Yoke is a poorly documented language spoken by about 200 people in the north of
Papua,
Indonesia
Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...
. The name is also spelled ''Yoki, Yauke'', and it is also known as Bitovondo. It was spoken in a single village in the interior until the government relocated a third of the population to a new village, Mantarbori, on the coast. In the late 19th century, a word list of "Pauwi" was collected by Robidé van der Aa at
Lake Rombebai
A lake is an area filled with water, localized in a basin, surrounded by land, and distinct from any river or other outlet that serves to feed or drain the lake. Lakes lie on land and are not part of the ocean, although, like the much larger ...
, where the Yoke say they migrated from; this is transparently Yoke, apart from some words which do not appear in the modern language but are found in related Warembori.
[A word list of "Pauwi" collected by Stroeve and Moszkowski was not Yoke, though it's not clear what it wa]
/ref>
Classification
About one third of the vocabulary of Yoke is cognate with Warembori language, Warembori, a language which has either been strongly influenced by Austronesian languages, or is an Austronesian language strongly influenced by Papuan languages. The two languages are grammatically very similar, with shared morphological irregularities, demonstrating a genealogical relationship. However, Yoke does not share the Austronesian features of Warembori, and it is unclear how this relates to Ross's 2005 classification, based on pronouns, of Warembori as an Austronesian language.
Grammar
On the surface, at least, Yoke has the following sounds:
Vowels
Unusually for a Papuan language, but like Warembori, Yoke has prepositions and a SVO constituent order. Verbs have subject prefixes and may have one or more object suffixes. The verbal affixes are:
The independent pronouns are the first subject marker listed in the table prefixed to ''-βu''. The plural forms may derive from Austronesian; see Warembori language, Warembori for details.
Like many Papuan languages of northern New Guinea, Yoke has suppletive In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even ...
singular/plural forms for nouns.polysynthetic
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to ...
, with noun incorporation in its verbs. For example,
:
:"I have already chopped down a sago tree for you with an axe."
(The purpose of the 'thematic' consonant is unclear, but it appears to divide verbs into different classes.)
References
*Clouse, Duane, Mark Donohue and Felix Ma. 2002. "Survey report of the north coast of Irian Jaya
External links
Donohue (1998) on Warembori
with a section on Yoke
{{Languages of Indonesia
Lower Mamberamo languages
Languages of western New Guinea