Muyu language
Muyu, Moyu, is one of the Ok languages of South Papua, Indonesia.
Based on available resources, linguists divided it to two varieties Kadi and South Muyu. However according to native speakers, it may be a dialect continuum of 9 mutually intelligible dialects which also include Ningrum and Yonggom. Petabahasa by Indonesia Ministry of Education classified it to three languages, Kadi spoken in Kampung Woropko, South Muyu spoken in Kampung Anggumbit, and Muyu in Kampung Kamka.
Phonology
The stop consonants are represented orthographically as either voiceless ⟨p, t, k⟩ or voiced ⟨b, d, g⟩ consonants, reflecting the language's allophonic rules.Grammar
Overview
The typical constituent order of a clause in Muyu is verb final. Role marking of core arguments is largely done through subject agreement on finite verbs, with a small number of verbs also indexing their object, and some verbs displaying verbal number alternations. Nouns lack bound morphology; postpositions, relational nouns, and a multipurpose oblique clitic serve to mark peripheral roles, while core arguments are unmarked by default. Verbs are morphologically complex; in addition to indexing their participants, they also take suffixes indicating aspect and mood, they may be marked for switch-reference, and there are a number of non-finite forms. Complex predicates are frequent in Muyu, including light verb constructions, auxiliary verbs, and multi-verb constructions, where each verb contributes its lexical meaning to express a complex event. Chains of multiple clauses in a row, where all but the final are marked for switch-reference, are frequently used to link multiple events together.Nouns, their modifiers, and the noun phrase
Nouns and pronouns
s are morphologically simple. There is a grammatical gender system, in which the two genders are masculine and feminine. Gender agreement surfaces on the verb, where subject and object indexes distinguish masculine and feminine in the third person singular, and on pronouns, where the second person singular also makes a gender distinction. Grammatical gender assignment for humans or animals is based on their sex/gender, while there seems to be no clear pattern for inanimates, and often masculine agreement is used as default even for a feminine inanimate noun. Kin terms behave differently to other nouns; they are the only nouns able to take morphology, a plural -a suffix, and many have two seemingly unrelated forms, based on whether the kin is discussed in relation to a 3rd person, or a 1st or 2nd person; when discussing "his/her/their father", one would use adi, while for "my/your father", emba is used. The infinitive form of the verb, produced with the suffix -i, can be used as a verbal noun.Personal pronouns distinguish all three persons, and the number singular and plural, while the second and third person pronouns also make a gender distinction. The pronouns may not be used when referring to inanimates.
Common modifiers of nouns
s follow the head noun in the noun phrase, or can head a nonverbal predicate, and be intensified by the word kai following them. They can be derived to form inchoative verbs meaning "become " with either the suffix -n or -teleb, the first producing a singular verb, the latter a plural verb.Quantifiers follow the noun, and include numerals and non-numeral quantifiers. Numerals above alopmin "three" are rarely used, and often are also words for body parts, indicative of a body-tally counting system. The quantifiers kadap and timung both indicate a large quantity, "many" or "much", while kumun means "all".
There are a large number of demonstratives in Muyu, built on the bound forms e- and o-, which are analysed as proximal and unspecified for deixis, respectively, as well as elevational demonstratives which also include specification for height, with the consonants d and n in the forms used for high and low elevation, such as eyadi, eyani "up here, down here". The forms edo, odo, and ege, ogo can both function as adnominal or pronominal demonstratives for subjects and direct objects, and mark a relative clause, while only the -do forms can be used identificationally, and only the -g forms can be used adnominally in indirect object or adjunct noun phrases. The forms eya, oya have adverbial function, like English here, there. Other forms include other kinds of information, such as marking a referent as nonvisible, marking it as the boundary of space or movement as in "until", or as contrastive with another referent.
Role-marking
The noun phrase can be followed by the oblique clitic =bet, which has diverse functions, its exact interpretation often depending on syntactic position, or context. It can express the location of an event, or the goal or source of a movement; the instrument used to carry out an action, the time an event takes place, or the items/substance from which only some is affected in sentences like "they took some of the dogs". It can even be used to mark the subject of a verb, emphasising it in some way, such as when the object is placed before the subject in the clause, to contrast the subject with other possible subjects, to indicate that an inanimate referent is the subject, along with other functions.There are spatial relation nouns which can be possessed and head a noun phrase, like yondem "behind", or bun "outside, and postpositions, such as tap "under, and ya "at", which cannot be possessed or head a noun phrase, but both word types fulfill similar functions of expressing location. Other postpositions mark different functions too, such as adep "like", or yeman "for", and some postpositions may have a clause as their complement as well.
The noun phrase
In the noun phrase, the head slot has one slot before it, which can be filled by a possessor or a relative clause. Following the head is a slot for modifiers, both adjectives and relative clauses; then quantifiers; and then finally determiners. Postpositions generally come after all other elements, but in order to modify a noun with both a postposition and a demonstrative, the demonstrative must come after the postposition, however. Pronominal possessors directly precede the possessed noun, while a third person pronoun indexing the possessor may separate a nominal possessor from the possessum. Similarly, a pronoun separates a prenominal relative clause from the head noun, though it is obligatory, and fixed in the third person singular masculine form. Postnominal relative clauses, on the other hand, are obligatorily followed by a demonstrative in the determiner slot.Noun phrases can be coordinated by juxtaposition, or by yom, or yanop, which otherwise function as a comitative postposition, or both a comitative postposition and an existential particle, respectively, following each coordinand.
Verbs and predicates
Verbs are morphologically complex. What exactly is marked on a verb is dependent on both syntactic position, and lexical specification, but indexing the person, number, and gender of their subject, and their objects, marking aspect and mood, taking switch-reference markers, having distinct stems based on verbal number/pluractionality, and a few non-finite forms, are all possibilities.A verbal predicate may consist of multiple words, a Complex Predicate, in the form of auxiliary verb constructions, light verb constructions, and multi-verb constructions. Auxiliary verbs have grammatical meaning and do not generally occur alone, while light verbs allow nouns or adjectives to function like a verbal predicate, while in multi verb constructions, all the verbs involved use their lexical meaning.
Muyu has a system of verbal number, in which some verbs have two stems, based on whether their subject if intransitive, their object if transitive, or the number of times the event occurred, is singular or plural. These stems may be related to each other; the stems may start the same but have different endings, or one may be a suffixed version of the other, or they may bear no resemblance and likely be suppletive, such as kale "throw " vs namo "throw ".
Verb morphology
Regular verbs have a vowel at the end of their stem, either o, e, or a, which is dropped when combining with certain suffixes, though there are irregular verb stems which never lose their final vowel, those in which the vowel of the stem harmonises with a following suffix, and those which display a final -n or -bVl with a harmonising vowel in some forms but not others.Verbs come in three main inflectional patterns based off of their clausal position. Final verbs have access to the full range of Aspect and Mood morphology, and person/number/gender indexing morphemes. Medial verbs occur in non-final clauses of a clause chain, take a distinct set of indexing morphemes, have limited possibilities for Aspect and Mood inflection, and take switch-reference markers. Both final and medial verbs are finite. Non-finite verbs are unable to index subjects, or be marked for switch-reference; they occur with a Mood marker in just a single construction.
Participant indexing
is obligatory on finite verbs, with final, medial, and imperative verbs all taking distinct subject affixes. All three persons are distinguished in the singular, with the third person also making a masculine/feminine distinction, while in the plural, only first versus non-first person is distinguished. In the imperative however, all three persons are distinguished in the plural.Object indexing is obligatory on a small number of irregular verbs, some take prefixes, others suffixes. Both sets of object indexing morphemes have only a single form for all plural objects; the prefixes make a 3-way person distinction in the singular, with gender distinguished in the third person, while the suffixes only distinguish between first and non-first person in the singular. The object suffixes, unlike the object prefixes may occur on other transitive verbs rarely, sometimes indexing the expected object, sometimes a beneficiary. Two verbs have more divergent behaviour, there is a verb meaning "hit/kill" which has no stem: truncated variants of the object prefixes are simply directly followed by verbal suffixes. The other, -mo- "give", takes both an object prefix, indexing the item given, and an object suffix, indexing the recipient. These object markers distinguish number only. There is also a verb, kombi, which is ambitransitive, either taking an object prefix meaning "hit/kill", or an intransitive verb meaning "fall", which, unlike other verbs, indexes its subject with the prefixes otherwise used for objects, while the subject suffix is frozen in the third-person singular masculine form.