Usku_language

Usku language

Usku language

Pauwasi language spoken in Indonesia

Usku, or Afra, is a nearly extinct and poorly documented Papuan language spoken by 20 or more people, mostly adults, in Usku village, Senggi District, Keerom Regency, Papua, Indonesia.

Quick Facts Region, Native speakers ...

Wurm (1975) placed it as an independent branch of Trans–New Guinea, but Ross (2005) could not find enough evidence to classify it. Usher (2020) found that it was one of the West Pauwasi languages, though divergent from the other two branches of that family.[2] Foley (2018) classifies Usku as a language isolate.[3]

An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)[4] found lexical similarities between Usku and Kaure. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.

Basic vocabulary

Basic vocabulary of Usku from Im (2006), quoted by Foley (2018):[5][3]

More information gloss ...

The following basic vocabulary words are from the Trans-New Guinea database:[6]

More information gloss ...

Morphology

Usku morphology as inferred by Foley (2018):[3]

Sentences

Word order in Usku is SOV.[3]

Some of the few documented sentences in Usku are:[3]

(1)

e

3

wang

money

o

1SG

ai

father

se

DAT

roti-mo

give-TNS

e wang o ai se roti-mo

3 money 1SG father DAT give-TNS

‘She gave money to my father.’

(2)

e

3

kompong

village

se

DAT

rifli-mo

go-TNS

e kompong se rifli-mo

3 village DAT go-TNS

‘He went to the village.’

(3)

kɨnmar

person

kompong

village

e

ABL

duar-mo

come-TNS

kɨnmar kompong e duar-mo

person village ABL come-TNS

‘That person came from the village.’

(4)

kɨnmar

person

mra-mu

dog-ERG/FOC?

ya-mu

bite-TNS

kɨnmar mra-mu ya-mu

person dog-ERG/FOC? bite-TNS

‘The dog bit that person.’

References

  1. [1]
    Usku at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. [2]
    New Guinea World
  3. [3]
    Foley, William A. (2018). "The languages of Northwest New Guinea". In Palmer, Bill (ed.). The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide. The World of Linguistics. Vol. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 433–568. ISBN 978-3-11-028642-7.
  4. [4]
    Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013).
  5. [5]
    Im, Youn-Shim. 2006. Survey Report on the Usku Language of Papua, Indonesia. Unpublished report. Jayapura: SIL Indonesia.
  6. [6]
    Greenhill, Simon (2016). "TransNewGuinea.org - database of the languages of New Guinea". Retrieved 2020-11-05.
Wiktionary has word lists at Appendix:Pauwasi word lists
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