Usku language – Wikipedia
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Pauwasi language spoken in Indonesia
Usku, or Afra, is a nearly extinct and poorly documented Papuan language spoken by 20 or more people, mostly adults, in Usku village, Senggi District, Keerom Regency, Papua, Indonesia.
Wurm (1975) placed it as an independent branch of Trans–New Guinea, but Ross (2005) could not find enough evidence to classify it. Usher (2020) found that it was one of the West Pauwasi languages, though divergent from the other two branches of that family.[2] Foley (2018) classifies Usku as a language isolate.[3]
An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)[4] found lexical similarities between Usku and Kaure. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.
Basic vocabulary[edit]
Basic vocabulary of Usku from Im (2006), quoted by Foley (2018):[5][3]
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Usku basic vocabulary
gloss Usku ‘bird’ rkwe ‘blood’ misie ‘bone’ kra ‘breast’ mi ‘ear’ bekria ‘eat’ nggreka ‘egg’ kri ‘eye’ nifi ‘fire’ yo ‘give’ roti ‘go’ rifri ‘ground’ taʔ ‘hair’ klekondia ‘hear’ yukri ‘I’ o ‘leg’ nafu ‘louse’ nimi ‘man’ na ‘moon’ menggrine ‘name’ təkwar ‘one’ kuskafi ‘road, path’ tra ‘see’ fra ‘sky’ mumgre ‘stone’ pani ‘sun’ winene ‘tongue’ bra ‘tooth’ ninggre ‘tree’ ninani ‘two’ narse ‘water’ a/æ ‘we’ no ‘woman’ ria ‘you (sg)’ po ‘you (pl)’ so
The following basic vocabulary words are from the Trans-New Guinea database:[6]
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gloss Usku head flekle hair flekle-kunda ear beikli eye nifi tooth neŋkle tongue bra leg nafu louse nimi bird lokwe egg kle blood kla; mise bone kla; mi skin ninje; ninye breast kiombra tree weli man mekenja; mekenya woman jomia sun nei moon meŋgerne water ei fire jo; yo stone pane road, path tra eat kepo one kisifaini two narna
Morphology[edit]
Usku morphology as inferred by Foley (2018):[3]
Sentences[edit]
Word order in Usku is SOV.[3]
Some of the few documented sentences in Usku are:[3]
(1)
‘She gave money to my father.’
(2)
‘He went to the village.’
(3)
‘That person came from the village.’
(4)
‘The dog bit that person.’
References[edit]
- ^ Usku at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- ^ New Guinea World
- ^ a b c d e Foley, William A. (2018). “The languages of Northwest New Guinea”. In Palmer, Bill (ed.). The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide. The World of Linguistics. Vol. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 433–568. ISBN 978-3-11-028642-7.
- ^ Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013).
- ^ Im, Youn-Shim. 2006. Survey Report on the Usku Language of Papua, Indonesia. Unpublished report. Jayapura: SIL Indonesia.
- ^ Greenhill, Simon (2016). “TransNewGuinea.org – database of the languages of New Guinea”. Retrieved 2020-11-05.
External links[edit]
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