Usku language
Usku, or Afra, is a nearly extinct and poorly documented Papuan language spoken by 20 or more people, mostly adults, in Usku village, Senggi District, Keerom Regency, Papua, Indonesia.
| Usku | |
|---|---|
| Afra | |
| Region | Usku village, Senggi District, Keerom Regency, Papua, Indonesia |
Native speakers | 20 to 160 (2007)[1] |
Pauwasi
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | ulf |
| Glottolog | usku1243 |
| ELP | Afra[2] |
Wurm (1975) placed it as an independent branch of Trans–New Guinea, but Ross (2005) could not find enough evidence to classify it. Usher (2020) found that it was one of the West Pauwasi languages, though divergent from the other two branches of that family.[3] Foley (2018) classifies Usku as a language isolate.[4]
An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)[5] found lexical similarities between Usku and Kaure. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.
Basic vocabulary
Basic vocabulary of Usku from Im (2006), quoted by Foley (2018):[6][4]
Usku basic vocabulary gloss Usku ‘bird’ rkwe ‘blood’ misie ‘bone’ kra ‘breast’ mi ‘ear’ bekria ‘eat’ nggreka ‘egg’ kri ‘eye’ nifi ‘fire’ yo ‘give’ roti ‘go’ rifri ‘ground’ taʔ ‘hair’ klekondia ‘hear’ yukri ‘I’ o ‘leg’ nafu ‘louse’ nimi ‘man’ na ‘moon’ menggrine ‘name’ təkwar ‘one’ kuskafi ‘road, path’ tra ‘see’ fra ‘sky’ mumgre ‘stone’ pani ‘sun’ winene ‘tongue’ bra ‘tooth’ ninggre ‘tree’ ninani ‘two’ narse ‘water’ a/æ ‘we’ no ‘woman’ ria ‘you (sg)’ po ‘you (pl)’ so
The following basic vocabulary words are from the Trans-New Guinea database:[7]
gloss Usku head flekle hair flekle-kunda ear beikli eye nifi tooth neŋkle tongue bra leg nafu louse nimi bird lokwe egg kle blood kla; mise bone kla; mi skin ninje; ninye breast kiombra tree weli man mekenja; mekenya woman jomia sun nei moon meŋgerne water ei fire jo; yo stone pane road, path tra eat kepo one kisifaini two narna
Morphology
Usku morphology as inferred by Foley (2018):[4]
- dative marker se
- tense suffix -mu ~ -mo
- allative postposition se
- ablative e
Sentences
Word order in Usku is SOV.[4]
Some of the few documented sentences in Usku are:[4]
(1)
e wang o ai se roti-mo 3 money 1SG father DAT give-TNS - ‘She gave money to my father.’
(2)
e kompong se rifli-mo 3 village DAT go-TNS - ‘He went to the village.’
(3)
kɨnmar kompong e duar-mo person village ABL come-TNS - ‘That person came from the village.’
(4)
kɨnmar mra-mu ya-mu person dog-ERG/FOC? bite-TNS - ‘The dog bit that person.’
References
- Usku at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
- Endangered Languages Project data for Afra.
- New Guinea World
- Foley, William A. (2018). "The languages of Northwest New Guinea". In Palmer, Bill (ed.). The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide. The World of Linguistics. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 433–568. ISBN 978-3-11-028642-7.
- Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013).
- Im, Youn-Shim. 2006. Survey Report on the Usku Language of Papua, Indonesia. Unpublished report. Jayapura: SIL Indonesia.
- Greenhill, Simon (2016). "TransNewGuinea.org - database of the languages of New Guinea". Retrieved 2020-11-05.