Language
name and locationː
Maklew, Papua
province, Indonesia
[Ref to
Ethnologue] |
1. mepɔla |
2. inaɡe |
3. mepɔla inaɡe (1+2) |
4. inaɡe inaɡe (2+2) |
5. blmepɔla |
10. blŋuka-blŋuka |
Linguist
providing data and dateː Dr. Tina Gregor,
Department of Linguistics, the Australian
National University, Canberra, Australia, October 10, October 20, 2015. Data provided by
speakers from Welbuti (Lat.
-7.45366, Long. 139. 30294) |
Other comments: Maklew has only few words for numbers. Maklew is spoken by about 100 speakers in Papua province: Merauke regency, Welbuti village; south coast area. To my knowledge all speakers of Yelmek and Maklew also speak the local variety of Bahasa Indonesia and there is a lot of code mixing going on. Therefore, they use the Indonesian numbers in normal circumstances. I don’t have the impression that there is phonological adoption, but I might just not be aware of it. In Yelmek, the word for hand is /alpɔ/, which apparently does not have anything to do with counting. In Maklew the word is /bl/, which makes five ‘one hand’. it seems to be used for ‘ten’ too, but I don’t know what the other part in the word and they spelled /bl/ as part of the word in both cases. To make it even more confusing, at some point they gave me /blinage-blmepola/ as the equivalent of ‘three’ and I think I have seen the prefix in other cases to mean ‘one further’. Moreover, when I ask for an example sentence for ‘ten’, he spontaneously gave me a sentence, which translates as ‘I have five male dogs and five female dogs’ meaning he has ten dogs, so I am not sure if this ‘ten’ is really used for counting. |
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