Kâte language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Kâte | ||
|---|---|---|
| Pronunciation: | [kɔtɛ] | |
| Spoken in: | Huon Peninsula, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea | |
| Total speakers: | 6,125 (1978 McElhanon) | |
| Language family: | Trans-New Guinea Finisterre-Huon Kâte |
|
| Writing system: | Latin | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | – | |
| ISO 639-3: | kmg | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Kâte is a Papuan language spoken by about 6,000 people in the Finschhafen District of Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. It is part of the Finisterre-Huon subgroup of the hypothetical Trans-New Guinea phylum of languages (Ross 2005). It was adopted for teaching and mission work among speakers of Papuan languages by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea in the early 1900s and at one time had as many as 80,000 second-language speakers.
Contents |
[edit] Phonology
[edit] Vowels (orthographic)
Kâte distinguishes six vowels. The low back vowel â sounds like the vowel of English law or saw (Pilhofer 1933: 14). Length is not distinctive.
| Front | Back | |
|---|---|---|
| High | i | u |
| Mid | e | o |
| Low | a | â |
[edit] Consonants (orthographic)
The glottal stop, written -c, only occurs after a vowel and Pilhofer first describes it as a vowel feature that distinguishes, for instance, bo 'sugarcane' from boc 'very' and si 'planting' from sic 'broth'. The fricatives f and w are both labiodentals, according to Pilhofer (1933), but bilabials, according to Flierl and Strauss (1977). Alveopalatal z and ʒ are affricates, [ts] and [dz] respectively, but they otherwise pattern like the stops, except that z only occurs between vowels, while ʒ occurs morpheme-initially (Flierl and Strauss 1977: xv). Both Pilhofer (1933: 15) and Flierl and Strauss (1977) describe the labiovelars q and q as coarticulated and simultaneously released [kp] and [gb], respectively. (The boldfaced q here stands for a curly q with hooked serifs that cannot properly be rendered here.)
| Labial | Labiovelar | Dental | Alveopalatal | Velar | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Voiceless stop | p | q | t | -z- | k | -c |
| Voiced stop | b | q | d | ʒ | g | |
| Prenasalized | mb | ŋq | nd | nʒ | ŋg | |
| Nasal | m | n | ŋ | |||
| Voiceless fricative | f | s | h | |||
| Voiced fricative | w | |||||
| Liquid | l | |||||
| Approximant | j |
[edit] Morphology
[edit] Free pronouns
Unlike many Papuan languages, Kâte distinguishes inclusive and exclusive in the 1st person, presumably due to Austronesian influence. The following pronoun table is from Pilhofer (1933: 51-52). Ross (2005: 32) cites nɔh-ɔʔ for 2nd-person plural, corresponding to Pilhofer's nâhâc for 1st-person dual inclusive. Perhaps this reflects a change in Kâte when it added the inclusive-exclusive distinction to its 1st-person pronoun paradigm. Otherwise, Ross's pronouns match Pilhofer's, except orthographically.
| Person | Singular | Plural | Dual |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st person inclusive | nâŋac | nâhâc | |
| 1st person exclusive | no | nâŋe | nâhe |
| 2nd person | go | ŋoŋe | ŋohe |
| 3rd person | e | jaŋe | jahe |
[edit] References
- Flierl, Wilhelm, and Hermann Strauss, eds. (1977). Kâte dictionary. Series C-41. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
- Pilhofer, G. (1933). Grammatik der Kâte-Sprache in Neuguinea. Vierzehntes Beihelf zur Zeitschrift für Eingeborenen-Sprachen. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.
- Ross, Malcolm (2005). "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages", in Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Robin Hide, Jack Golson, eds.: Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, pp. 15-66. ISBN 0858835622. OCLC 67292782.
