Mombum

Timothy Usher, Santa Fe Institute

Mombum, also known as Komolom (Komelomsch,) is spoken by 220 people (1950) living in a single village on Komolom island at the south end of Marianne Strait, immediately to the southeast of Kolopom at the far southwestern tip of New Guinea. The native term Mombum /moˈmbum/ refers to both the speakers' tribe and the village in which they live; the term Komolom is likewise used for both as well as for the island upon which the village is situated. Speakers call their language Mombum-taghanan /moˈmbum taɣaˈnan/ (Drabbe 1950: 548, 561.)

Geurtjens (1933: 398-433) 455 comparative terms for Komelomsch

Drabbe (1950: 561-566) brief grammar and (pp. 566-574) 422 comparative terms for Mombùm

Boelaars (1950: 29-32) English-language recension of Drabbe's work

Voorhoeve (1980: 61-121) Proto-Asmat includes comparisons to Drabbe's Mombum

Susanto (2001) 234 comparative terms for Komolom

[under construction]

Drabbe (1950: 561-562) gives 24 consonants and 7 vowels for Mombùm as follows:

This inventory is too complicated.

Velar nasal /ŋ/ has been found in only two words, … “old man” and … “machete”, where its value is consistent in both Drabbe's and Susanto's vocabularies. The latter is a loan from Indonesian <parang>. There is no velar nasal /*ŋ/ in proto-Marianne Strait. Thus we can state that it is an independent phoneme, but marginal and found only in loans, although the immediate origin of “old man” is not immediately clear.

Plain voiced stops [b d] have two sources in native words, allophones of initial prenasalized stops /mb nd ŋg/ and allophones of medial voiceless stops /p t/. There are a fair number of examples of both initial and medial plain voiced [g] in Drabbe's and Susanto's materials, but its origin isn't immediately clear. Several loans suggest that contrastive plain voiced stops have been introduced into Mombum via Marind, in which all three stop prosodies are phonemic.

Laminal voiced prenasalized affricate [ndʒ] is found nearly only when followed by high front vowel /i/, where it does not appear to contrast with apical /nd/ and thus should be considerd an allophone thereof.

Drabbe's /ndr/ is only given in one word, [wondˈrum] “head,” for which Geurtjens (1933) likewise gives Mombum [untrom wondrom] but Koneraw [wonderʌm underʌm] “head/skull.” It is not a unit phoneme, but a cluster resulting from the subphonemic loss of an unstressed vowel or perhaps compounding, as otherwise Mombum has no root-internal clusters.

Voiceless velar prenasalized stop [ŋk] is the usual allophone of final /ŋg/ and does not otherwise occur. The sole counterexample in Drabbe's vocabulary, [joŋkparaˈbor] “mucus”, is a compound; cf. Geurtjens' [joŋgə].

Laminal palatalized voiceless [ʃ] is an allophone of /s/, e.g. [ʃu] “fence,” Geurtjens [su]; the same variation is found in Geurtjens' Mombum materials.

Drabbe's laminal voiced [z̪], which he specifies as interdental, finds its unexpected equivalent in Susanto's Komolom [x], as does less surprisingly Drabbe's [ɣ]. In the latter instance this may be viewed as simple aspiration, but in the former it suggests that the original sound might not have underlyingly been /z̪/ but rather /j/. Such changes would be broadly consistent with those found in neighboring languages, where original /*j/ has become /z/ in Marind's eastern dialects, /hʲ. in its western dialects and /s/ in Maklew.

Lateral non-stop /l/ is marginal and likely indicates loans from the western dialect of Marind, in which Marind /*ɾ/ is regularly reflected as /l/; e.g. /ˈmalab/ “rainbow”, /sakil/ “bird of paradise.” Some Marind loans have /r/ instead, perhaps suggesting an older layer of borrowing.

Semivowels [w j] are probably allophones of high vowels /u i/ as they are realized in sequence with other vowels. Reasons for this analysis include 1) they do not contrast with vowels in these positions, while diphthong-like vowel sequences are known to occur 2) they do contrast with the known reflexes of original /*w *j/, which are /p z̪/ 3) this phonological arrangement is found also in Marianne's Strait's immediate neighbors to the east and northeast in the Marind and Bulaka River families. As in both these families, it may be possible to argue that they have already become phonemic consonants on the basis of distributional and metrical grounds.

If there is a bilabial non-stop /w/, Drabbe's voiceless fricative [f], which is not specified as bilabial or labiodental, would be one of its final allophones. This finds some support int he fact that Asmat-Marianne Strait … However, some examples of final occlusion …

…

Accordingly, we propose a simpler system with 12 native consonants, 5 recently introduced consonants and … vowels as follows, with those phonemes which appear only in loans indicated with square brackets:

Drabbe (1950: 562) gives pronouns for Mombùm in three case forms as follows:

Mombum lacks the prefixed verbal undergoers common to other Trans New Guinea families. A prefix /n-/, probably indicating the first person singular inalienable possessor, is found on kin terms.

Drabbe (1950: 563-566) gives desinences for five indicative tenses as follows. There is no distinction between first and second person plurals:

Negatives are marked with /-worɛ-/, or in the future by /-a'ŋawr-/ which replaces /-ɛsir-/. The distinction between today and yesterday past is neutralized:

From these can be derived the following underlying subjects, the alternate form of the third person plural being found in the distant past:

Imperatives and prohibitives are as follows, with distinct subject forms in the imperative: