West Bomberai languages


The West Bomberai languages are a family of Papuan languages spoken on the Bomberai Peninsula of western New Guinea and in East Timor and neighboring islands of Indonesia.

Languages

Two of the languages of the mainland, Baham and Iha, are closely related to each other; the third is distant, forming a third branch of the family along with the Timor–Alor–Pantar languages:
Ross classified Timor–Alor–Pantar with the mainland West Bomberai languages, although this connection is not universally accepted. Usher found that the Timor–Alor–Pantar languages resides within the West Bomberai languages, and is not just their closest relative. This suggests that Timor–Alor–Pantar may have been the result of a relatively recent migration from New Guinea, perhaps arriving in the Timor area shortly before the Austronesian languages did.

Classification

Ross classifies Timor–Alor–Pantar with the West Bomberai languages, the two groups forming a branch within West Trans–New Guinea. Based on a careful examination of new lexical data, Holton & Robinson find little evidence to support a connection between TAP and TNG. However, Holton & Robinson concedes that a relationship with Trans-New Guinea and West Bomberai in particular is the most likely hypothesis, though they prefer to leave it unclassified for now.
Usher finds that the two mainland branches of the family are no closer to each other than they are to the Timor–Alor–Pantar languages, and has begun to reconstruct the West Bomberai protolanguage.

Phonemes

Usher reconstructs the consonant and vowel inventories as:
Prenasalized plosives do not occur initially, having merged with the voiceless plosives.
The vowels are *i *u *e *o *a *ɒ and the diphthong *ai.

Pronouns

Usher reconstructs the free pronouns as:

Cognates

Protoforms of the 40 most-stable items in the Swadesh list include the following.