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Meyah language
Meyah (Meyakh) is a West Papuan language spoken in North Manokwari District, Manokwari Regency, West Papua, Indonesia. The Meyah language is agglutinative and head-marking and has no grammatical cases. It has subject-verb-object word order, which comes from nearby Austronesian languages.
Meax has 5 vowels and 13 consonants.
Unlike most other Papuan languages of the Bird's Head Peninsula, which are non-tonal, Meyah is a pitch-accent language with two phonemic pitch levels: rising high and falling high. Tone in Meyah is marked only on the stressed syllable within a word.
The related language Sougb is the only other known pitch-accent language in the peninsula, and the only other nearby tonal languages are the linguistic isolates (Mpur and Abun), so it is unclear if Meyan's tone system comes from a common ancestor language shared with Sougb, or via some other path.
Some two- and three-syllable words also have pitch accent. For example, éfes 'young' contrasts with efés 'fat', and óboha 'skull' contrasts with obóha 'tools' and obohá 'spoiled'.
Pronouns demonstrate three numbers: singular, dual, and plural. The first person dual and plural pronouns also demonstrate clusivity.
These prefixes are used for verbs, body parts and kinship terms.
Nouns in Meyah are divided into two types: alienable and inalienable, the latter of which includes terms for body parts and kinship relations, and are obligatorily marked for possessor. With alienable nouns, there is morphological complexity. The plural marker -ir can only be used with humans, pigs, and dogs. There is no other method of indicating plurality for other alienable nouns. For inanimate nouns, a plurality may be indicated by certain modifiers such as:
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Meyah language
Meyah (Meyakh) is a West Papuan language spoken in North Manokwari District, Manokwari Regency, West Papua, Indonesia. The Meyah language is agglutinative and head-marking and has no grammatical cases. It has subject-verb-object word order, which comes from nearby Austronesian languages.
Meax has 5 vowels and 13 consonants.
Unlike most other Papuan languages of the Bird's Head Peninsula, which are non-tonal, Meyah is a pitch-accent language with two phonemic pitch levels: rising high and falling high. Tone in Meyah is marked only on the stressed syllable within a word.
The related language Sougb is the only other known pitch-accent language in the peninsula, and the only other nearby tonal languages are the linguistic isolates (Mpur and Abun), so it is unclear if Meyan's tone system comes from a common ancestor language shared with Sougb, or via some other path.
Some two- and three-syllable words also have pitch accent. For example, éfes 'young' contrasts with efés 'fat', and óboha 'skull' contrasts with obóha 'tools' and obohá 'spoiled'.
Pronouns demonstrate three numbers: singular, dual, and plural. The first person dual and plural pronouns also demonstrate clusivity.
These prefixes are used for verbs, body parts and kinship terms.
Nouns in Meyah are divided into two types: alienable and inalienable, the latter of which includes terms for body parts and kinship relations, and are obligatorily marked for possessor. With alienable nouns, there is morphological complexity. The plural marker -ir can only be used with humans, pigs, and dogs. There is no other method of indicating plurality for other alienable nouns. For inanimate nouns, a plurality may be indicated by certain modifiers such as: