The Touo language , also known as Baniata ( Mbaniata ) or Lokuru , is spoken over the southern part of Rendova Island , located in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands .
6-585: Touo is generally seen to be a member of the tentative Central Solomons family, although Glottolog considers it an isolate . Pedrós (2015) cautiously suggests Lavukaleve as the closest relative to Touo. Most of the surrounding languages to Touo belong to the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family . The Touo language is sometimes called the Baniata ( Mbaniata ) or Lokuru language, after
12-543: A connection, based on similarities among pronouns and other grammatical forms. Pedrós (2015) suggests, tentatively, that the branching of the family is as follows. Savosavo and Bilua , despite being the most distant languages geographically, both split more recently than Lavukaleve and Touo according to Pedrós. Palmer (2018) regards the evidence for Central Solomons as tentative but promising. An automated computational analysis ( ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013) grouped Touo , Savosavo , and Bilua together. Lavukaleve
18-470: The four Papuan languages spoken in the state of Solomon Islands . The four languages are, listed from northwest to southeast, The four Central Solomon languages were identified as a family by Wilhelm Schmidt in 1908. The languages are at best distantly related, and evidence for their relationship is meager. Dunn and Terrill (2012) argue that the lexical evidence vanishes when Oceanic loanwords are excluded. Ross (2005) and Pedrós (2015), however, accept
24-749: The largest two villages where the language is spoken. The word Touo comes from the ethnonym that Touo speakers use to refer to themselves. Touo consonants are: Touo has six lax and five tense vowels. Some minimal pairs showing the tense/lax vowel phonemic distinction in Touo: Word order in Touo is SOV . Touo has four genders. Only in certain paradigms of the singular number can neuter I and II be distinguished. Touo distinguishes four numbers. 8°35′S 157°18′E / 8.58°S 157.30°E / -8.58; 157.30 Central Solomons languages The Central Solomon languages are
30-402: The pronominal morphemes of each language and then proposes a reconstruction of some of the pronouns of the claimed family. The reconstructions are the following: Central Solomon numerals from Pedrós (2015): As the comparisons indicate, lexical evidence for the relatedness of the four languages is limited. The following basic vocabulary words are from Tryon & Hackman (1982), as cited in
36-438: Was not included. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance. Pedrós (2015) argues for the existence of the family through comparison of pronouns and other gender, person and number morphemes and based on the existence of a common syncretism between 2nd person nonsingular and inclusive . He performs an internal reconstruction for
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