Central Solomon languages

Central Solomons
Geographic
distribution		 Solomon Islands
Linguistic classification One of the world's primary language families
Subdivisions
  • Bilua
  • Touo
  • Lavukaleve
  • Savosavo
Glottolog None

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Language families of the Solomon Islands.
  Central Solomons

The Central Solomon languages are the four Papuan languages spoken in the Solomon Islands. They were identified as a family by Wilhelm Schmidt in 1908 and were classified as East Papuan languages by Wurm, but this does not now seem tenable, and was abandoned in Ethnologue (2009). Although some studies have tried to find if these languages are genetically related, no conclusive proof has been found by now.[1]

The four languages are,

Pronouns reconstructions

Ross (2001) reconstructs pronouns and pronominal object suffixes (represented with hyphens) for proto-Central Solomons as follows:

Person Singular Dual Plural
1 exclusive *ŋa, *a *-la *ge *ŋe, *ve
1 inclusive ? *mai
2 *ŋo, *nu ? *be *me
3 masculine ? *-la *la(/*lo) *ma, *mu
3 feminine *vo, ko *-ma

Pedrós (2015) argues for the existence of the family through comparison of pronouns and other gender, person and number morphemes and based on the existence of a common syncretism between 2nd person nonsingular and inclusive. He performs an internal reconstruction for the pronominal morphemes of each language and then proposes a reconstruction of some of the pronouns of the claimed family. The reconstructions are the following:

1 singular 2 singular inclusive/
2 singular 		1 exclusive
Pre-Savosavo *a-ɲi *no *me a-
Pre-Touo e̤ noe *me e̤-
Pre-Lavukaleve *ŋai *ŋo *me e
Pre-Bilua *ani/*aŋai *ŋo me e-
Proto-Central Solomons *ani/*aŋai *ŋo *me *e

See also

References

  1. ↑ Terrill, Angela, 2006. "Central Solomon Languages". In Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, ed. by Keith Brown: 279–281.
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