Trans–New Guinea languages


Trans–New Guinea is an extensive family of Papuan languages spoken on the island of New Guinea and neighboring islands, a region corresponding to the country Papua New Guinea as well as parts of Indonesia.
Trans–New Guinea is perhaps the [List of language families#By number of languages|third-largest language family in the world] by number of languages. The core of the family is considered to be established, but its boundaries and overall membership are uncertain. The languages are spoken by around 3 million people. There have been several main proposals as to its internal classification.

History of the proposal

Although Papuan languages for the most part are poorly documented, several of the branches of Trans–New Guinea have been recognized for some time. The Eleman languages were first proposed by S. Ray in 1907, parts of Marind were recognized by Ray and JHP Murray in 1918, and the Rai Coast languages in 1919, again by Ray.
The precursor of the Trans–New Guinea family was Stephen Wurm's 1960 proposal of an East [New Guinea Highlands languages|East New Guinea Highlands] family. Although broken up by Malcolm Ross in 2005, it united different branches of what became TNG for the first time, linking Engan, Chimbu–Wahgi, Goroka, and Kainantu. Then in 1970, Clemens Voorhoeve and Kenneth McElhanon noted 91 lexical resemblances between the Central and South New Guinea and Finisterre–Huon families, which they had respectively established a few years earlier. Although they did not work out regular sound correspondences, and so could not distinguish between cognates due to genealogical relationship, cognates due to borrowing, and chance resemblances, their research was taken seriously. They chose the name Trans–New Guinea because this new family was the first to span New Guinea, from the Bomberai Peninsula of western West Irian to the Huon Peninsula of eastern PNG. They also noted possible cognates in other families Wurm would later add to TNG: Wurm's East New Guinea Highlands, Binandere in the 'Bird's Tail' of PNG, and two families that John Z'graggen would later unite in his 100-language Madang–Adelbert Range family.
In 1975, Wurm accepted Voorhoeve and McElhanon's suspicions about further connections, as well as Z'graggen's work, and postulated additional links to, among others, the languages of the island of Timor to the west of New Guinea, Angan, Goilalan, Koiarian, Dagan, Eleman, Wissel Lakes, the erstwhile Dani-Kwerba family, and the erstwhile Trans-Fly–Bulaka River family, expanding TNG into an enormous language phylum that covered most of the island of New Guinea, as well as Timor and neighboring islands, and included over 500 languages spoken by some 2,300,000 people. However, part of the evidence for this was typological, and Wurm stated that he did not expect it to stand up well to scrutiny. Although he based the phylum on characteristic personal pronouns, several of the branches had no pronouns in common with the rest of the family, or even had pronouns related to non-TNG families, but were included because they were grammatically similar to TNG. Other families that had typical TNG pronouns were excluded because they did not resemble other TNG families in their grammatical structure.
Given that grammatical typology is readily borrowed – many of the Austronesian languages in New Guinea have grammatical structures similar to their Papuan neighbors, for example, and conversely many Papuan languages resemble typical Austronesian languages typologically –, other linguists were skeptical. William A. Foley rejected Wurm's and even some of Voorhoeve's results, and he broke much of TNG into its constituent parts: several dozen small but clearly valid families, plus a number of apparent isolates.
In 2005, Malcolm Ross published a draft proposal re-evaluating Trans–New Guinea, and found what he believed to be overwhelming evidence for a reduced version of the phylum, based solely on lexical resemblances, which retained as much as 85% of Wurm's hypothesis, though some of it tentatively.
The strongest lexical evidence for any language family is shared morphological paradigms, especially highly irregular or suppletive paradigms with bound morphology, because these are extremely resistant to borrowing. For example, the fact that the German words gut "good" and besser "better" resemble their English counterparts is stronger evidence that German is related to English than the mere lexical correspondence between German rot and English red for the color. However, because of the great morphological complexity of many Papuan languages, and the poor state of documentation of nearly all, in New Guinea this approach is essentially restricted to comparing pronouns. Ross reconstructed pronoun sets for Foley's basic families and compared these reconstructions, rather than using a direct mass comparison of all Papuan languages, attempted to then reconstruct the ancestral pronouns of the Proto-Trans–New Guinea language, such as *ni "we", *ŋgi "you", *i "they", and then compared poorly supported branches directly to this reconstruction. Families required two apparent cognates to be included. However, if any language in a family was a match, the family was considered a match, greatly increasing the likelihood of coincidental resemblances, and because the plural forms are related to the singular forms, a match of 1sg and 1pl, although satisfying Ross's requirement of two matches, is not actually two independent matches, again increasing the likelihood of spurious matches. In addition, Ross counted forms like *a as a match to 2sg *ga, so that all counted as matches to *ga. And although and occur in Papuan pronouns at twice the level expected by their occurrence in pronouns elsewhere in the world, they do not correlate with each other as they would if they reflected a language family. That is, it is argued that Ross's pronouns do not support the validity of Trans–New Guinea, and do not reveal which families might belong to it.
Ross also included in his proposal several better-attested families for non-pronominal evidence, despite a lack of pronouns common to other branches of TNG, and he suggested that there may be other families that would have been included if they had been better attested. Several additional families are only tentatively linked to TNG. Because the boundaries of Ross's proposal are based primarily on a single parameter, the pronouns, all internal structure remains tentative.

The languages

Most TNG languages are spoken by only a few thousand people, with only seven being spoken by more than 100,000. The most populous language outside of mainland New Guinea is Makasae of East Timor, with 100,000 speakers throughout the eastern part of the country. Enga is the most populous Trans-New Guinea language spoken in New Guinea, with more than 200,000 speakers. Golin, Sinasina, Central Dani language|Grand Valley Dani], Kamano, and Bunaq have between 50,000 and 100,000 speakers All other Trans–New Guinea languages have fewer than 50,000 speakers.
The greatest linguistic diversity in Ross's Trans–New Guinea proposal, and therefore perhaps the location of the Trans–New Guinea homeland, is in the interior highlands of Papua New Guinea, in the central-to-eastern New Guinea cordillera, just where Wurm first posited his East New Guinea Highlands family. Indonesian Papua and the Papuan Peninsula of Papua New Guinea have fewer and more widely extended branches of TNG, and were therefore likely settled by TNG speakers after the proto-language broke up.
Ross speculates that the TNG family may have spread with the high population densities that resulted from the domestication of taro, settling quickly in the highland valleys along the length of the cordillera but spreading much more slowly into the malarial lowlands, and not at all into areas such as the Sepik River valley where the people already had yam agriculture, which thus supported high population densities. Ross suggests that TNG may have arrived at its western limit, the islands near Timor, perhaps four to 4.5 thousand years ago, before the expansion of Austronesian into this area.
Roger Blench associates the spread of Trans–New Guinea languages with the domestication of the banana.

Classification

Wurm, Voorhoeve & McElhanon (1975)

Wurm et al. identify the subdivisions in their Papuan classification as families, stocks, and phyla. Trans-New Guinea is a phylum in this terminology. A language that is not related to any other at a family level or below is called an isolate in this scheme.
As of 2003, William A. Foley accepted the core of TNG: "The fact, for example, that a great swath of languages in New Guinea from the Huon Peninsula to the highlands of Irian Jaya mark the object of a transitive verb with a set of verbal prefixes, a first person singular in /n/ and second person singular in a velar stop, is overwhelming evidence that these languages are all genetically related; the likelihood of such a system being borrowed vanishingly small." He considered the relationship between the Finisterre–Huon, Eastern Highlands, and Irian Highlands families to be established, and he said that it is "highly likely" that the Madang family belongs as well. He considered it possible, but not yet demonstrated, that the Enga, Chimbu, Binandere, Angan, Ok, Awyu, Asmat, Mek, Sentani, and the seven small language families of the tail of Papua New Guinea may belong to TNG as well.

Ross (2005)

Ross does not use specialized terms for different levels of classification as Donald Laycock and Stephen Wurm did. In the list given here, the uncontroversial families that are accepted by Foley and other Papuanists and that are the building blocks of Ross's TNG are printed in boldface. Language isolates are printed in italics.
Ross removed about 100 languages from Wurm's proposal, and only tentatively retained a few dozen more, but in one instance he added a language, the isolate Porome.
Ross did not have sufficient evidence to classify all Papuan groups. In addition, the classification is based on a single feature – shared pronouns, especially 1sg and 2sg – and thus is subject to false positives as well as to missing branches that have undergone significant sound changes, since he does not have the data to establish regular sound correspondences.
;Unclassified Wurmian languages
Although Ross based his classification on pronoun systems, many languages in New Guinea are too poorly documented for even this to work. Thus there are several isolates that were placed in TNG by Wurm but that cannot be addressed by Ross's classification. A few of them have since been assigned to existing branches of TNG, whereas others continue to defy classification.
;Reclassified Wurmian languages
Ross removed 95 languages from TNG. These are small families with no pronouns in common with TNG languages, but that are typologically similar, perhaps due to long periods of contact with TNG languages.
and Harald Hammarström accept 35 subgroups as members of Trans-New Guinea.
;Trans-New Guinea subgroups : 35 subgroups, 431 languages
Groups and isolates considered by Pawley and Hammarström as having weaker or disputed claims to membership in Trans-New Guinea :
Groups and isolates sometimes classified as Trans-New Guinea, but rejected by Pawley and Hammarström as Trans-New Guinea:
Glottolog, of which Hammarström is one of the editors, accepts 10 groups as part of a Nuclear Trans–New Guinea family, based on Foley, Pawley and Edgar Suter.
used lexicostatistics to evaluate Pawley and Hammarström, based on 40-word Swadesh list data from the ASJP database. Dryer concludes that the following language families are likely to be Trans–New Guinea. They are listed in order of highest to lowest score, i.e. starting with the most likely.
Dryer does not consider that evidence based solely on pronouns and the word for 'louse' is sufficient to conclude that a family is a member of Trans-New Guinea. This is because they are more likely to be an areal form in the case of the word for 'louse' or to be highly conservative in the case of pronouns. Dryer states that similarities solely in pronouns mean that the families are related but that the relationship is so distant as to be "undetectable".
Dryer notes that this is a preliminary quantitative analysis and only gives a rough prediction of the families that may or may not belong within Trans–New Guinea, and that the lexical similarities it is based on may be due to loanwords, areal forms and so forth.
Dryer lists the following families as "borderline". They have a somewhat higher basic lexical similarity with Trans–New Guinea than with non-Trans–New Guinea families:
Dryer lists the following families as less likely to be Trans–New Guinea. They have few basic vocabulary items in common with Trans–New Guinea:
Timothy Usher and Edgar Suter, in consultation with Papuan language researchers such as William Croft, Matthew Dryer, John Lynch, Andrew Pawley, and Malcolm Ross, have reconstructed low-level constituents of Trans–New Guinea to verify, through the establishment of regular sound changes, which purported members truly belong to it, and to determine their subclassification. In many cases Usher has created new names for the member families to reflect their geographic location. Much of Usher's classification is accepted by Glottolog, though under different names. As of 2024, his classification is as follows, including correspondences to the names in earlier classifications. He expects to expand the membership of the family as reconstruction proceeds.
These branches may cluster together, but the details are as yet unclear.
The families from the Ross and Glottolog classifications that are not included are Kaure, Pauwasi, Engan, Chimbu–Wahgi, Madang, Eleman, Kiwaian, Binanderean, Goilalan, and the several Papuan Gulf families. Usher only includes families that have a regular reflex of the 2sg pronoun, so there may be additional TNG families that have changed their pronouns.

Lexical semantics

A number of colexification patterns, particularly in the nominal domain, are commonly found among Trans–New Guinea languages:
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  • Proto-language