North Kamrau

Timothy Usher, Santa  Fe Institute

North Kamrau (Kamberau,) also known as Iria, is spoken by over 1,200 people (1988, Anceaux 1958: c. 900) living in ten villages located on and around the Kamrau river and both the east and west shores of Kamrau Bay, straddling the Bird's Neck and the southeast portion of the Bomberai peninsula in the Kaimana regency of Indonesian's West Papua province. According to Visser, the term Iria derives from Irian, the name the people of Ubia-Sermuku call the Irarutu, while the North Kamrau call themselves Gesira /gesi-ra/, meaning “people” (Anceaux 1958: 117, Walker and Hesse 1988: 1, 2, 3, Visser 1989: 65-66, 68.)

Following van Beek (n.d.), Anceaux (1958: 117) distinguishes three dialects of Iria with populations as follows:

1. Ubia and Sermuku villages (150)

2. Koi, Tanggaromi, Wamesa, Wanomi and Inari villages (480)

3. Tjowa, Waho and Bahumia villages (280)

These might be designated as West, East and Central North Kamrau respectively. We have no data for Tjowa (Coa) or for Inari, but otherwise this is generally consistent with the materials in the wordlists that we have. In addition to these, Walker and Hesse (1988: 3) show a new village which appropriately enough is called Kampung Baru.

Walker and Hesse (1988: 2) give lexicostatistical figures between six North Kamrau speaking villages as follows:

(In the chart above, Ubia stands for for Ubia-Sermuku.)

The high figure between Waho and Wamesa is somewhat unexpected; however the same figure is given between Wamesa and Koi and Wamesa and Tanggaromi, and a look at the diagonistc features which distinguish the dialects shows Waho to group with Bahomia in accordance with Anceaux's divisions. Words which distinguish these dialects and are confirmed by multiple attestations, primarily from Walker (1978) and Walker and Hesse (1988) who surveyed most of the villages, include the following, with South Kamrau (Asienara) forms presented for comparison:

(Phonetic regularizations and morpheme separations ours.)

In the majority of these examples, such as “blood/red”, “hot/warm”, “tongue”, “eye”, “fish”, “sky” and “ear”, the West dialect of Ubia-Seramuku looks to have borrowed a doublet form from South Kamrau immediately to the south. It may also be that some sound changes common to the North and East dialects were not shared by the West dialect; for example “hot/warm”, “tongue”, “eye” and “fish” look to involve the same rule, as might well “blood/red” as this is the ony known example of Kamrau Bay root-final /*t/. At least lexically, it is probably safe to say that the West dialect is the most distinct of the three.

Anceaux (n.d.) comparative vocabulary of Iria (unobtained)

Anceaux (1956) (unobtained,) reprinted in English as (1958)

Anceaux (1958: 119-120) 10 comparative terms for Iria

Greenberg (n.d.) comparative vocabulary of Iria after Anceaux (n.d.)

Voorhoeve (1975: 100) 40 comparative terms for Iria after Anceaux (n.d.)

Voorhoeve (1980: 661-121) Proto-Asmat includes Iria words from Anceaux (n.d.)

Visser (1989) kin and miscellaneous terms for Kamrau of Ubia-Sermuku village

Voorhoeve (2007) comparative vocabulary of Kamrau is North Kamrau mixed with some South Kamrau words

Walker (1978) 110 comparative terms for Obia-Seramuku, Waho and Wainoma villages

Walker and Werner (1978) (unobtained)

Walker and Hesse (1988) 209 comparative terms for Waho village, 127 comparative terms for Tanggaromi, Bahomia, Ubia-Seramuku and Koi villages and 58 comparative terms for Wamesa village

Matsumura (1985) 60 terms for Kamberau of Wanoma village

In addition to these, an unattributed typewritten vocabulary has been made available to us by SIL Indonesia dating to 1956. It is glossed in Dutch and Indonesian and gives 100 comparative terms for Koi village.

North Kamrau has 13 consonants and 5 vowels as follows::

Glottal stop /ʔ/ reflects Kamrau Bay /*k/ as well as root-final /*t/ when followed by /*-ra/ (below,), and is perhaps the most obvious feature distinguishing North Kamrau from South Kamrau.

Unoccluded fricative /h/ reflects Kamrau Bay bilabial /*ɸ/ as it does in South Kamrau.

Apical non-stop /*r/ has not been found initially. It can be realized as a tap [ɾ] or as a trill [r].

The realization of front mid vowel /e/ varies from low mid [ɛ] to high mid [e].

Central vowel [ə] is very common in Walker's vocabularies. It appears to be a destressed allophone of low central /a/.

Any consonant or any vowel can occur initially or medially, excepting apical non-stop /*r/ which is not found initially. There are no word-final consonants nor do clusters occur in roots, but underlying root-final consonants created clusters in combination with postposed nominal article /*-ra/ which have since been simiplified (below.) It is not clear if these final consonants should be analyzed as underlyingly present in the synchronic roots.

Anceaux (n.d. as excerpted in Greenberg n.d., Voorhoeve 1975: 370) gives Iria pronouns as follows:

We share Voorhoeve's (1975: 370, 448) doubts about the reliability of the third person plural form given here.

Most North Kamrau nominals and nominal modifiers when occuring in isolation appear with a postposed article /*-ra/ which has a number of historically conditioned allomorphs depending upon the underlying final consonant or absence thereof in the preceding root.. This led Voorhoeve (1980: 66) to analyze them as noun class markers:

It is not known if any of these final consonants remain underlyingly present in some form, or if a noun class analysis is synchronically correct.

No information about North Kamrau verbal morphology is currently available to us. It can be observed however that, as in Buruwai and South Kamrau, the majority of verbs in Walker's (1978, Walker and Hesse 1988) survey vocabularies are appended with a suffix /-ara/ of unknown meaning. Many of these verb roots have final consonants, as do those of Asmat (q.v. Voorhoeve 1980: 61-121,) but because the suffix is /-ara/ in sontrast to the nominal /-ra/ (above) there are no special combinatory rules and these consonants take their usual medial reflexes.