Eastern Trans-Fly languages


The Eastern Trans-Fly languages are a small independent family of Papuan languages spoken in the Oriomo Plateau to the east of the Fly River in New Guinea.

Classification

The languages constituted a branch of Stephen Wurm's 1970 Trans-Fly proposal, which he later incorporated into his 1975 expansion of the Trans–New Guinea family as part of a Trans-Fly – Bulaka River branch. They are retained as a family but removed from Trans–New Guinea in the classifications of Malcolm Ross and Timothy Usher.
Wurm had concluded that some of his purported Trans-Fly languages were not in the Trans–New Guinea family but rather heavily influenced by Trans–New Guinea languages. Ross removed the bulk of the languages, including Eastern Trans-Fly, from Wurm's Trans–New Guinea.
Timothy Usher links the four languages, which he calls Oriomo Plateau, to the Pahoturi languages and the Tabo language in an expanded Eastern Trans-Fly family.

Languages

Oriomo languages and respective demographic information listed by Evans are provided below. Geographical coordinates are also provided for each dialect.

Pronouns

The pronouns Ross reconstructs for proto–Eastern Trans-Fly are,
There is a possibility of a connection here to Trans–New Guinea. If the inclusive pronoun is historically a second-person form, then there would appear to be i-ablaut for the plural: *ka~ki, **ma~mi, **tapa~tapi. This is similar to the ablaut reconstructed for TNG . Although the pronouns themselves are dissimilar, ablaut is not likely to be borrowed. On the other hand, there is some formal resemblance to Austronesian pronouns ku I, *mu you, *kita we inc., *mi we exc., *ia he/she/it; some archeological, cultural and linguistic evidence of Austronesian contact and settlement in the area exists.