Nancowry_language

Nancowry language

Nancowry language

Nicobarese language of the Nicobar Islands, India


Nancowry (Nancoury, Nankwari, Mūöt) is a Nicobarese language spoken on the Nancowry Island in the central Nicobar Islands. It is not mutually intelligible with the other Central Nicobarese languages, and is distantly related to Vietnamese and Khmer.

Quick Facts Pronunciation, Native to ...

Phonology

Consonants

More information Labial, Alveolar/ Retroflex ...
  • The labial glide written variously v and w is written ʋ.

Vowels

More information Front, Central ...

Vocabulary

Paul Sidwell (2017)[3] published in ICAAL 2017 conference on Nicobarese languages.

More information Word, proto-Nicobarese ...

Morphology

Presence of a coda-copy-infixation system. Stock of lexical roots is reduced by active word taboo and hence rely on derivation extensively.

  • kóɲ - 'male, husband'
  • ʔumkóɲ -'to turn into a man'
  • mumkóɲ - 'eunuch'
  • ʔinkóɲtet - 'widower'
  • kóɲu - 'to marry, to have a man'
  • kamóɲu - 'married women'

Shared morphological alternations: the old AA causative has two allomorphs, prefix ha- with monosyllabic stems, infix -um- in disyllabic stems (note: *p > h onset in unstressed σ).

  • ŋok - 'to eat' / haŋok 'to feed'
  • cim - 'to cry' / hacim 'to make someone cry'
  • lapəʔ - 'pretty' / lumpəʔ 'to make someone pretty'
  • karuʔ - 'large' / kumdruʔ 'to enlarge'
More information Person, Singular ...

References

  1. Edward Horace Man, 1889, A dictionary of the central Nicobarese language
  2. Nicobarese, Central at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)



Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Nancowry_language, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.