Language name and location: Tayap, Papua New Guinea [Refer to Ethnologue]

语言名称和分布地区: 泰亚普语 (加潘语 Gapun), 巴布亚新几内亚东北部东塞皮克省 

1. nambar ‘one’

2. sene ‘two’

3. manaw ‘three

4. towotowo ‘four’

5. ndaram nambar ‘one hand’ (i.e. five)

6. ndaram nambar taw nonnɨ nambar  ‘one hand one on the other side’ (i.e. six)

7. ndaram nambar taw nonnɨ sene   ‘one hand two on the other side’ (i.e. seven)

8. ndaram nambar taw nonnɨ manaw ‘one hand three on the other side’ (i.e. eight)

9. ndaram nambar taw nonnɨ towotowo ‘one hand four on the other side’ (i.e. nine)

10. ndaram sene ‘two hands’ (i.e. ten)

11. ndaram senea ndow sikrim nambar ‘two hands and one toe’ (i.e. eleven)

12. ndaram senea ndow sikrim sene ‘two hands and two toes’ (i.e. twelve)

13. ndaram senea ndow sikrim manaw ‘two hands and three toes’ (i.e. thirteen)

14. ndaram senea ndow sikrim towotowo ‘two hands and four toes’ (i.e. fourteen)

15. ndaram senea ndow nambar ‘two hands and one leg' (i.e. fifteen)

16. ndaram senea ndow nambar tawnonnɨ ndow sikrim nambar

     ‘two hands and one leg one toe on the other side’ (i.e. sixteen)

17. ndaram senea ndow nambar taw nonnɨ ndow sikrim sene

     ‘two hands and one leg two toes on the other side’ (i.e. seventeen)

18. ndaram senea ndow nambar taw nonnɨ ndow sikrim manaw

     ‘two hands and one leg three toes on the other side’ (i.e. eighteen)

19. ndaram senea ndow nambar taw nonnɨ ndow sikrim towotowo

     ‘two hands and one leg two toes on the other side’ (i.e. nineteen)

20. ndaram senea ndow sene ‘two hands and two legs’ (i.e. twenty)

Linguist providing data and dateː Prof. Don Kulick, Department of English, Hong Kong University, Hong Kong, October 25, 2023. 

Reference: Don Kulick. A Grammar and Dictionary of Tayap: The Life and Death of a Papuan Language (Pacific Linguistics Pl, 661), 2019.

提供资料的语言学家: Prof. Don Kulick, 2023 年 10 月 25 日.

Other comments:  Tayap (also spelled Taiap; called Gapun) is a small, previously undocumented Papuan language, spoken in a single village called Gapun, in the lower Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea. The language is an isolate, unrelated to any other in the area. Furthermore, Tayap is dying. Fewer than fifty speakers actively command it today. Based on linguistic anthropological work conducted over the course of thirty years. The traditional counting system in Tayap was based on a person’s fingers and toes. This is a well-known areal feature (Laycock 1975). The Tayap system allowed counting up to twenty, although in principle the system could count indefinitely, because after reaching twenty, one could, I was told, begin counting again on the body of another person (so ‘twenty-one’ could be ‘two hands and two legs and one hand one finger on the other side’).

This laborious system, for which there seems to have been no shorthand, disappeared rapidly after villagers began speaking Tok Pisin among themselves in the 1930s and 1940s. Today it is only vaguely remembered, and is regarded as an amusing, cumbersome and primitive curiosity by everyone in Gapun. Villagers still use the Tayap words for ‘one’ through to ‘five’, and they sometimes combine them to denote a number between five and ten. For example, I once overheard a villager ask another in Tayap how many bags a cocoa buyer who had come to Gapun had filled (this was a typical instance of using Tayap to “hide talk” from non-villagers). The addressee, a thirty-year-old man who is a very weak speaker of Tayap and who under other circumstances never speaks it, responded by saying manaw towotowo (literally ‘three four’), which in this context meant seven bags. Villagers also sometimes use the Tayap word for ‘ten’, but never any of the others, which are always said in Tok Pisin.