Kire

Timothy Usher, Santa Fe Institute

Kire (Giri,) or Kire-Puir, is spoken by 1,900 people (1987) living in ten villages just east of the Ramu River, 19 to 37 miles inland from Hansa Bay, in in the Bogia subdistrict of Papua New Guinea's Madang province. Kire territory ranges from riverine sago swamps to low hills covered with grassland and rainforest. Sago is the staple food of the Kire region (Höltker 1961: 81-85, Stanhope 1972: 49-51, 63, Pryor and Clifton 1987.)

[under construction]

Höltker (1961: 93-95) vocabulary and (pp. 96-97) counting system for Kire-Puir

Z'graggen (1969, 1971: …) …

Z'graggen (1972) comparative vocabulary of Giri

Stanhope (1972) grammar of Kire including (pp. 53-57) 68 number-inflected nominals and (pp. 64-71) 396-term vocabulary and 119 tense-infected verb stems

Pryor (1981) phonology of Kire (unobtained)

Pryor and Clifton (1987) Kire nasalization

Foley (2005: 119-121) 61 comparative terms for Kire drawn from Stanhope (1972)

Stanhope (1972: 51-54) gives 21 consonants and 6 vowels for Kire as follows:

Labial fricatives /ɸ β/ may be realized as labiodental [f v], especially word-medially. Apicals /s z/ may be palatalized, especially when followed by front vowels [i e]. Stanhope's /h/ is “roughly aspirated.”

Phonetic semivowels [w j] are uncommon, the former occuring almost solely following another consonant in a cluster, the latter found only in /fjaŋ/ “dog” and in proper names. Historically, the reflexes of glides /*w *j/ have been occluded to /β z/.

Of the vowels, only high front /ɪ/ and low central /a/ occur initially.

Pryor and Clifton (1981: 31) give a significantly expanded inventory, with 28 consonants and 6 vowels for Kire as follows:

Pryor and Clifton's vowels differ from Stanhope's only in their representation, but their consonantal inventory diverges very significantly. They do not posit phonetic semivowels [w j], which are marginal even in Stanhope's description (above.) Prenasalized stops, both voiced and voiceless, are distinguished from plain stops and aspirated /fʰ sʰ/ distinguished from /f s/. Finally, instead of bilabials /ɸ β/ [f v], Pryor and Clifton give /β v]. This result is an unusually complicated and counterintuitive system.

Vowel length is contrastive.

Nasaslized vowels also occur, and contrast with both short and long oral vowels word-finally, but these are analyzed by both Stanhope and by Pryor and Clifton as reflecting underlying final velar nasal /ŋ/.

…

Stanhope (1972: 57-58) gives pronouns for Kire in three case forms as follows:

[under construction]

Stanhope (1972: 55-57) …

[under construction]

Stanhope (1972: 68-70) gives up to five inflected forms for Kire 119 verb stems, the best understood of which we arrange in paradigms as follows.

Tense, mood and aspect are indicated by suffixes:

The final syllables of verb roots vary according to … The form of the future in turn varies according to ….

Initial nasals /m n/ are occluded to [mb nd] in most inflected forms, but not originally in the imperative, although some of these imperative forms have been are in the process of being regularized by analogy with the indicatives.

…

…

…

…

The disposition of verb roots with final /*k/ is dependent upon the quality of the preceding vowel, with those ending in /ak/ showing a different pattern in the future and one example of /œk/ retaining final /k/ as such in the imperative:

…

Some stems take augments /-kɪ/ in the future and /-ɪk/ in the imperative, which presumably originated as an auxilliary verb. Unlike final /k/ in most imperative forms, this augment is not realized as glottal stop /ʔ/:

Other stems take an augment /-rɪ/ in the imperative.

At least two verb stems are suppletive, with synchronically unrelated forms in the present and participle on the one hand and the future and imperative on the other:

Kire has a body-part counting system of the type characteristic of New Guinea languages, in which the term for the number is the same as that for the body part which is touched during tallying. Counting begins from the left pinkie at one, proceeding to the thumb and then up the left side of the body until reaching the side of the head at thirteen, then proceeding downward on the right side of the body, with numbers to thirteen as follows (Stanhope 1972: 62):