Tayap language

The first European to describe Tayap was Georg Höltker, a German missionary-linguist, in 1937. Höltker spent three hours in the village and collected a word list of 125 words, which he published in 1938. He wrote that “it will be awhile before any other researcher ‘stumbles across’ Gapun, if only because of the small chances of worthwhile academic yields in this tiny village community, and also because of the inconvenient and arduous route leading to this linguistic island”.[6]

Höltker's list was all that was known about Tayap in literature until the early 1970s, when the Australian linguist Donald Laycock travelled around the lower Sepik to collect basic vocabulary lists that allowed him to identify and propose classifications of the many languages spoken there. Tayap and its speakers have been extensively studied by linguistic anthropologist Don Kulick since the mid-1980s. The language is described in detail in Tayap Grammar and Dictionary: The Life and Death of a Papuan Language and in A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea.[7][8]

Until World War II, when Japanese soldiers occupied the area and caused the villagers to flee into the rainforest, Gapun was located on a hill that several thousand years earlier had been an island in the sea that receded and formed the lower Sepik River. This indicates that Tayap may be the descendant of an ancient, autochthonous language that was already in place before the various waves of migration from the inland to the coast began occurring thousands of years ago.[9] Foley (2018) also speculates that Tayap could have been part of a larger language family that was spoken on the island before the arrival of Lower Sepik speakers. As the coastline moved further northeast, Lower Sepik speakers migrated from the foothills into the new land areas created by the receding waters.[10]

Up to 2018, Gapun was the only village where Tayap is spoken, although some speakers of the language also lived in neighboring villages such as Wongan and Watam, having moved there because of marriage or as a result of conflicts over land or sorcery in Gapun. However, in 2018, Gapun village was burned down and abandoned due to violence among households. The former residents fled to the nearby villages of Wongan (3.999326°S 144.532123°E / -3.999326; 144.532123 (Wongan)), Watam (3.906592°S 144.545246°E / -3.906592; 144.545246 (Watam)), and Boroi.[11]^:16

Gapun villagers associate Tok Pisin with Christianity, modernity and masculinity, and they associate Tayap with paganism, "backwardness", disruptive femininity and childish stubbornness. As a result, Tayap is being increasingly replaced by Tok Pisin.[12]

Unlike the neighboring patrilineal Lower Sepik-Ramu speakers, Tayap speakers are matrilineal.[12] Tayap is typologically very different from the neighboring Lower Sepik-Ramu languages.

Tayap also has many loanwords from the Kopar and Adjora languages.[11]^:349

Tayap is not related to the neighboring Lower Sepik languages, though a relationship to the more distant Torricelli family has been proposed by Usher (2020).[2]

In the 1970s Australian linguist Donald Laycock classified Tayap (which he called "Gapun") as a sub-phylum of the Sepik-Ramu language phylum, on the basis of Georg Höltker's 1938 word list and a few verb paradigms that Laycock gathered from two speakers.[13]

Kulick and Terrill (2019) found no evidence that Tayap is related to the Lower Sepik languages, another branch of the erstwhile Sepik-Ramu phylum. The conclude that Tayap is a language isolate, though they do not compare it to other language families, as would be required to establish Tayap as an independent language family. Comparative vocabulary demonstrates the lexical aberrancy of Tayap as compared to the surrounding Lower Sepik languages: e.g. sene 'two' (cf. proto-Lower Sepik *ri-pa-), neke 'ear' (*kwand-), ŋgino 'eye' (*tambri), tar 'hear' (*and-), min 'breast' (*nɨŋgay), nɨŋg 'bone' (*sariŋamp), malɨt 'tongue' (*minɨŋ), mayar 'leaf' (*nɨmpramp) among the Holman et al. (2008) ranking of the Swadesh list. Cultural vocabulary such as 'village', 'canoe', 'oar', and 'lime', as well as the basic words awin 'water' (cf. *arɨm) and a 'eat' (cf. *am ~ *amb), may be shared with Lower Sepik languages. The word karep 'moon' is shared specifically with Kopar (karep). However, most basic vocabulary items have no apparent cognates in surrounding languages.[14]

The Tayap consonants are:[11]

p	t		k
ᵐb	ⁿd		ᵑɡ
m	n		ŋ
	s
	r
w		j

Tayap has 6 vowels, which are:[11]

i		u
e	ɨ	o
a

Tayap pronouns are:[11]

	sg	pl
1	ŋa	yim
2	yu	yum
3m	ŋɨ	ŋgɨ
3f	ŋgu	ŋgɨ

Like many Sepik languages, Tayap is a synthetic language. Verbs are the most elaborated area of the grammar. They are complex, fusional and massively suppletive, with opaque verbal morphology including unpredictable conjugation classes, both in terms of membership and formal marking.

There is a fundamental distinction in verbal morphology between realis and irrealis stems and suffixes. Grammatical relations are marked by verbal suffixes, which distinguish Subject/Agent (S/A) and Object (O). In some conjugations S/A is marked by discontinuous morphemes. Free pronouns and noun phrases mark the ergative case (A) compared to unmarked forms for the absolutive (S/O). As in many Papuan languages which have an ergative case, the ergative marker is optional and is frequently omitted.

Selected Tayap words from Kulick and Terrill (2019: 442-454):

• Linguistic anthropology#Identity and intersubjectivity
• Gapun
• Don Kulick