East Bird's Head languages
Encyclopedia
The East Bird's Head languages form a language family
of three languages in the "Bird's Head" Peninsula of western New Guinea
, spoken by only 20,000 people in all.
Stephen Wurm
identifies the subdivisions of his Papuan classification as families (on the order of the Germanic languages
), stocks (on the order of the Indo-European languages
), and phyla (on the order of the Nostratic hypothesis). East Bird's Head is a stock in this terminology. A language that is not related to any other at a family level, such as Greek within Indo-European, will be called an isolate
in this scheme.
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' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...
of three languages in the "Bird's Head" Peninsula of western New Guinea
New Guinea
New Guinea is the world's second largest island, after Greenland, covering a land area of 786,000 km2. Located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, it lies geographically to the east of the Malay Archipelago, with which it is sometimes included as part of a greater Indo-Australian Archipelago...
, spoken by only 20,000 people in all.
Stephen Wurm
Stephen Wurm
Stephen Adolphe Wurm was a Hungarian-born Australian linguist.- Biography :Wurm was born in Budapest, the second child to the German-speaking Adolphe Wurm and Hungarian-speaking Anna Novroczky, and was christened Istvan Adolphe Wurm...
identifies the subdivisions of his Papuan classification as families (on the order of the Germanic languages
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
), stocks (on the order of the Indo-European languages
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
), and phyla (on the order of the Nostratic hypothesis). East Bird's Head is a stock in this terminology. A language that is not related to any other at a family level, such as Greek within Indo-European, will be called an isolate
Language isolate
A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. They are in effect language families consisting of a single...
in this scheme.
Classification
East Bird's Head stock (3 languages)- Mantion (Manikion)Mantion languageMantion , also known as Sougb or Sogh, is a language of the East Bird's Head language family spoken in East Bird's Head, east of Meyah, south of Manokwari. It consists of four dialects and is spoken by around 12,000 people in all....
isolate - Meax family: MeaxMeax languageMeax is a Papuan language on the north coast of Papua, Indonesia....
, Meninggo (Moskona) - ? SaponiSaponi languageSaponi is nearly extinct a Papuan language of Indonesia. It shares half of its basic vocabulary with the Rasawa language, but it's not clear that they are related. Saponi shares none of its pronouns with the Lakes Plain family that Rasawa is part of; indeed its basic pronouns mamire "I, we" and ba...
(contradictory evidence)