Linguistics

The following description of the Ogea language is taken from a morphological writeup that may be downloaded from this page.

Ogea[1] is a Papuan (non-Austronesian) language spoken by approximately 700 people living in an area 18 kilometers south of the town of Madang, in the Madang Province of Papua New Guinea. The Ogea live in four villages—Garima, Dogia, Balama, and Erima, bounded by the Golgol and Yawor rivers, and the Astrolabe Bay. Ethnically, the Ogea are Melanesians. There is evidence that Polynesians migrated through New Guinea in pre-European times. Although not an Austronesian language, Ogea contains a number of Austronesian cognates—perhaps loan words—indicating the possibility of interaction between the Ogea and the migrating Polynesians. The first recorded contact with the Ogea by a European was likely made by the Russian scientist, Miloucho-Maclay, who describes visits to several Ogea villages between 1871 and 1883 in his diary. Ogea has at least one Russian loan-word, sapora 'axe, hatchet', evidence perhaps that Mikloucho-Maclay introduced metal to the Ogea.

Ogea linguistic data were collected by Michael Colburn while living among the Ogea between 1977 and 1986 under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and during a visit in 1999. The original grammatical analysis was presented by this author in a technical report on file at the Summer Institute of Linguistics at Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea. The original analysis was based on a collection of 40 pages of native authored text, and was reviewed by Dr. Ger Reesink, then of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Papua New Guinea, and now of the Leiden University in the Netherlands. A new analysis of Ogea Morphology was prepared as part of a doctoral dissertation. For these purposes, a collection of native-translated[2] texts containing more than 223,000 words was used. Where paradigms could not be completed using texts, data were elicited from native speakers. The original analysis was based on the minority dialect of Ogea (spoken in Erima village). The analysis presented here is based on the majority dialect (spoken in Garima, Dogia, and Balama). Deviations from the original analysis will be noted.

Phonemically, Ogea has a 15 vowel system with 17 consonants. Syntactically, Ogea is a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) language, with adjectives following nouns, and deictics following adjectives—the reverse of English. Morphologically, Ogea is a highly inflected, suffixing language, with most of the complexity occurring with verbs. There are over 100 basic verbal suffixes, the number of which is significantly multiplied by allomorphic variants. Ogea sentences are often composed of chains of verbs, with suffixes indicating sentence medial versus final positions. Ogea verbs encode inter-clausal temporality (temporal succession—one action occurs following another—and temporal overlap—actions occur simultaneously). They also encode switch reference. Switch reference indicates whether the referents of the clause in question are referents in the following clause. It is useful to classify Ogea verbal suffixes into two major categories: endocentric and exocentric, following the lead of Staalesen and Wells. Endocentric suffixes occur between the verb root and the exocenter. Endocentric suffixes include manner, object, and benefactive suffixes, among others. The same set of endocentric suffixes are used with varying sets of exocentric suffixes. The endocenter itself is composed of the verb root plus the endocentric suffixes. Exocentric suffixes encode inter-clausal temporality, tense, mood, subject, and switch reference. They are termed exocentric because they may contain suffixes that relate to the clause that follows (i.e., inter-clausal temporality and switch reference relate the current clause to the one that follows it).

[1] Also known as Erima in the literature. However, speakers of the language refer to it as Ogea, not Erima (which is a village name).

[2] The use of translated texts is far from ideal, but few native-authored texts are available. The texts used were translated by a native Ogea speaker. The use of such texts for morphological studies is likely more defensible than using them for studies of syntax or discourse. Influence of the source language is less likely to impact morphology than, say, syntax or discourse. To date no morphological contradictions have been found between the large body of translated texts available to this author and the small body of native authored texts that are available. Also, all examples used in this appendix have been verified by a native Ogea speaker.

Downloads

Note: the Ogea Lexicon is an ASCII file that may be viewed directly. It uses the DATR lexical knowledge representation language. The query file may be executed against the lexicon if you have a DATR implementation such as ZDATR.