The Greater West Bomberai Language Family

Timothy Usher; Antoinette Schapper

doi:10.1353/ol.2021.0028

The Greater West Bomberai Language Family

Timothy Usher, Antoinette Schapper

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Abstract

This paper demonstrates the existence of the Greater West Bomberai family, bringing the Timor–Alor–Pantar language family of the Lesser Sunda islands into a genealogical unit with the Papuan languages of the western part of the Bomberai peninsula in New Guinea. Applying the comparative method to the increasingly available data from these languages, we demonstrate their relatedness on the basis of forty-seven lexical cognate sets with largely regular sound correspondences. Grammatical evidence in the form of pronouns is invoked to further demonstrate the relatedness of these languages. Loans from Austronesian languages have been identified and eliminated from our comparisons. Establishing the family has repercussions for our view of Island Southeast Asian prehistory, entailing the existence of maritime Papuan-language-speaking groups from an early time.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	469-527
Number of pages	59
Journal	Oceanic Linguistics
Volume	61
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1353/ol.2021.0028 https://doi.org/10.1353/ol.2022.0004
Publication status	Published - 1 Jun 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
1. Schapper’s research was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research VENI project “The evolution of the lexicon. Explorations in lexical stability, semantic shift and bor-rowing in a Papuan language family,” the Volkswagen Stiftung DoBeS project “Aru languages documentation,” the Australian Research Council project (ARC, DP180100893) “Waves of words,” and the European Research Council “OUTOFPAPUA” project (Grant Agreement No. 848532). We thank František Kratochvíl, Laura Robinson, and Jeroen Willemsen for shar-ing their invaluable unpublished data.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved.

Funding

1. Schapper’s research was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research VENI project “The evolution of the lexicon. Explorations in lexical stability, semantic shift and bor-rowing in a Papuan language family,” the Volkswagen Stiftung DoBeS project “Aru languages documentation,” the Australian Research Council project (ARC, DP180100893) “Waves of words,” and the European Research Council “OUTOFPAPUA” project (Grant Agreement No. 848532). We thank František Kratochvíl, Laura Robinson, and Jeroen Willemsen for shar-ing their invaluable unpublished data.

Funders	Funder number
Automotive Research Center	DP180100893
Automotive Research Center
European Research Council	848532
European Research Council
Australian Research Council
Volkswagen Foundation

Keywords

Comparative Method
Historical Linguistics
Papuan Languages

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The Greater West Bomberai Language FamilyFinal published version, 1.33 MBLicence: Article 25fa Dutch Copyright Act

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abstract = "This paper demonstrates the existence of the Greater West Bomberai family, bringing the Timor–Alor–Pantar language family of the Lesser Sunda islands into a genealogical unit with the Papuan languages of the western part of the Bomberai peninsula in New Guinea. Applying the comparative method to the increasingly available data from these languages, we demonstrate their relatedness on the basis of forty-seven lexical cognate sets with largely regular sound correspondences. Grammatical evidence in the form of pronouns is invoked to further demonstrate the relatedness of these languages. Loans from Austronesian languages have been identified and eliminated from our comparisons. Establishing the family has repercussions for our view of Island Southeast Asian prehistory, entailing the existence of maritime Papuan-language-speaking groups from an early time.",

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The Greater West Bomberai Language Family

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Keywords

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