Even More Diverse Than We Had Thought: the Multiplicity of Trans-Fly Languages
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Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 5 (December 2012) Melanesian Languages on the Edge of Asia: Challenges for the 21st Century, ed. by Nicholas Evans and Marian Klamer, pp. 109–149 http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/sp05/ 5 http://hdl.handle.net/10125/4562 Even more diverse than we had thought: The multiplicity of Trans-Fly languages Nicholas Evans Australian National University Linguistically, the Trans Fly region of Southern New Guinea is one of the least known parts of New Guinea. Yet the glimpses we already have are enough to see that it is a zone with among the highest levels of linguistic diversity in New Guinea, arguably only exceeded by those found in the Sepik and the north coast. After surveying the sociocultural setting, in particular the widespread practice of direct sister-exchange which promotes egalitarian multilingualism in the region, I give an initial taste of what its languages are like. I focus on two languages which are neighbours, and whose speakers regularly intermarry, but which belong to two unrelated and typologically distinct families: Nen (Yam Family) and Idi (Pahoturi River Family). I then zoom out to look at some typological features of the whole Trans-Fly region, exemplifying with the dual number category, and close by stressing the need for documentation of the languages of this fascinating region. 1. INTRODUCTION.1 The distribution of linguistic diversity is highly informative, about 1 My thanks to two anonymous referees and to Marian Klamer for their usefully critical comments on an earlier version of this paper. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Australian National University (Professorial Setup Grant) and the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project ‘Languages of Southern New Guinea’) for supporting my fieldwork in Southern PNG, the Linguistics Society of America for support to teach a Field Methods course on Idi at the Boulder Linguistics Institute in 2011, as well as the ANRC for funding enabling me to attend the Manokwari conference, to members of the audience there for their helpful discussion, and Jeff Siegel, Christian Döhler, Grahame Martin and Garrick Hitchcock for access to unpublished materials drawn on here. Most importantly I thank my Nen and Idi teachers, particularly Michael Binzawa, †Aramang Wlila, Jimmy Nébni and Wasang Baiio, for their insightful and dedicated efforts to teach me their languages. Material on Idi comes predominantly from two sources: recordings made with Wasang Baiio during a Field Methods course at the LSA Institute in Boulder, Colorado in July-Aug 2011, and material recorded from Mr Gus Iamatta (Ymta) in 2010, who at that time was the school principal at Bimadbn community school. I would also like to thank Ewelina Wnuk, Kate Miller, Rebecca Defina and Grant Aiton who during the Field cc Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives Licence Multiplicity of Trans-Fly languages 110 history, social configurations, and ideologies of language use. Over the last four decades of scholarship, New Guinea’s position as the most linguistically diverse region of the planet has not changed, but received views of where the most deep-level diversity lies within New Guinea have moved substantially. Various versions of the Trans-New Guinea hypothesis have led to hundreds of languages centred on the cordillera being joined into a single family of (sometimes only distantly) related languages, whereas the progression of research on the Sepik has found a mosaic of small families and isolates – a pattern taken to be more representative of New Guinea as a whole before the spread of Trans-New Guinea languages. Southern New Guinea – and more particularly that part of it known as the Trans-Fly (fig. 1)2 –has not yet figured prominently in assessments of where the most diversity lies. Though it has sometimes been mentioned (e.g. Pawley 2008:51) as ‘a smaller region of high diversity’, existing assessments tend to lump together several families on little evidence: both Pawley (2005) and Ross (2005:30-31) essentially reproduce Wurm’s earlier lumper classification of what I will argue are several distinct families in the Trans-Fly region. Methods course elicited some of the material cited here in small-group sessions. Material on Warta Thundai comes from a field methods course taught in February 2011 with Sembara Dibara whom I thank for his enthusiastic participation. 2 There is no universally accepted definition of the extent of ‘Trans-Fly’: it tends to be well-defined at its eastern and northern extremities (by the Fly River) and to the south by the Torres Strait but, as one moves west, geographical boundaries give way to political ones, as in Williams’ (1936) ‘the south-west corner of Papua’ (where Papua meant the [then] Australian territory of Papua). From the ecological point of view, however, it makes sense to consider the Trans-Fly Region as extending somewhat further west, taking in Kolopom Island, as is done in Fig. 1, and this is the term that has been adopted by conservationist groups like the World Wildlife Fund. For present purposes I will take it to extend across the (modern) national boundary to the Merauke River, in traditional Marind territory. Southern New Guinea is of course bigger than this, with many other linguistic groupings which I do not discuss here, such as Yelmek-Maklew, which Ross (2005) treats as non-TNG but part of a ‘South-Central Papuan’ family without adducing any evidence of formal cognacy across the three branches. A full discussion of these languages is beyond the scope of this article, but the existence of further groups to the west of the Trans-Fly merely amplifies the point I am making here. MELANESIAN LANGUAGES ON THE EDGE OF ASIA: CHALLENGES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY Multiplicity of Trans-Fly languages 111 FIGURE 1. The Trans-Fly Region, as defined by the WWF (WWF Transfly Team 2006) In this paper I will argue that Southern New Guinea in fact contains more deep diversity than has hitherto been realised, with somewhere between five and eight unrelatable families taking in forty or so languages in an area about the size of the Netherlands. On top of that, there are major typological differences between the languages of these families, and many of them (such as the Yam and Pahoturi River families) diverge significantly from the picture of a ‘typical Papuan language’ that has arisen from studies centred in the Highlands, the Sepik or the islands to the east of the New Guinea mainland. Taken together, data from Southern New Guinea significantly amplifies our view of the overall level of diversity in New Guinea. This diversity is even more astonishing given that the region did not even exist in its present form until recently and large parts of it were underwater following mid-Holocene sea-level rises until rebuilt by progradation from sediments brought down by the Fly and Digul rivers. It is thus unlikely that all language differences currently found in Southern New Guinea developed in situ. What seems more likely is that they represent the interaction of a number of unrelated groups entering the region from different regions as it became habitable land, combined with specific features favouring diversification such as the pattern of direct sister-exchange between small groups to be discussed in §2.1.2, which is likely to have created high levels of diversity in a multilingual population coupled with a valuation of very local markers of linguistic allegiance. I structure the paper as follows. In §2 I give a basic description of the geography and ethnography of the region. In §3 I review the main linguistic groupings, as currently MELANESIAN LANGUAGES ON THE EDGE OF ASIA: CHALLENGES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY Multiplicity of Trans-Fly languages 112 understood, then in §4 go on to give brief portraits of Nen and Idi, two languages which, although close geographical neighbours bound by relations of marriage exchange and multilingualism, diverge significantly on a wide range of measures – not only are they in different phylogenetic groups, but their typological profiles also differ markedly. But divergence of this type does not mean there are no significant areal features across Southern New Guinea, and in §5 I illustrate this point with one such feature – three-valued number systems – while emphasising that the means of composing the dual value vary significantly from one language group to another. I close the article in §6 by summarising the key scientific challenges facing linguists as we confront a zone that is simultaneously one of the most diverse and one of the least-known regions of the logosphere. 2. SOUTHERN NEW GUINEA AS A GEOGRAPHICAL AND CULTURAL REGION. In its biota, such as its vegetation of eucalypts, melaleuca, acacia and banksias combined with wallabies, bandicoots, goannas, taipans and termite mounds, Southern New Guinea is more like northern Australia than like the rest of New Guinea. Geographically, much of it is new, low land, a kind of tropical Netherlands built up over the last few millennia as the giant Fly River to the east (fig. 2) and the Digul and other rivers to the west have carried down and deposited sediment from the central cordillera. Compared to most of present-day New Guinea and Australia (except for the Sepik), it has had a turbulent geomorphological past over the last 10,000 years. The ancient land-bridge to Australia was severed by the rising seas around 9,000 b.p., and for a while higher sea- levels than today meant that some of what is now land was then submerged, before being rebuilt by progradation. The northern parts are characterised by vast tracts of rainforest, with only the occasional clearing for a village, swidden garden or sago (fig.