Kuot language

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Kuot, Kuat, Panaris
Spoken in:	Papua New Guinea
Region:	New Ireland
Total speakers:	2000-3000
Language family:	Language isolate
Writing system:	Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`–`
ISO 639-3:	`kto`

The Kuot language, or Panaras, is a language isolate, the only non-Austronesian language spoken on the island of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. There are about 2400 speakers, concentrated primarily on the northwest coast of the island. Perhaps due to the small speaker base, there are no significant dialects present within Kuot.^[1]

1 Grammar
2 Morphology
- 2.1 't' to 'r' alternation
- 2.2 Vowel shortening
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Grammar

The language uses a VSO word order, similar to Irish and Welsh^[2]. The morphology of the language is primarily agglutinative. There are two grammatical genders, male and female, and distinction is made in the first-person between singular, dual, and plural, as well as between exclusive and inclusive.

For instance, the sentence "parak-oŋ ira-ruaŋ kamin" literally means "my father eats sweet potato". " Parak-oŋ" is a continuous verb meaning "to eat", "ira" means "father", "-ruaŋ" is a suffix used to indicate possession ("my father"), and "kamin" is a simple noun meaning "sweet potato".

[edit] Morphology

There are a number of morphological alternations in the Kuot language:

[edit] 't' to 'r' alternation

The sound "t" in certain possessive markers, such as "-tuaŋ", "-tuŋ" and "-tuo" becomes an "r" sound when it comes after a word ending in a vowel. Compare:

ira-ruaŋ - my father
luguan-tuaŋ - my house
i'rama-ruo - my eye
nebam-tuaŋ - my feather

[edit] Vowel shortening

Where the third person singular masculine suffix "-on" is used on a noun that ends with a vowel, this vowel is typically not pronounced. For instance, "amaŋa-on" is pronounced "a'maŋɔŋ", not "a'maŋaɔŋ"