| Also Known As: Kuot Language,Panaras,Kuat
Description:
The Kuot language, or Panaras, is a language isolate, the only non-Austronesian language spoken on the island of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. There are about 2400 speakers, concentrated primarily on the northwest coast of the island. Perhaps due to the small speaker base, there are no significant dialects present within Kuot.
The language uses a VSO word order, similar to Irish and Welsh. The morphology of the language is primarily agglutinative. There are two grammatical genders, male and female, and distinction is made in the first-person between singular, dual, and plural, as well as between exclusive and inclusive.
For instance, the sentence "parak-oŋ ira-ruaŋ kamin" literally means "my father eats sweet potato". " Parak-oŋ" is a continuous verb meaning "to eat", "ira" means "father", "-ruaŋ" is a suffix used to indicate possession ("my father"), and "kamin" is a simple noun meaning "sweet potato".
There are a number of morphological alternations in the Kuot language:
The sound "t" in certain possessive markers, such as "-tuaŋ", "-tuŋ" and "-tuo" becomes an "r" sound when it comes after a word ending in a vowel. Compare:
Where the third person singular masculine suffix..... full article at Wikipedia |
