The Central Flores languages (also called Ngadha–Lio[1]) are a subgroup of the Austronesian language family. They are spoken in the central part of Flores, one of the Lesser Sunda Islands in the eastern half of Indonesia. The speech area of the Central Flores languages is bordered to the west by the Manggarai language, and to the east by the Sikka language.[2][1][3]
| Central-Flores | |
|---|---|
| Ngadha–Lio | |
| Geographic distribution | Flores (Indonesia) |
| Linguistic classification | Austronesian
|
| Proto-language | Proto-Central Flores |
| Glottolog | ngad1266 |
Languages edit
The Central Flores subgroup comprises the following languages, from west to east (with subvarieties):[3]
Grammar edit
Unlike most other Austronesian languages, the Central Flores languages are highly isolating.[1][3] They completely lack derivational and inflectional morphemes, and core grammatical relations are mostly expressed by word order. E.g. in Rongga, there is strict SVO word order: jara ndau kenda ja'o (lit. 'horse that kick I') 'that horse kick(ed) me'. Possession is expressed by placing the possessor after the possessed noun: ine ja'o (lit. 'mother I') 'my mother'.[1]
Prehistory edit
According to McWhorter (2010, 2011, 2019), the extreme isolating character of the Central Flores languages is the result of language shift through "heavy adult acquisition", which means that adult populations which originally spoke completely different languages shifted to a language ancestral to the Central Flores languages, but dropped all derivational and inflectional morphology. This process is characteristic for the development of pidgins and creoles, most of which display strong simplification of the source language.[4][5][6]
McWhorter's (2019) hypothesis of adult acquisition and subsequent creolization is dismissed by Elias (2020), who proposes that the isolating character can better be explained by a pre-Austronesian substrate language, which must have had the typological features of the Mekong-Mamberamo area. Elias (2020) estimates that the switch would have taken place around 2,500–1,500 BCE.[7][8]
There remains to explain why the ikat from Ngadha are the only such Floresian textiles to bear distinctive motifs of stick figures such as what may be encoutered in prehistoric imaging;[9] and what to make of the legends that talk of living side by side with some 'little people' until only a few centuries ago - said legends being very strong still in central Flores, less so in the west and inexistent in the east, a repartition which indicates a population movement of outsiders coming from the west.[10]
References edit
- ^ a b c d Arka, I Wayan (2016). Bahasa Rongga: Deskripsi, Tipologi and Teori (in Indonesian). Jakarta: Penerbit Universitas Katolik Indonesia Atma Jaya.
- ^ Schmidt, Christopher (2013). Morphosyntax of Wangka, a dialect of Rembong-Riung (Ph.D. Dissertation). Rice University. hdl:1911/103420.
- ^ a b c Elias, Alexander (2019). Lio and the Central Flores languages (M.A. thesis). Leiden University. hdl:1887/69452.
- ^ McWhorter, John H. (11 February 2010). "Affixless in Indonesia: The Abnormality of Flores". indoling.com (Workshop on the Languages of Papua 2). Retrieved 2024-06-10.
- ^ McWhorter, John H. (2011). "8. Affixless in Austronesian: Why Flores is a puzzle and what to do about it". Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity. Why Do Languages Undress?. Language Contact and Bilingualism, vol. 1. De Gruyter Mouton. p. 223. ISBN 9781934078402.
- ^ McWhorter, John H. (2019). "The radically isolating languages of Flores: a challenge to diachronic theory". Journal of Historical Linguistics. 9 (2): 177–207. doi:10.1075/jhl.16021.mcw.
- ^ Elias, Alexander (2020). "Are the Central Flores languages really typologically unusual?". In David Gil; Antoinette Schapper (eds.). Austronesian Undressed: How and why languages become isolating. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- ^ Elias, Alexander (2018). Lio and the Central Flores languages (thesis as partial fulfilment for the degree of Research Master of Arts in Linguistics). Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University.
- ^ Peter ten Hoopen, curator. "Ikat from Ngadha, Indonesia". ikat.us. Online Museum of Indonesian ikat textiles. Retrieved 2024-06-08.
- ^ McWhorter, John Hamilton (April 30, 2019). "Flores Man vs. Sulawesi. A linguistic mystery in the Lesser Sunda Islands" (audio). slate.com. Lexicon Valley. Retrieved 2024-06-10.