Barem

Timothy Usher, Santa Fe Institute

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Barem (Brem,) also known as Bunabun, is spoken by nearly 1,200 people people (2003) living … … around Masor mountain to the coast, from the Dibor river in the south to Bunabun village in the north … … To the southwest is spoken Barem's nearest relative Manep; to the northwest is spoken Amako … … in the Sumkar (formerly Bogia) district of Papua New Guinea's Madang province (Z'graggen 1971: …, 1975: …, Pick 2020: 36-38.)

Pick (2020: 36-38) distinguishes four dialects of Barem as follows:

Barem

Bunabun – Bunabun village north of the Dibor near the coast

Asumbin – inland

Qkuan Kambuar – around the Dibor and in Tokain village to the south

Kimbu Kambuar – inland from Tokain

Kimbu Kambuar is now extinct, the Kimbu community having abandoned it in favor of Qkuan Kambuar and Tok Pisin. Qkuan Kambuar is now itself endangered.

It is unclear from the information given how these dialects should be classified relative to one another, though Pick gies a few words to illustrate how Kimbu Kambuar differed from Bunabun and Qkuan Kambuar.

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Capell (1951-1952: 193-195) grammar sketch of and (pp. 203-205) 84 comparative terms for Bunabun

Z'graggen (1980: 1-159) 315 comparative terms and (p. 161) pronominal paradigms for Bunabun

Pick (2020: 36-76) sketch grammar of and (pp. …) … for Barem

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Pick (2020: 39-56) gives 15 to 18 consonats and 5 vowels for Barem as follows:

In addition ot the simple vowels given above, five diphthongs are found as follows:

While not listed in the inventory, a sixth apparent diphthong /uᵒ/ is found in a number of examples.

Plain voiced and prenasalized voiced stops are nearly in complementary distribution. Initially, only plain voiced /b d dʒ g/ are found<. Medially, /mb nd n dʒ ŋg/ are much more common; however a small number of words, perhaps all loans, are found with medial plain voiced stops, such that what were originally position-governed allophones have become contrstive. This motivates Pick to analyze them synchronically as clusters, which in turn requires velar nasal /ŋ/ to be treated as a phoneme. It is highly probably then that Barem originally had only 14 consonants as follows:

When preceding another stop in a cluster, voiceless stops /p t k/ can be realized as fricatives [ɸ θ s x]. Velar /k/ is always realized as [x] when preceding another /k/.

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Pick (2020: 313-315) gives free pronouns for Bunabun and Qkuan Kambuar dialects in two case forms as follows:

Pick (2020: 65-69, 308-310) gives verbal direct and indirect objects for both Bunabun and Qkuan Kambuar dialects in four paradigms as follows:

Pick (2020: 57-65) gives subject desinences for final verbs in three tense/mood forms as follows:

(The designations of Qkuan Kambuar tenses are historically accurate, but the distinction between the two realis tenses is well into the process of collapsing, with some subject markers falling out of use.)

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&nbspIimperatives are found with only three person.numbers as follows:

Pick (2020: 69-74) gives subject desinences for same-subject medial verbs as follows:

Different-subject medial verbs are indicated by the addition of a suffix /-na/ to the hodiernal tense form of final verbs (above.)

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