Yele – West New Britain is a tentative
language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term ''family'' is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics ...
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. These were classified as
East Papuan languages 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'' Grammatical person, first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called ''inclusive "we"'' and ''exclusive "we"''. Inclusive "we" specifically inc ...
. Yele also has
dual pronouns which aren't shown.
:
:
:
See also
*
Papuan languages
The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands in Indonesia, Solomon Islands, and East Timor. It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply ...
References
*''Structural Phylogenetics and the Reconstruction of Ancient Language History''. Michael Dunn, Angela Terrill,
Ger Reesink, 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