Region New Guinea ISO 639-3 spi | Extinct moribund by 2000 Glottolog sapo1254 | |
Language family unclassified
(lexically Lakes Plain,
grammatically East Bird's Head) | ||
Saponi is an extinct Papuan language of Indonesia. It shared half of its basic vocabulary with the Rasawa language, but it's not clear that they were related. Saponi shared none of its pronouns with the Lakes Plain family that Rasawa is part of; indeed its basic pronouns mamire "I, we" and ba "thou" are remenincent of proto–East Bird's Head *meme "we" and *ba "thou".
References
Saponi language Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA