Native to Indonesia Native speakers 240,000 (2009) Glottolog kamb1299 | Region Lesser Sunda Islands ISO 639-3 xbr | |
Language family Austronesian
Malayo-Polynesian (MP)
Nuclear MP
Central–Eastern MP
Sumba–Flores ?
Sumba
Sumba Island
Sumbanese
Kambera | ||
Kambera, also known as (East) Sumbanese, is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken in the Lesser Sunda Islands, Indonesia. Kambera is a member of Bima-Sumba subgrouping within Central Malayo-Polynesian inside Malayo-Polynesian. The island of Sumba, located in the Eastern Indonesia, has an area of 12,297 km2. The name Kambera comes from a traditional region which is close to a town in Waingapu. Because of export trades which concentrated in Waingapu in the 19th century, the language of the Kambera region has become the bridging language in eastern Sumba.
Contents
Vowels
The diphthongs /ai/ and /au/ function phonologically as the long counterparts to /e/ and /o/, respectively.
Consonants
Kambera formerly had /s/, but a sound change occurring around the turn of the 20th century replaced all occurrences of former /s/ with /h/.
Pronouns and Person Markers
Personal pronouns are used in Kambera for emphasis/disambiguation and the syntactic relation between full pronouns and clitics is similar to that between NPs and clitics. NPs and pronouns have morphological case.
Kambera, as a head-marking language, has rich morpho-syntactic marking on its predicators. The pronominal, aspectual and/or mood clitics together with the predicate constitute the nuclear clause. Definite verbal arguments are crossreferenced on the predicate for person, number and case (Nominative (N), Gentive (G), Dative (D), Accusative (A)). The four main pronominal clitic paradigms are given below.
Examples:
The items in the table below mark person and number of the subject when the clause has continuative aspect.
Examples:
Possession
Kambera has a possessive or reflexive noun wiki ‘self/own’, which can be used to mark possession (1).
Wiki has the structural properties of a noun and can be used as a nominal modifier (compare 2 & 3), unlike pronouns which must be cross-referenced on the noun with a genitive clitic (3).
As (3) is a possessed noun phrase, the enclitic attaches to the noun. In possessed and modified noun phrases, the genitive enclitic attaches to the noun modifier (4).
In Kambera, where cross-referencing is used, the noun phrase is optional. A verb along with its pronominal markers constitutes a complete sentence. Pronominal clitics are a morphological way of expressing relationships between syntactic constituents such as a noun and its possessor.
Possessor Relativisation
Possessors can be relativised with a ma- relative clause. There are three types of clauses used in the relativisation of possessors.
The first is when the embedded verb is derived from a relational noun such as mother or child. These derived transitive verbs express relations between the subject and the object (5).
The second clause type is where the possessor is the head of the ma- relative clause and the possessee is the subject of the embedded verb (6).
The final type is where the relative clause contains the verb ningu ‘be’ and the incorporated argument of this verb. The head of the relative construction is the possessor (7).
*N.B: the morpheme .ng marks the edge of incorporation
Normally, the possessor pronoun nyuna ‘he/she’ follows the possessed noun (8), though it can also be the head of a relativised clause (9).
Possessors can also be relativised in the same way as subjects. For example, in the following headless relative clause (no possessor NP is present), a definite article is present (10).