Mairasi languages
family of Papuan languages
The Mairasi languages, also known as Etna Bay, are a small independent family of Papuan languages in the classifications of Malcolm Ross and Timothy Usher, that had been part of Stephen Wurm's Trans–New Guinea proposal. They are named after Etna Bay, located in the southeastern corner of West Papua province, in Indonesia.
Languages
The Mairasi languages are clearly related to each other.
Mairasi family: Semimi, Mer, Mairasi, Northeastern Mairasi
Classification
Mairasi cannot be linked to other families by its pronouns. However, Voorhoeve (1975) links it to the Sumeri (Tanah Merah) language, either a language isolate or an independent branch of the Trans–New Guinea family.
Pawley and Hammarström (2018) do not consider there to be sufficient evidence for the Mairasi languages to be classified as part of Trans-New Guinea, though they do note the following lexical resemblance between Mairasi, Semimi, and proto-Trans-New Guinea.
Mairasi ooro and Semimi okoranda ‘leg’ < proto-Trans-New Guinea *k(a,o)nd(a,o)C ‘leg’
Phonemes
Usher (2020) reconstructs the consonant inventory as follows:
Vowels are *a *e *i *o *u. *ns is uncommon.
Pronouns
Usher (2020) reconstructs the free and possessive pronouns as:
Basic vocabulary
Some lexical reconstructions by Usher (2020) are:
Lexical comparisons
Below is a basic vocabulary table of Mairasi languages (Mairasi, Mer, Semimi) with potential cognate matches, from Peckham (1991a,b), quoted in Foley (2018):
Usher's protoforms of the 20 most stable items in the Swadesh list include the following.
See also
Papuan languages
Further reading
Peckham, Lloyd.
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