Eipo language
| Eipo | |
|---|---|
| Lik | |
| Native to | Indonesia |
| Region | Eipo River area in Eipumek District, Pegunungan Bintang Regency, Highland Papua |
| Ethnicity | Eipo people |
Native speakers | (3,000 cited 1987)[1] |
Trans–New Guinea
| |
| Latin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | eip |
| Glottolog | eipo1242 |
Eipo (Eipomek), or Lik, is a Mek language of the eastern highlands of Eipumek District, Pegunungan Bintang Regency, Highland Papua. It spoken by the Eipo people who live along the Eipo River. A large percentage of its vocabulary is shared with Una and Tanime, and they form one dialect area.[2]
Classification
[edit]Eipo belongs to the Eastern branch of Mek languages, which is a family of closely related languages belonging to the larger grouping of Trans-New Guinea languages.
Geographic distribution
[edit]The Eipo language is spoken by about 3,000 people along the Eipo River in the valley of Eipomek, which is situated in the eastern highlands of Highland Papua.[1]
Phonology
[edit]Consonants
[edit]Eipo exhibits the following 16 phonemic consonants:[3]
| Bilabial | Labio- dental |
Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive | p | b | t | d | c | k | ɡ | |||
| Fricative | β | f | s | |||||||
| Nasal | m | n | ŋ | |||||||
| Tap or flap | ɾ | |||||||||
| Approximant | j | |||||||||
Vowels
[edit]Eipo has five phonemic vowels:[3]
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | u | |
| Open-mid | e | o | |
| Open | a |
Diphthongs are not regarded as separate phonemes.[3]
Grammar
[edit]Morphology
[edit]Eipo is generally isolating language, but exhibits an elaborate system of agglutination in verb formation.
Syntax
[edit]The usual word order of Eipo is subject-object-verb (SOV).
Deictics
[edit]Eipo has only four basic spatial deictics, which are usually accompanied by pointing gestures, since the deictics are used during face-to-face communication to refer to positions relative to the person.[5]: 119
- a- ‘here’
- ei- ‘up there’
- ou-, u- ‘down there’
- or-, er- ‘across there’ (‘across-valley’)
Interrogatives
[edit]Eipo has many compound interrogatives:[5]: 95
- yate ‘what?, which?, what kind of?’
- yate anye ‘who?’
- yate ate ‘why? (what for)’
- yate arye ‘why? (what reason)’
- yate-barye ‘why?’
- yate-sum ‘when? (what day/time)’
- dan- ‘where?, where to, whence’
- dan-segum ‘whereabouts? (approximate location)’
- dan-tam ("where side") ‘where, whence, whereto’
- dan-ak ("where at") ‘where, whence, whereto’
Writing system
[edit]Eipo is not historically a written language, but in recent decades a Latin alphabet has been devised for it. The letter values are mostly those of the IPA letters given above, with the exceptions of /β/ ⟨w⟩, /ŋ/ ⟨ng⟩, /ɾ/ ⟨r⟩, and /j/ ⟨y⟩.
References
[edit]- ^ a b Eipo at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
- ^ Heeschen 1998, p. 18.
- ^ a b c Heeschen 1998, p. 117.
- ^ a b Heeschen 1998, p. 118.
- ^ a b Pawley, Andrew; Hammarström, Harald (2018). "The Trans New Guinea family". In Palmer, Bill (ed.). The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide. The World of Linguistics. Vol. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 21–196. ISBN 978-3-11-028642-7.
- Heeschen, Volker (1998). An Ethnographic Grammar of the Eipo Language (spoken in the central mountains of Irian Jaya (West New Guinea), Indonesia). Berlin: Reimer.
- Heeschen, Volker and Wulf Schiefenhövel. 1983. Wörterbuch der Eiposprache: Eipo-Deutsch-Englisch. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.