, or when the nucleus of the following syllable is /a/ or /o/.
Writing system
Grammar
Sinaugoro is an
agglutinative
In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes (word parts), each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglu ...
language with ergative alignment and
subject–object–verb (SOV) word order.
Number is marked explicitly on the verb and freely within the noun phrase, but is not marked on the noun itself.
A morphological distinction is made in Sinaugoro between the possession of alienable and inalienable nouns, and then between the alienable possession of edible and inedible objects.
Verbal indexing of person and number in Sinaugoro makes freestanding personal pronouns optional. These are given below, displaying a distinction between inclusive and exclusive.
Notes
References
*
External links
Sinaugoro phonologySinaugoro dictionary*
Paradisec ha
multiple links to Sinaugoro language materials
Central Papuan Tip languages
Languages of Central Province (Papua New Guinea)
{{PapuanTip-lang-stub