Alor-Pantar languages

We present a system that automatically groups verb stems into inflection classes, performing a case study of Abui verbs. Starting from a relatively small number of fully glossed Abui sentences, we train a morphological precision grammar and use it to automatically analyze and gloss words from the unglossed portion of our corpus. Then we group stems into classes based on their cooccurrence patterns with several prefix series of interest. We compare our results to a curated collection of elicited examples and illustrate how our approach can be useful for field linguists as it can help them refine their analysis by accounting for more patterns in the data.

This volume showcases the expression of number and quantity in a dozen minority languages spoken in Eastern Indonesia. While several papers offer a typological and comparative perspective, most contributions provide detailed descriptions of the numeral systems, universal quantifiers, classifiers, and the expression of nominal and verbal number in individual languages. Languages featuring in this volume include the Austronesian languages Sumbawa, Tolaki, Helong, Uab Meto, and Papuan Malay; the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages Abui, Bunaq, Kamang, Makalero, Sawila, and Western Pantar, and the West-Papuan language Tobelo.

This paper investigates the influence of Abui plant names on Alor Island's toponyms. Abui is a Papuan language spoken in Alor Island (Alor-Pantar Archipelago, SouthEast Indonesia, Timor area). Although there are rich studies on the Abui culture and language, research on how botany, an important toponymic source, shapes toponymic patterns in Alor Island remains scant. Using Field Linguistics and Language Documentation methods, the authors and a local consultant have detailed the names of ten common Abui horticultural andagricultural plants before matching them with toponyms in Alor Island to reconstruct their etymologies. Results show that toponyms in Alor Island derived from phytonyms are mostly transparent, named after plants in the area with the top toponymic sources being mea 'mango', wata 'coconut', and kanaai 'canarium'. Oral stories are highly connected with the place naming process and are frequently used to explain how places received their names. This paper would like to provide evidences and analyses as a starting point for further research on the links between Botany and Toponymy in Alor Island.

Key words: Toponymy, Phytonyms, Language Documentation, Abui Language, Alor Island

We examine the varying role of conditions on grammatical relation marking (namely animacy and volitionality) by looking at different languages of one family, using both existing descriptions and working with specially prepared video stimuli. This enables us to see the degree of variation permitted within closely related languages. We look at four Alor-Pantar languages (Teiwa, Adang, Kamang, and Abui), Papuan languages of eastern Indonesia. The conditions on argument marking are manifested in different ways. Those languages with syntactic alignment index objects with a prefix, those which have semantic alignment index objects and some subjects with a prefix. In 42 video clips we systematically varied animacy and volitionality values for participants in one and two-participant events. These clips were used in fieldwork to elicit descriptions of the events. The data show that animacy of the object is an important factor which favours indexation of the object on the verb in all four languages to varying degrees. Volitionality, on the other hand, is a factor in the semantically aligned languages only. While the presence of a prefix on the verb is semantically motivated in many instances, marking is not directly determined by verbal or participant semantics, and lexical factors must also play a role.

This paper discusses referential properties of articles in Abui. Abui deictic system (from which the articles were grammaticalised) makes a three-way contrast and alternates the viewpoint between the speaker and the addressee/hearer.  Discussions of definiteness revolve around the role of familiarity, and its status as a defining feature for definiteness and its relationship to uniqueness or identifiability (Gundel et al. 1993; Lyons 1999; Roehrs 2009, and many others).
Abui is a language with a deictic contrast in the definite articles (cf. Lyons 1999:55-56). The deictic contrast indicates whether the referent is discourse-immediate or not. Additional pragmatic functions, not unlike those in Bella Coola (Newman 1968; Davis and Saunders 1975) are also available, mapping the location of the referent in other dimensions, primarily in time and stance.
Systems with hearer-oriented articles are cross-linguistically rare but indicate that definiteness can be combined with other categories (Dryer 2014:241). Abui offers some insights about how the category of ‘familiarity’ may be structured. While Gundel et al. (1993) rank familiarity above the plain definiteness in their Givenness Hierarchy, in Abui, familiarity seems to run in parallel to definiteness and possibly extends to specificity. Another noteworthy property of the Abui system is the three-way distinction in indefinites, where specificity is marked and allows the viewpoint alternation as well.

This paper recounts a parallel story of the Lamòling myth. The original analysis of the legend addressed the relationship between two gods, Lamòling and Lahatàla, from the Abui traditional religion. The myth evolved from ancestral times to the arrival of Christianity in Alor, with the resultant association of the 'bad' god as a demon and, finally, as the devil. This paper completes the myth as handed down from traditional 'owners' of the narrative and storytellers by telling a parallel version centered around an Abui 'prophet', Fanny, who was the only person able to travel to Lamòling Bèaka, 'the land of the Lamòling gods/servants'. We also focus on a number of sacred objects and rituals associated with this religious myth and on their symbolic meaning for the Abui. This account tells a different version of the killing and eating of an Abui child by these gods/supernatural entities and of how Fanny came upon the gruesome feast. The paradoxical absence of Lamòling in this version of the myth depicts him as an immanent being, pervading and sustaining all that is real and created in nature, existing anywhere and nowhere at the same time.

With the rapid pace of globalization, cultures are constantly reinterpreted and reconstructed with the onslaught of mass communication bought about by technology. Marginalized communities like the Abui community in Indonesia have potentially received a substantial dilution of their own culture with the introduction of new cultural influences. As such, the project seeks to provide children of the targeted community, Abui, with illustrative books derived from their local folk tales. The paper will focus on addressing the community targeted, the methodology explored in detail, especially in regards to the development of children's literacy material, and the initial results of the project. In total three children books will be produced, with the focus on one of the three, Pigeon Padalehi for this paper. The results can not only serve as a reestablishment of literacy skills for the younger generation, but provide a step forward in cultivating a sense of identity to the communities' own native culture.

This paper reconstructs 15 Papuan etymologies from nine languages belonging to the Alor-Pantar language family. It offers a systematic attempt of a comprehensive etymological reconstruction, in this specific linguistic context, based on an all-embracing comparative methodology. The analysis is developed, in this initial stage, on a number of common words from the respective languages. The paper aims to offer a sampling of etymological restitutions inherent in the Papuan languages of Alor, establishing an unbiased methodology potentially applicable in the study and reconstruction of the proto-lexicon of Alor-Pantar languages (pAP). Working on a case-by-case basis, but moving in the framework of a historical-linguistic methodology connecting the different etymological reconstructions, the paper tries to draft, for the first time, a new and reliable historical phonetics of the Papuan languages of Alor. Moreover, it analyzes the ‘target languages’ considering the geographical distribution of the different groups of speakers, highlighting language contact and language alignment phenomena.

Key words: Alor-Pantar Languages; Papuan Etymologies; Alor Island; Abui; Historical Linguistics

The indigenous numerals of the Alor-Pantar  languages, as well as the indigenous structures for arithmetic operations are currently under pressure from Indonesian, and will inevitably be replaced with Indonesian forms and structures. This chapter presents a documentary record of the forms and patterns currently in use to express numerals and arithmetic operations in the Alor-Pantar languages. We describe the structure of cardinal, ordinal and distributive numerals, and how operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and fractions are expressed.

Have you ever wondered how cultural identity is constructed among various groups of people? How do people living pre-literate and indigenous societies, with the absence of an established writing system, note their history, ideas, traditions, and rituals – crucial aspects of any culture? In fact, they rely heavily on oral culture. These traditional stories are passed from one generation to another and create a sense of identity and belonging! This is a trend we will see in our story on the Abui people. You might be thinking, who are these Abui people and what does the word Abui even mean? The word Abui, in the Abui language, means ‘mountain’ or ‘enclosed space’. In Bahasa Malay, Abui also refers to the Abui speakers who define their language as Abui tangà, ‘mountain language’, and call themselves Abui lokù, ‘mountain people’. This ‘mountain language’, or Abui, is a Papuan language spoken in Alor Island (Alor-Pantar Archipelago, South-East Indonesia, Timor area) by about 17,000 speakers. NTU has had a longstanding history of conducting research on the Abui people and language. Early work in NTU’s Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies (LMS) was done by Assistant Professor Frantisek Kratochvíl. Frantisek’s Doctoral Thesis published in 2007, A Grammar of Abui, is widely regarded as the first comprehensive work on Abui phonology, morphology, and syntax – areas relating to the structure and “look” of the Abui language. Frantisek has conducted fieldwork in Alor Island since the 2000s, resulting in the publication of an Abui storybook and dictionary – valuable tools in protecting and passing down this language – especially when the teaching of the Abui language is banned in schools in Alor Island. Current research done by Dr Francesco Perono Cacciafoco, together with Associate Professor Francesco Cavallaro, focuses on the Abui people. In particular, they study Abui oral traditions which shape cultural identity. Abui myths and legends, known as tira, focus on historical events and answer questions like: where did the Abui people come from, what does it mean to be Abui, where do places get their names from, among others. Such questions are vital for a culture to trace its beginnings and thereafter, commemorate how far it has come as a “civilisation”. Abui oral traditions detail how the Abui people settled in Alor in ancient times. Some people later moved to the Kabola territory in Alor Island, where they lived in caves in the mountains of Mainàng, giving rise to their identity as mountain people. Oral traditions are also highly intertwined with Abui toponyms, or place names. The Abui people use stories to explain the names of certain places. These narrative genres also prove the lasting connection between the Abui people and their physical surroundings rocks, caves, water bodies, places, and coastal areas – as the Abui people name their physical environment according to events they believed took place at these locations!

We investigate the variation in form, syntax and semantics of the plural words found across the Alor-Pantar languages. We study five Alor-Pantar languages: Western Pantar, Teiwa, Abui, Kamang and Wersing. We show that plural words in Alor-Pantar family are diachronically instable: although proto-Alor-Pantar had a plural number word *non, many AP languages have innovated new plural words. Plural words in these languages exhibit not only a wide variety of different syntactic properties but also variable semantics, thus likening them more to the range exhibited by affixal plural number than previously recognized.