Annotated Swadesh wordlists for the Awbono-Bayono group (North Digul River family).

Languages included: Kovojab [kov]; Enamesi [ena]; Awbono [awh].

DATA SOURCES

I. Kovojab.

Wilbrink 2004 = Wilbrink, Ans. 2004. The Kopkaka of Papua. Provisional notes on their language, its language affiliation and on the Kopkaka culture. Master's thesis. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Hischier 2006 = Hischier, Phyllis. 2006. Exploration of the remote Kopayap and Urajin areas in West Papua, Indonesia: A First Contact in Kopayap and Urajin. Manuscript.

II. Bayono.

Wilbrink 2004 = Wilbrink, Ans. 2004. The Kopkaka of Papua. Provisional notes on their language, its language affiliation and on the Kopkaka culture. Master's thesis. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

III. Awbono

Wilbrink 2004 = Wilbrink, Ans. 2004. The Kopkaka of Papua. Provisional notes on their language, its language affiliation and on the Kopkaka culture. Master's thesis. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

NOTES

1. General.

The North Digul River family consists of the Becking and Dawi Rivers languages (see: de Vries, Lourens. 2012. Some notes on the Tsaukambo language of West Papua. Language and Linguistics in Melanesia. Special Issue 2012 Part I: 165-193, and: de Vries, Lourens, Ruth Wester and Wilco van den Heuvel. 2012. The Greater Awyu language family of West Papua. Language and Linguistics in Melanesia. Special Issue 2012 Part I: 269-312) and the Awbono-Bayono family, hitherto considered to be an isolate. A draft reconstruction of proto-North Digul River and its subgroups can be found on the Newguineaworld website under the title "North Digul River." It is part of a larger family which includes Central Digul River (a.k.a. Awyu-Dumut) Sawuy (Sawi) and, likely at somewhat greater remove, the Kamula-Elevala River family (Suter and Usher 2017.) This database only covers the Awbono-Bayono group, since the lexicostatistical distance from it to Becking-Dawi is way too large for us to formally consider all these entities as a single "group" under the current GLD definitions. Data on Becking-Dawi are covered in a separate database.

All these languages besides van Enk and de Vries' (1997) Korowai are scantily documented in the literature available to us at this time, which includes all published and freely-circulating digital works of which we are aware. There are Baas' (1981, cited in de Vries 2012) fieldnotes, but we do not have access to them. Awbono and Bayono are attested solely through survey vocabularies, plus a handful of words in Hischier (2006).

The Awbono-Bayono taxon consists of at least two languages, Awbono and Bayono, spoken to the northwest of Korowai, across the Eilanden river (Wilbrink 2004: 6). Like Korowai, Awbono-Bayono is adjacent to Kopkaka of the West Ok family and has borrowed some words therefrom (e.g. "stone".) To the north is Momuna, the nearest relative of the Mek family still further north. At least one Momuna word ("see") is found in Menanti's Awbono vocabulary as presented in Wilbrink (2004: 108).

Alongside Awbono, we include Menanti's Enamesi/Swesu/Bayono and a vocabulary of Kovojab elicited by Peter Jan de Vries (Wilbrink 2004: 108); presumably the latter is the same dialect as that of Hischier's (2006: 11) Kopayap, for which only 27 words are given. In addition to these, there is a fourth vocabulary entitled Densar (Wilbrink 2004: 105) said to have been collected by Wilbrink himself in April 2001; however there are too many Swadesh terms missing to expect reliable results from its inclusion.

2. Transcription.

The survey vocabularies presented in Wilbrink (2004: 108) are given with standard IPA values throughout and generally need no explanation besides the general description of GLD's Unified Transcription System (http://starling.rinet.ru/new100/UTS.htm), except that Menanti's Awbono and Enamesi/Swesu/Bayono transcriptions use the following conventions:

IPA GLD Menanti
dʒ ǯ j
j y y
y u u

Wilbrink's transcriptions contain a number of inaccuracies, as is evident by comparison to transcriptions of what look to be Menanti's materials by Paul Whitehouse; however in most instances these were spotted and rectified.

Database compiled by: T. Usher (last update: March 3, 2018).