Maisin language

Maisin (or Maisan) is a divergent Austronesian language of Papua New Guinea, containing Papuan features. It is a Nuclear Papuan Tip language, with the Papuan element being Binanderean or Dagan. It is spoken by the Maisin people of Oro Province.

Maisin displays significant lexical copying from Korafe, a neighboring Papuan language.Template:Sfn

Other languages with disputed affiliation between either Austronesian or Papuan are Magori, the Reefs-Santa Cruz languages, the Lower Mamberamo languages, and the Pasismanua languages.Template:Sfn

Phonology

Vowels

Monophthongs

	Front	Back
High
Mid
Low

Diphthongs

	Ending with	Ending with	Ending with	Ending with	Ending with
Starting with
Starting with
Starting with
Starting with
Starting with

Consonants

		Bilabial		Alveolar	Palatal	Velar
		Unrounded	Rounded			Unrounded	Rounded
Stop	Voiceless
	Voiced
Nasal
Fricative	Voiceless
	Voiced
Flap
Approximant

and are not phonemic, but are distinguished in the orthography.

Phonotactics

Syllables can begin and end with up to one consonant each. I.e., English wrong would be an acceptable word, but strength would not. Words can only end in either a vowel or . The vowels and never occur word-initially. never occurs before or .

Writing system

A a	B b	D d	E e	F f	Fw fw	G g	I i	J j	K k	M m
N n	O o	R r	S s	T t	U u	V v	W w	Y y	Kw kw	Ŋ ŋ

Literacy varies from 20% to 80% in different areas.

Morphosyntax

Negation

Negation in Maisin

Negation in Maisin is achieved predominantly by morphology. In the Marua communalect, negation is marked by ,Template:Sfn while in the Sinapa communalect, negation is marked by .Template:Sfn The negation marking is discontinuous.Template:Sfn

is a morpheme located prior to the predicate of the sentence, and can be roughly glossed as 'not' in English. Morphologically, it is classified as a separate word.Template:Sfn is an enclitic that is found attached to a verb's tense- or aspect-marking enclitic. Alternatively, when there is no tense- or aspect-marking enclitic in the sentence, it attaches to the predicate's last item.Template:Sfn Negation through can be seen in the following examples.

In Example 1, the verb stem 'swim' takes both the progressive marker (created through partial reduplication of the verb stem Template:Sfn and the negative enclitic , as well as the male second-person singular pronominal enclitic. The enclitic attaches to the progressive marker . The combination of and in the sentence negates the action of swimming.

Here negation is also shown through . In this case, is attached directly to the end of the predicate, as there is no tense- or aspect-marking present. The first in the sentence (in ) is not a negative marker; rather, it is a homophonous morpheme that functions as a topic marker.Template:Sfn

In Example 3, is found attached to the enclitic , which marks future tense. Again, negation is achieved through the combination of and .

Negation with only

In the presence of the conjunction or the demonstrative , the enclitic is removed, leaving as the sole negation marker in the sentence. This occurs because and are both located in the same position in a word as .Template:Sfn -only negation is demonstrated in the following examples.

The presence of the demonstrative morpheme in the first clause of Example 4 displaces (and removes) . Thus, is the sole negator of the clause.

This example shows the presence of the conjunction , which is attached to the end of the verb stem . This removes and again leaves as the only negation marker in the sentence.

Negation within Oceanic language family

Maisin is an Oceanic language (Eberhard, Simons, & Fennig, 2019), and its negation system is fairly typical of Oceanic languages. Oceanic languages often express negation discontinuously,Template:Sfn with the first element located preverbally and the second postverballyTemplate:Sfn – Maisin fits this pattern, as the above examples demonstrate.

Additionally, Maisin follows both the Polynesian pattern of marking negation clause-initially and the Papuan pattern of marking negation clause-finally.Template:Sfn

List of abbreviations

• FUT = 'final' future enclitic
• LOC = locative enclitic
• NEG = negative enclitic
• PROG = progressive aspect
• TOP = topic marker encliticTemplate:Sfn

Notes

The first interlinear text example was retrieved from page 50 of Maisin: A Preliminary Sketch by Malcolm Ross. The glossing of the morphemes and as 'PG' and the verb stem 'swim' respectively means that the negative enclitic is attached to 'swim'. This does not seem to fit the description of as attaching to the tense- or aspect-marking enclitic of the predicate. The progressive marker is generated through reduplication,Template:Sfn and so the glossing of each morpheme may be ambiguous - that is, it may not be entirely clear as to whether should be glossed as 'PG' or 'swim', and likewise with the morpheme . This may explain why the first example seems to deviate from the typical pattern of negation.

See also

• Magori language, a similar case

External links

• Bada ari Foraga ari Buandi ari nane, ai Totoruga Muanfafusi The Service of Holy Communion in the Maisin Language (1921 translation digitized by Richard Mammana)
• Maisin organised phonology data
• Materials on Maisin are included in the open access Arthur Capell collections (AC1 and AC2) held by Paradisec
• Paradisec also has a number of other collections in the Maisin language