Annotated Swadesh wordlists for the Becking-Dawi group (North Digul River family).

Languages included: Korowai [kor]; Abiowage [abi]; Komyandaret [kom]; Tsaukambo [tsa].

DATA SOURCES

I. Korowai.

Enk & Vries 1997 = Van Enk, Gerrit J. and Lourens de Vries. 1997. The Korowai Of Irian Jaya: Their Language In Its Cultural Context. Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics, 9. Oxford University Press.

II. Abiowage

Hughes 2009 = Hughes, Jock. 2009. Upper Digul Survey. SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2009-003.
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. Komyandaret

Hughes 2009 = Hughes, Jock. 2009. Upper Digul Survey. SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2009-003.

IV. Tsaukambo

Baas 1981 = Baas, Petier. 1981. Tsakwambo Taalstudie. Manuscript.
Hughes 2009 = Hughes, Jock. 2009. Upper Digul Survey. SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2009-003.
Vries 2012 = De Vries, Lourens. 2012. Some notes on the Tsaukambo language of West Papua. In: Language and Linguistics in Melanesia Special Issue 2012 Part I: 165-193.

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 Becking-Dawi group, since the lexicostatistical distance from it to Awbono-Bayono is way too large for us to formally consider all these entities as a single "group" under the current GLD definitions. Data on Awbono-Bayono are covered in a separate database.

All of 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).

Hughes' (2009: 27-37) Abiowage, said to be Korowai, is thought reliable and distinct enough from van Enk and de Vries' (1997) Korowai to be worth including. Based upon its location as shown in Hughes (2009: 2) it can probably be identified with Ethnologue's North Korowai dialect. Seven other elicitations or varieties of Korowai are presented in Wilbrink (2004) but have not been included here. One is drawn from the same underlying material as Hughes' Abiowage but is attributed only to SIL.

2. Transcription.

Van Enk and de Vries' (1997: 54-64) practical orthography of Korowai corresponds to IPA and GLD values as follows:

IPA GLD van Enk and de Vries
m m m
n n n
ŋ ŋ ng
p p p
t t t
k k k
ɸ ɸ f
s s s
x x kh
w w w
l l l
j y y
i i i
y u u
e e é
ǝ ǝ e
ɛ ɛ è
ɔ ɔ o
a a a
ˈV ˈV V̱

Hughes' (2009: 27-37) Abiowage, Komyandaret and Tsaukambo survey vocabularies are given with standard IPA values throughout and need no explanation besides the general description of GLD's Unified Transcription System (http://starling.rinet.ru/new100/UTS.htm).

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