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23-414: Sye is close to being the only language on Erromango. There were once four—Sye, Sorung , Ura and Utaha —but the latter three are extinct apart from a handful of recently discovered Ura speakers. Terry Crowley counted six speakers of Ura in the mid-1990s. The South Vanuatu language group includes these four languages. Erromango Island was once much more diverse linguistically. In the nineteenth century

46-475: A massive depopulation took place and the languages were realigned. Terry Crowley states that there would have been three different languages prior to European contact. The earliest published account of Erromangan languages is Gordon (1889), whose notes, which he took on the island, were published posthumously. Capell produced a description of the language in the 1920s on the basis of the same materials that were used before by Ray , another scholar. This sketch

69-696: A wide range of subject categories and a number of orders of optional prefixes, which appear between the prefixes and the stem . Because this aspect is rather complex the example, which shows the prefixation of / tovop / is preceded by a brief overview of the prefix order: SUBJECT (PRIOR PAST) (ITERATIVE) (NEGATIVE) (EM-) STEM. koh 1NONSG . INCL koku-tovop 1DU . INCL : RECPAST - BR :laugh koh koku-tovop 1NONSG.INCL 1DU.INCL:RECPAST-BR:laugh 'we (both) laughed' koh 1NONSG . INCL koli-tovop 1PL . INCL : RECPAST - BR :laugh koh koli-tovop 1NONSG.INCL 1PL.INCL:RECPAST-BR:laugh 'we (all) laughed' Alienable possession

92-763: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Word stem In linguistics , a word stem is a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning. Typically, a stem remains unmodified during inflection with few exceptions due to apophony (for example in Polish , miast-o ("city") and w mieść-e ("in the city"); in English, sing , sang , and sung , where it can be modified according to morphological rules or peculiarities, such as sandhi ) Uncovering and analyzing cognation between word stems and roots within and across languages has allowed comparative philology and comparative linguistics to determine

115-462: Is called suppletion . An example of a suppletive paradigm is the paradigm for the adjective good : its stem changes from good to the bound morpheme bet- . Both in Latin and Greek , the declension (inflection) of some nouns uses a different stem in the oblique cases than in the nominative and vocative singular cases. Such words belong to, respectively, the so-called third declension of

138-406: Is cited with the infinitive inflection ( correr ) and always appears in actual speech as a non-finite (infinitive or participle) or conjugated form. Such morphemes that cannot occur on their own in this way are usually referred to as bound morphemes . In computational linguistics , the term "stem" is used for the part of the word that never changes, even morphologically, when inflected, and a lemma

161-405: Is marked on phrase level; inalienable possession would be indicated on nouns. Sye is a classical SVO language in that it has postmodifying adjectives as well as prepositions within the noun phrase. The fairly large set of prepositions makes it unusual. The absence of the widespread patterns of serial verbs makes Sye different from other Oceanic languages. Lacking serial verbs, Sye – along with

184-602: Is restricted to the marking of number and some types of possession. In the example shown below, the suffix / -me / is used to indicate the plural form of 'who'. Kem-antehep 2SG : PRES - MR :sit nandu ACC . SG [mei] who Kem-antehep nandu [mei] 2SG:PRES-MR:sit ACC.SG who 'Who (singular) are you sitting with?' Kem-antehep 2SG : PRES - MR :sit ndal ACC . PL [mei-me] who- PL Kem-antehep ndal [mei-me] 2SG:PRES-MR:sit ACC.PL who-PL 'Who (plural) are you sitting with?' Verbs are obligatorily marked by prefixes that express

207-440: Is the base form of the word. For example, given the word "produced", its lemma (linguistics) is "produce", but the stem is "produc-" because of the inflected form "producing". A list of all the inflected forms of a word stem is called its inflectional paradigm. The paradigm of the adjective tall is given below, and the stem of this adjective is tall . Some paradigms do not make use of the same stem throughout; this phenomenon

230-658: The Southern Vanuatu vowel systems lies in the status of the mid central vowel, which was present in the proto-language. This vowel is not present in Anejom̃ , while it is in the Tanna languages. In Erromango, however, while there is evidence for an underlying contrastive schwa / ə / , it does not contrast at the surface level of representation. Other than languages from the North Central Vanuatu subgroup

253-640: The Latin grammar and the so-called third declension of the Ancient Greek grammar. For example, the genitive singular is formed by adding -is (Latin) or -ος (Greek) to the oblique stem, and the genitive singular is conventionally listed in Greek and Latin dictionaries to illustrate the oblique. English words derived from Latin or Greek often involve the oblique stem: adip ose , altitudin al , andr oid , and mathemat ics . Historically,

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276-435: The difference in stems arose due to sound changes in the nominative. In the Latin third declension, for example, the nominative singular suffix -s is combined with a stem-final consonant. If that consonant was c , the result was x (a mere orthographic change), while if it was g , the -s caused it to devoice , again resulting in x . If the stem-final consonant was another alveolar consonant ( t, d, r ), it elided before

299-490: The extent of multifunctionality. The productive use of prefixes and compounding is also typical. Less productive are suffixes . Reduplication is attested in Sye, but to a much smaller extent than it is in other Oceanic languages with regard to productivity. There is, however, a considerable amount of inflectional affixation in the nominal, prepositional and verbal morphology. Inflectional morphology with Sye noun phrases

322-405: The history of languages and language families . The term is used with slightly different meanings depending on the morphology of the language in question. In Athabaskan linguistics , for example, a verb stem is a root that cannot appear on its own and that carries the tone of the word. By attaching the morpheme -ship to the root word friend (which some linguists call a stem, too),

345-493: The languages of the Southern Vanuatu subgroup have a rather complex morphology . The phonemes are simple but the phonotactics of Sye allow a wide range of consonant clusters. They stand mostly in the middle of words and can occur at initial and end position, too. Sye is typological fairly typical for an Oceanic language with regard to word classes. Both number and type of class that are needed are normal as well as

368-444: The new word friendship was synthesized. While an s can be attached to friendship to form friendships , it can not be attached to the root within it to form friendsship . A stem is a base from which all its inflected variants are formed. For example, the stabil- (a variant of stable unable to stand alone) is the root of the destabilized , while the stem consists of de·stabil·ize , including de- and -ize . The -(e)d , on

391-460: The old ones and on a different place on the island. This huge demographic change took place in recent historical times. Thus, it is not too surprising that there is relatively little dialectal diversity. Erromangans will point out quickly the differences in the language of the people from Potnarvin and Dillon's Bay but for an outsider these are very small. There are just some differences in very low-frequency lexical items. The main difference between

414-425: The other hand, is not part of the stem. Stem may either consist of a root (e.g. run ) alone or a compound word , such as meatball and bottleneck (examples of compound nouns) or blacken and standardize (examples of compound verbs). The stem of the verb to wait is wait : it is the part that is common to all its inflected variants. In languages with very little inflection, such as English and Chinese ,

437-546: The other languages of the Southern Vanuatu subgroup – has what we can refer to as an echo subject construction. A verb that has the same subject as the preceding verb is marked with a special reduced set of prefixes which replace the full set of subject prefixes. In the first of the following three examples just the verb / kamlitouri / receives full inflection. The following verbs / mlitantvi / ('and we crossed'), / mlisac / ('and we went up') and / mlitelwogi / ('and we went past') all carry echo subject markers. The second and

460-537: The spoken language. They published in 1983 and made clear that their work had to be regarded as provisional and to be supplemented. The Erromangan language today is dialectally fairly homogeneous. There is very little difference spoken on the coast of the island. While the pre-contact population of the island has been estimated at 6.000 people³, this number dropped to 400 by 1931. Entire villages became unviable through loss of population and people were apparently constantly building and reconstituting new villages, larger than

483-404: The stem is usually not distinct from the "normal" form of the word (the lemma, citation, or dictionary form). However, in other languages, word stems may rarely or never occur on their own. For example, the English verb stem run is indistinguishable from its present tense form (except in the third person singular). However, the equivalent Spanish verb stem corr- never appears as such because it

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506-537: The third example follow the same structure, however, in the third example the concurrence of the two events of departing and arriving is hard to grasp for non-Erromango speakers. Sorung language Sorung is an extinct language of the island Erromango in Vanuatu . It has sometimes been classified as a dialect of Sie . This article about Southern Oceanic languages is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This Vanuatu -related article

529-503: Was never published but it is referred to in detail, however, in unpublished correspondence dated 1927 from Dempwolff to Ray, so he obviously had copies passed on to others. John Lynch gathered new material from speakers of Erromangan in the 1960s and 1970s. A description combining the resources of both his and Capell's work was felt to be feasible and a detailed grammatical sketch was published by Lynch and Capell. Capell's description bases on translated sources, while Lynch's notes base on

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