| Alor–Pantar | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution: |
Alor Island, Pantar Island, Indonesia |
| Linguistic classification: | Trans–New Guinea ?
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| Subdivisions: | |
The languages of Pantar (left) and Alor (right). Retta is not shown. "Western Pantar" is Lamma. Kafoa (Jafoo) is the black area between Kelon (Klon) and Abui. Kabola is merged with Adang. Alorese is an Austronesian language.
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The Alor–Pantar languages are a family of clearly related Papuan languages spoken on islands of the Alor archipelago near Timor in southern Indonesia. They may be most closely related to the non-Austronesian languages of western Timor, but this is not yet clear. A more distant relationship with the Trans–New Guinea languages of the Bomberai peninsula has been proposed based on pronominal evidence, but though often cited has never been firmly established.
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The family is conventionally divided into two branches, centered on the islands of Alor and Pantar.
Tereweng is sometimes considered a separate language from Blagar, and Hamap sometimes separate from Adang. Abui, Kamang, and Kabola may also not be unitary languages.
The 15th edition of Ethnologue included Makasae as a third branch, but by comparing pronouns, Malcolm Ross concluded that Makasae belongs with the East Timor languages. This is reflected in the 16th edition.
Language documentation efforts in the early 21st century have produced a range of published documentary materials.
It has long been recognized that the Papuan languages of the Alor archipelago (including Alor and Pantar, as well as the four small islands of Buaya, Pura, Ternate, and Tereweng in the Pantar Strait) form a well-defined group. Apparent cognates among basic vocabulary are abundant, as demonstrated for example in Stokhof’s (1975) survey of basic vocabulary, and the shape of pronominal systems is almost identical across the group.[7] Relationships between the Alor–Pantar languages and at least some (though perhaps not all) of the non-Austronesian languages of Timor Island may justify the positing of a Timor–Alor–Pantar language family, however the relationship between the AP group and the Timor languages is of a second order. A bottom-up approach to reconstruction would suggest focusing on the AP group before assessing the strength of the putative connection to Timor.
Based on an examination of possessive prefixes, Capell (1944) originally postulated that the AP languages were related to the West Papuan Phylum languages of North Maluku and the Bird’s Head of New Guinea.[8] This hypothesis was later countered by Wurm et al. (1975), who classified these languages as members of the putative Trans–New Guinea Phylum.[9] However, the authors offered little evidence for this classification and remained somewhat doubtful, noting, “whichever way they [the Timor–Alor–Pantar languages] are classified, they contain strong substratum elements of the other … phyla involved” (Wurm et al. 1975:318). Most recently, based on an analysis of pronominal shapes Ross (2005) assigns AP to his West Trans–New Guinea linkage, a subgroup of Trans–New Guinea.[10] Yet Ross’ proposal requires that AP pronouns be derived from pTNG via a flip-flop in which second person pronouns trade places with third person. Compare pTNG *ŋga ‘2pro’ and *(y)a ‘3pro’ with Nedebang aŋ and gaŋ, respectively. Bottom-up reconstruction based on regular sound correspondences may shed further light on these issues.