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Topic: Malayo-Polynesian languages

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Malayo-Polynesian languages - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages and comprise at least 351 million speakers. The Malayo-Polynesian languages tend to use reduplication (repetition of all or part of a word) to express the plural, and like other Austronesian languages have simple phonologies; thus a text has few but frequent sounds. Ethnologue has classified these languages into 23 groups. en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Western_Malayo-Polynesian_languages   (352 words)

ninemsn Encarta - Austronesian Languages The 237 Western Oceanic languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Indonesia. In general, the Austronesian languages use affixes (suffixes, infixes, prefixes) attached to base words to modify the meaning or to indicate the function of the word in the sentence. The languages of Australia (Aboriginal languages) and most of New Guinea (Papuan languages), however, are not part of this family. au.encarta.msn.com /encyclopedia_761553922/Austronesian_Languages.html   (645 words)

Chapter 10. Language, Race and Culture. Edward Sapir. 1921. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech Historians and anthropologists find that races, languages, and cultures are not distributed in parallel fashion, that their areas of distribution intercross in the most bewildering fashion, and that the history of each is apt to follow a distinctive course. The geographical position of the Germanic languages is such 7 as to make it highly probable that they represent but an outlying transfer of an Indo-European dialect (possibly a Celto-Italic prototype) to a Baltic people speaking a language or a group of languages that was alien to Indo-European. The language, race, and culture of the Eskimo are markedly distinct from those of their neighbors; 14 in southern Africa the language, race, and culture of the Bushmen offer an even stronger contrast to those of their Bantu neighbors. www.bonus.com /contour/bartlettqu/http@@/www.bartleby.com/186/10.html   (3881 words)

MSN Encarta - Pacific Islands Polynesians often believed their founding ancestors were gods, and Polynesians had altars and houses for them as well as places of worship for their ancestors. For example, Polynesians put the coconut palm to a variety of uses: they made matting and roof thatch from the leaves of the palm, baskets from the fibrous material covering the coconuts, household containers and other utensils from the shells, and various foods and beverages out of the meat and liquid. Like most other Pacific Islanders, Polynesians today are mostly Christians. encarta.msn.com /encnet/refpages/RefArticle.aspx?refid=761595628&pn=3   (1525 words)

Southeast Asian Languages: A comparative study - WordReference Forums Filipino is the national/official Language of the Philippines. Conversely, an official language is a language which people of a certain established region, having a distinct natural language (national language) of their own, learns to speak and adapt to become one of their valid media towards communicating with people of other region. I know this is a daring feat but I know this would be possible with your help. forum.wordreference.com /showthread.php?t=54637   (1437 words)

East Timor Leste: Languages, Culture, Images (Timor Timur - Timor Lorosae) Tetum belongs to the great Austronesian family of languages spoken in a vast area of the globe between Taiwan in the north, New Zealand in the south, Easter Island in the east, and Madagascar in the west. In Indonesia, however, while Dutch was denigrated as the language of the colonialists, it was also the language - or one of the languages - of the Indonesian nationalist elite. The local language of Dili was originally Mambai, but by the next century the new capital's mixed population, too, was speaking the favoured Tetum language. geo.ya.com /travelimages/timor/languages.html   (3580 words)

The Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) Language Family Austronesian languages are spoken by approximately 300 million people in Madagascar, the Malay Peninsula, Indonesia and New Guinea, the Philippines, Taiwan, the Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian islands, and New Zealand. Austronesian is one of the largest language families in the world, both in terms of the number of languages (1244) and in terms of its geographical extent. These languages are widely spoken and understood as native or as second languages in their respective countries. www.nvtc.gov /lotw/months/june/austronesianLanguageFamily.html   (704 words)

Appendix: Polynesian Language Again, the Polynesian language is but one member-of that wide-spread family of languages, known as the Malayo-Polynesian or Oceanic family, which extends from Madagascar to the Hawaiian Islands and from New Zealand to Formosa. It is the law of all Polynesian languages that every word and syllable must end in a vowel, so that no two consonants are ever heard without a vowel sound between them. The Polynesian ear is as nice in marking the slightest variations in vowel sound as it is dull in distinguishing consonants. www.sacred-texts.com /pac/hlov/hlov32.htm   (804 words)

Oceanic subgroups Austronesian languages are spoken from Madagascar in the west to Easter Island in the east, and from Taiwan and Hawaii in the north to New Zealand in the south. He maintains that speakers of languages outside the Western Oceanic group migrated from the area in which POC was spoken, and that the languages of the Western Oceanic group evolved by a process of dialect differentiation from that point on. The Oceanic languages are members of the Austronesian language family, a language family which, until the advent of European exploration and settlement of the 'New World', had spread out across a considerably larger proportion of the earth than had any other language family. www.tlg.uci.edu /~opoudjis/Work/Oceanic_guide.html   (5840 words)

TheReference: Language The languages of the largest family -- Indo-European -- are spoken by about 2.24 billion people, or about half the world's population. Over 110 million people speak the languages in this family. About 192 million people speak the languages in this family. www.thereference.com /language   (561 words)

Family tree - Polynesian languages Rapa is here classified as a Tahitic language, and not as an unclassified language within the Central Polynesian subgroup, based on Biggs' 1971 statement that the language spoken on the island of Rapa today is a variant of the Tahitian language. J.F.G. Stokes 1955, however, claims that another language, clearly distinct from the other Tahitic languages, was earlier spoken on Rapa; and Niko Besnier 1992 classifies Rapa as a Marquesic language. Reao is here classified as a language, and not as a dialect of Tuamotuan, based on the statement by P.H. Audrian 1919 (Notes sur le dialecte Paumotu) that Reao is incomprehensible to speakers of the Tuamotuan language, and also on my own field experiences of Reao in 1993. www.ling.su.se /pollinet/facts/tree.html   (334 words)

Who invented Japanese alphabet? - Asia Finest Discussion Forum Phonological and lexical similarities to Malayo-Polynesian languages have been noted. The relationships among these languages remain a matter of debate among historical linguists, and the existence of Altaic as a family is rejected by many. The Japonic languages and Korean are often also included, and Ainu has been suggested by some, into an "Altaic superfamily." However, the evidence for this is not solid enough to do so. www.asiafinest.com /forum/index.php?showtopic=24705   (784 words)

UH Press Journals: Oceanic Linguistics, vol. 32, no. 2 (1993) CMP, encompassing over 100 languages in the Lesser Sunda and Moluccan islands of eastern Indonesia, is justified by a set of phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic innovations that often fail to include all members of the proposed group. These overlapping distributions of innovated features in CMP languages are interpreted as evidence for a rapid spread of Austronesian speakers through eastern Indonesia from a primary dispersal point in Northern Moluccas soon after separation of the ancestral CMP and EMP language communities. It is concluded that the Bomberai languages reached their historical locations through a back-migration from the southern Moluccas well after the initial Austronesian settlement of eastern Indonesia. www.uhpress.hawaii.edu /journals/ol/OL322.html   (1126 words)

dukes.doc In this paper I revisit a number of issues in the grammar of Tongan, an ergative Polynesian language (Eastern branch of MP), in the light of recent developments in grammatical theory and in the analysis of WMP languages in particular. As is the case in virtually all Polynesian languages, Tongan sentences are typically verb initial (with a preceding tense aspect marker). It is important to note however that there are raising processes in several ergative Polynesian languages that appear to be quite unrestricted with respect to the target NP in the complement clause. www.sultry.arts.usyd.edu.au /LFG98/austro/download/dukes.doc   (7225 words)

Overview of the Tagalog Language to Help You Learn Tagalog The Malayo-Polynesian languages are unique and do not appear to be related to any other language group. Tagalog was selected as the national language of the Philippines in 1946 because it had a rich literary tradition, it was the most widely spoken language in the Republic, and it was considered the language of the revolution against colonialism. Tagalog (ta-GA-log) is the national language of the Republic of the Philippines. www.transparent.com /languagepages/tagalog/overview.htm   (650 words)

Western Malayo-Polynesian (WMP) (from Austronesian languages) --  Britannica Student Encyclopedia The Slavic languages are a group of related languages within the Indo-European family. From their origins in East-Central Europe, the Slavic languages spread widely and are now spoken throughout most of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, parts of Central Europe, and the northern portion of Asia. English is the national language of the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. www.britannica.com /ebi/article-75198   (856 words)

Kawi language - Psychology Central It is also the main language used for the Lombok cultural practice of reading and writing literature on the leaves of the lontar palm. Kawi (from Sanskrit: kāvya, "poet") is a language from the islands of Java, Bali and Lombok. Kawi is extinct as a spoken language, but is still used in Bali, Lombok and to some extent in Java as a literary language. psychcentral.com /psypsych/Kawi_language   (205 words)

Language of Japan (overview, phonology, written Japanese, loan-words, honorific language, names) The short vowels in the Japanese language are spoken similarly to those of the Spanish and Italian languages, whereas the long vowel sounds are usually comprised of doubling the short vowel sounds. There are many theories about the origin of the Japanese language, some believe it is close to Altaic languages like Turkish or Mongolian, it's similarity in syntax to Korean is recognized. As with other cultures, the Japanese have a different language on that shows honor or respect and it is called "keigo." Keigo is simply a method of speaking that shows the speaker's respect to the person he is speaking to. www.asianinfo.org /asianinfo/japan/japanese_language.htm   (854 words)

REFERENCES ON MALAGASY LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS The Malagasy language has some similarities with other Malayo-Polynesian languages spoken on Borneo. Pullum, Geoffrey K. ‘Languages in which movement does not parallel bound anaphors’. Dahle, L. ‘Studies in the Malagasy language on the 'inflection' of the verb in Malagasy’. folk.uio.no /janengh/gassisk   (3285 words)

Austronesian Languages Some of the most important languages in this family are Indonesian, Malay, Javanese, Sundanese, Tagalog, Samoan, Fijian, Maori and Hawaiian. Surprisingly, Malagasy, the official language of the nation of Madagascar, is part of the Austronesian family, despite its location thousands of miles away from core area of Austronesian speakers. Unfortunately, there are only a few thousand people who speak Hawaiian today, but English speakers in Hawaii use a large number of Hawaiian words in their daily conversation, and are familiar with dozens of other Hawaiian words used in place names. www.concentric.net /~chanska/home/austro.html   (251 words)

Bicolano language resources Bicolano is classified as a Central Philippine language, which is a sub-branch of the Meso Philippine – Western Malayo-Polynesian languages. ...region had their own culture and language, and would rather speak in their local languages. The inhabitants are of Bicolano descent with Bikol as the main language. www.mongabay.com /indigenous_ethnicities/languages/languages/Bicolano.html   (1166 words)

Malagasy Dictionary, Malagasy Fonts, Malagasy Learn, Malagasy OCR, Malagasy Phrase Books, Malagasy Reference, Malagasy Software - Mac, Malagasy Software - Windows, Malagasy System, Investigation has established it as one of the Malayo-Polynesian languages, the rest of which are spoken thousands of miles to the east, in Southeast Asia and on islands in the Pacific. Copyright © Kenneth Katzner, The Languages of the World, Published by Routledge. It would be logical to assume that Malagasy belongs to one or another of the African language families but this is not the case. www.worldlanguage.com /Languages/Malagasy.htm   (206 words)

Linguistics Language Program - LING 19 The South Pacific Islands are home to one of the most diverse inventories of languages on earth, most belonging to the Malayo-Polynesian family of languages. Because Malayo-Polynesian speakers spread out over thousands of islands that were often widely separated, many dialects and, in time, languages evolved from the ancestor language, Proto-Malayo-Polynesian. and serves to unite the 200,000,000 citizens of Indonesia, whose first language might be one of the over 300 distinct languages spoken in the Indonesian Archipelago. ling.ucsd.edu /courses/ling19/ling19langdis/indonesian.htm   (198 words)

Ausbau and Abstand languages Some languages that are so by Ausbau but not by Abstand may try to increase the distance by resorting to purism or some other distancing mechanism (borrowing from some other source). languages are languages because they have been developed or `built-up'; they contain all the useful vocabulary they need and are recognized for all domains and But they may be very close to some other, even mutually intelligible lect: The Scandinavian ``languages", Czech and Slovak, Lao and Thai, etc. But they may depend on different classical (or other) languages as a source of learned vocabulary... ccat.sas.upenn.edu /~haroldfs/540/langdial/node3.html   (258 words)

Gayo language - Psychology Central It is classified as belonging to the Western Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian languages. id:Bahasa Gayo Bahasa Gayo is the spoken language of about 180,000 people (1989) in the mountain region of North Sumatra around Takengon, Genteng, and Lokon. psychcentral.com /psypsych/Gayo_language   (110 words)

Island agenda Among follow-up activities is support to the recording and revitalization of languages in the Melanesian islands of the southwestern Pacific, as described in a special small-islands dossier in the April 2004 issue of UNESCO’s New Courier magazine. Much information on the status of threatened languages is given in the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing (first published in 1996, with a new revised edition released in 2001) UNESCO’s work on endangered languages includes support to initiatives to describe and record these languages, as well as to preserve and maintain them. www.unesco.org /csi/B10/mime4.htm   (4025 words)

Lexical Evidence for Early Contact between Indonesian Languages and Japanese - Questia Online Library This is because WMP languages do not constitute a genetic unity, as the putative member languages do not share any innovations in either lexicon or morphology. Even attempts to group some of these WMP languages into smaller subgroups and to reconstruct... It is generally agreed that Old Japanese is the language of the oldest extant written records and of eighth-century Nara literary works such as the Kojiki and Man' yoshu, but scholars differ as to when it ends. www.questia.com /PM.qst?a=o&d=5001177532   (1002 words)

CC is for CCreole Although the grammar of a pidgin is simpler than the grammars of its parent languages, and although pidgins often sound like uneducated fumbling attempts to speak one of the parent languages, pidgins aren't just "corruptions" of parent languages; they have grammar and vocabulary all their own. However, pidgins are created languages; nobody is a native speaker of a pidgin. a simplified language that combines features of the groups' languages while leaving out the more difficult parts, allowing the groups to speak to each other. www.kith.org /logos/words/upper2/CCreole.html   (565 words)

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