Glottolog: east2503 | ||
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Geographic
distribution: Papua New Guinea, Torres Strait Islands (Australia) Linguistic classification: One of the world's primary language families Subdivisions: Meriam
Bine
Wipii (Gidra)
Gizra | ||
The Eastern Trans-Fly languages are a small independent family of Papuan languages in the classification of Malcolm Ross, that constituted a branch of Stephen Wurm's 1970 Trans-Fly proposal, which he later incorporated into his 1975 expansion of the Trans–New Guinea family as part of a Trans-Fly – Bulaka River branch. Wurm himself concluded that some of the Trans-Fly languages were not Trans–New Guinea languages but rather heavily influenced by them. Ross (2005) removed the bulk of the languages from Wurm's TNG, including Eastern Trans-Fly.
Eastern Trans-Fly includes Meriam, located within the national borders of Australia, as well as Bine, Wipi (Gidra) and Gizrra.
Pronouns
The pronouns Ross reconstructs for proto–Eastern Trans-Fly are,
There is a possibility of a connection here to Trans–New Guinea. If the inclusive pronoun is historically a second-person form, then there would appear to be i-ablaut for the plural: *ka~ki, **ma~mi, **tapa~tapi. This is similar to the ablaut reconstructed for TNG (*na~ni, *ga~gi). Although the pronouns themselves are dissimilar, ablaut is not likely to be borrowed. On the other hand, there is some formal resemblance to Austronesian pronouns (*(a)ku I, *(ka)mu you, *kita we inc., *(ka)mi we exc., *ia he/she/it; some archeological, cultural and linguistic evidence of Austronesian contact and settlement in the area exists (David et al., 2011; McNiven et al., 2011; McNiven et al., 2006; McNiven et al., 2004: 67-68; Mitchell 1995).