South Bougainville languages

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The South or East Bougainville languages are a small language family spoken on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. They were classified as East Papuan languages by Wurm, but this does not now seem tenable.

The languages include a closely related group called Nasioi and three more divergent languages tentatively classified together under the name Buin:

Buin branch
- Buin
- Motuna (Siwai)
- Uisai isolate
Nasioi branch: Koromira, Lantanai, Naasioi, Nagovisi (Sibe), Oune, Simeku

[edit] Pronouns

Ross reconstructed three pronoun paradigms for proto-South Bougainville, free forms plus agentive and patientive (see morphological alignment) affixes:

	I	we	you	s/he, they
free	*ni(ŋ)	nee DL ni PL	da SG dee DL *dai PL	ba SG bee DL *bai PL
patientive	*-m		*-d	*-b
agentive	*a	*o	i or e	*u

SG: singular; DL: dual; PL: plural

[edit] See also

[edit] References

Structural Phylogenetics and the Reconstruction of Ancient Language History. Michael Dunn, Angela Terrill, Ger Reesink, Robert A. Foley, Stephen C. Levinson. Science magazine, 23 Sept. 2005, vol. 309, p 2072.
Malcom Ross (2005). "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages." In: Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Robin Hide and Jack Golson, eds, Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples, 15-66. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.