Sio language
Encyclopedia
Sio is an Austronesian language
spoken by about 3,500 people on the north coast of the Huon Peninsula
in Morobe Province
, Papua New Guinea
. According to Harding and Clark (1994), Sio speakers lived in a single village on a small offshore island until the Pacific War
, after which they established four villages on the nearby coast: Lambutina, Basakalo, Laelo, and Balambu. Nambariwa, another coastal village a few miles to the east, is also Sio-speaking.
Michael Stolz (d. 1931) of the German Lutheran Neuendettelsauer Mission arrived in 1910, and Sio villagers converted en masse in 1919. "Since then the Sio have produced many Lutheran evangelists, lay mission workers, teachers, and churchmen" (Harding and Clark 1994: 31). However, the Sio villages were assigned to the mostly Papuan Kâte language
circuit, rather than to the mostly Austronesian Jabêm language
circuit. The first Sio orthography was based on that of Kâte, and was used in the publication in 1953 of Miti Kanaŋo, a book containing Bible stories, Luther's Small Catechism, and 160 hymns, all in the Sio language. Stolz was the principal translator, although many of the hymns were composed by native speakers of Sio, and the whole volume was edited by Hans Wagner, Stolz's successor.
began to work with Sio speakers in 1985, the latter expressed a desire to revise their orthography to make it more similar to what people had become familiar with in Tok Pisin
and English
. The eventual results are tabulated in the following chart. The community at first resisted writing the labialized consonants as digraphs, since they clearly regarded them as unit phonemes. They insisted on writing the labialization as superscripts rather than as separate segments. However, by 1992, after many materials were produced in the new orthography, Sio teachers and church circuit officers approved writing the indicator of labialization on the same line, thus accepting mw instead of mʷ (Clark 1993).
, which the German Lutheran mission used as a church and school lingua franca
among speakers of Papuan languages
. (Sio appears to have been assigned to the wrong language circuit.) The linguist Otto Dempwolff
served as mentor and adviser to all the German missionaries in New Guinea on language questions. After Stolz died, Dempwolff analyzed his language materials and compiled a short sketch (1936). His analysis differs in several key respects from that of Clark (1993), who has had firsthand experience with the language. The most striking difference pertains to the labiovelars, which Dempwolff analyzed as coarticulated [k͡p], [ɡ͡b], [mɡ͡b], [ŋ͡m], but which Clark finds to be labialized labials (rounded on release) [pʷ], [bʷ], [mbʷ], [mʷ]. (The boldfaced q in the table below here stands for a curly q with hooked serifs that cannot properly be rendered online.) But Clark also found that g- [ɡ] and -c- [ɣ] were positional variants of the same phoneme; that trilled [r] is just a conditioned variant of flapped [ɾ]; and that the approximants are conditioned variants of their corresponding vowels.
Austronesian languages
The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia that are spoken by about 386 million people. It is on par with Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic and Uralic as one of the...
spoken by about 3,500 people on the north coast of the Huon Peninsula
Huon Peninsula
Huon Peninsula is a large rugged peninsula on the island of New Guinea in Morobe Province, eastern Papua New Guinea. It is named after French explorer Jean-Michel Huon de Kermadec who discovered it along with his personal assistant and porter, Henry Ole. The peninsula is dominated by the steep...
in Morobe Province
Morobe Province
Morobe Province is a province on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea. The provincial capital, and largest city, is Lae. The province covers 34,500 km², including 719 km² maritime area, with a population of 539,725...
, Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea , officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is a country in Oceania, occupying the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and numerous offshore islands...
. According to Harding and Clark (1994), Sio speakers lived in a single village on a small offshore island until the Pacific War
Pacific War
The Pacific War, also sometimes called the Asia-Pacific War refers broadly to the parts of World War II that took place in the Pacific Ocean, its islands, and in East Asia, then called the Far East...
, after which they established four villages on the nearby coast: Lambutina, Basakalo, Laelo, and Balambu. Nambariwa, another coastal village a few miles to the east, is also Sio-speaking.
Michael Stolz (d. 1931) of the German Lutheran Neuendettelsauer Mission arrived in 1910, and Sio villagers converted en masse in 1919. "Since then the Sio have produced many Lutheran evangelists, lay mission workers, teachers, and churchmen" (Harding and Clark 1994: 31). However, the Sio villages were assigned to the mostly Papuan Kâte language
Kâte language
Kâte is a Papuan language spoken by about 6,000 people in the Finschhafen District of Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. It is part of the Finisterre–Huon branch of the Trans–New Guinea phylum of languages...
circuit, rather than to the mostly Austronesian Jabêm language
Yabem language
Yabem or Jabêm is an Austronesian language spoken natively by about 2000 people at the southern tip of the Huon Peninsula in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea...
circuit. The first Sio orthography was based on that of Kâte, and was used in the publication in 1953 of Miti Kanaŋo, a book containing Bible stories, Luther's Small Catechism, and 160 hymns, all in the Sio language. Stolz was the principal translator, although many of the hymns were composed by native speakers of Sio, and the whole volume was edited by Hans Wagner, Stolz's successor.
Vowels (orthographic)
The low back vowel is pronounced [ɔ]. All vowels vary in length, but length is rarely contrastive. Monosyllabic nouns and adjectives tend to be lengthened more than monosyllabic verbs, adverbs, or prepositions. Word stress generally falls on the penultimate syllable.| Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also... |
Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark... |
|
|---|---|---|
| High | i | u |
| Mid Mid vowel A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned mid-way between an open vowel and a close vowel... |
e | o |
| Low | a | â |
Consonants (current orthography)
When Stephen and Dawn Clark of SIL InternationalSIL International
SIL International is a U.S.-based, worldwide, Christian non-profit organization, whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to expand linguistic knowledge, promote literacy, translate the Christian Bible into local languages,...
began to work with Sio speakers in 1985, the latter expressed a desire to revise their orthography to make it more similar to what people had become familiar with in Tok Pisin
Tok Pisin
Tok Pisin is a creole spoken throughout Papua New Guinea. It is an official language of Papua New Guinea and the most widely used language in that country...
and English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
. The eventual results are tabulated in the following chart. The community at first resisted writing the labialized consonants as digraphs, since they clearly regarded them as unit phonemes. They insisted on writing the labialization as superscripts rather than as separate segments. However, by 1992, after many materials were produced in the new orthography, Sio teachers and church circuit officers approved writing the indicator of labialization on the same line, thus accepting mw instead of mʷ (Clark 1993).
| Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:... |
Dental | Alveopalatal | Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).... |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Voiceless | p / pw | t | k | |
| Voiced | b / bw | d | z | g |
| Prenasalized Prenasalized consonant Prenasalized consonants are phonetic sequences of a nasal and an obstruent that behave phonologically like single consonants. The reasons for considering these sequences to be single consonants is in their behavior, not in their actual composition... |
mb / mbw | nd | nz | ŋg |
| Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... |
m / mw | n | ŋ | |
| Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... |
v | s | ||
| Liquid Liquid consonant In phonetics, liquids or liquid consonants are a class of consonants consisting of lateral consonants together with rhotics.-Description:... |
l / r | |||
| Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no... |
w | y | ||
Consonants (original orthography)
The first orthography of Sio was devised by the missionary Michael Stolz, based on that of the Kâte languageKâte language
Kâte is a Papuan language spoken by about 6,000 people in the Finschhafen District of Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. It is part of the Finisterre–Huon branch of the Trans–New Guinea phylum of languages...
, which the German Lutheran mission used as a church and school lingua franca
Lingua franca
A lingua franca is a language systematically used to make communication possible between people not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both mother tongues.-Characteristics:"Lingua franca" is a functionally defined term, independent of the linguistic...
among speakers of Papuan languages
Papuan languages
The Papuan languages are those languages of the western Pacific which are neither Austronesian nor Australian. The term does not presuppose a genetic relationship. The concept of Papuan peoples as distinct from Melanesians was first suggested and named by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1892.-The...
. (Sio appears to have been assigned to the wrong language circuit.) The linguist Otto Dempwolff
Otto Dempwolff
Otto Dempwolff was a German linguist and anthropologist who became famous for his research into Austronesian languages...
served as mentor and adviser to all the German missionaries in New Guinea on language questions. After Stolz died, Dempwolff analyzed his language materials and compiled a short sketch (1936). His analysis differs in several key respects from that of Clark (1993), who has had firsthand experience with the language. The most striking difference pertains to the labiovelars, which Dempwolff analyzed as coarticulated [k͡p], [ɡ͡b], [mɡ͡b], [ŋ͡m], but which Clark finds to be labialized labials (rounded on release) [pʷ], [bʷ], [mbʷ], [mʷ]. (The boldfaced q in the table below here stands for a curly q with hooked serifs that cannot properly be rendered online.) But Clark also found that g- [ɡ] and -c- [ɣ] were positional variants of the same phoneme; that trilled [r] is just a conditioned variant of flapped [ɾ]; and that the approximants are conditioned variants of their corresponding vowels.
| Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:... |
Labiovelar | Dental | Alveopalatal | Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).... |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Voiceless | p | q | t | k | |
| Voiced | b | q | d | z | g- |
| Prenasalized Prenasalized consonant Prenasalized consonants are phonetic sequences of a nasal and an obstruent that behave phonologically like single consonants. The reasons for considering these sequences to be single consonants is in their behavior, not in their actual composition... |
mb | mq | nd | ʒ- / -nz- | ŋg |
| Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... |
m | ɱ | n | ŋ | |
| Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... |
v | s | -c- | ||
| Liquid Liquid consonant In phonetics, liquids or liquid consonants are a class of consonants consisting of lateral consonants together with rhotics.-Description:... |
l / r | ||||
| Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no... |
w | j | |||
Free pronouns
| Person Grammatical person Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns... |
Singular Grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions .... |
Plural Grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions .... |
|---|---|---|
| 1st person inclusive | kinda | |
| 1st person exclusive | naŋa | maka |
| 2nd person Grammatical person Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns... |
noko | miki |
| 3rd person Grammatical person Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns... |
i | kinzi |
External links
- Sio language at EthnologueEthnologueEthnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International , a Christian linguistic service organization, which studies lesser-known languages, to provide the speakers with Bibles in their native language and support their efforts in language development.The Ethnologue...