Tangko

Timothy Usher, Santa Fe Institute

Tangko is spoken by approximately 100 people (2009) living in a single village, Kawe or Kawemaot, in the Merauke Regency of Indonesia's Papua province. The people call themselves the Senggaop, and their language Tangko after the term for “what?” (Hughes 2009: 4, 11-13.) Tangko is currently attested only by a single survey vocabulary.

Hughes (2009: 27-37) 238 comparative terms for Tangko of Kawemaot village

There is no published phonology of Tangko. Based upon comparison to Nakai, Tangko likely has 11 or 12 consonants and 6 vowels as follows:

Any consonant except apical non-stop /r/ may occur initially.

Bilabial voiceless stop /p/ is realized as fricative [ɸ] initially and as a stop [p p̚] finally. An alternate analysis would have final [p] synchronically reanalyzed as an allophone of /mb/, in contrast to a bilabial fricative /ɸ/ initially. Apical voiceless stop /t/ occurs only initially, as root-medial and final reflexes of Nakai-Tangko /*t/ have merged with /r/ and fricated to /s/ [s ø] respectively. Velar voiceless stop /k/ is usually realized as uvular in all positions, and is lenited to [ɢ ʁ] root-medially.

Prenasalized stops /mb nd ŋg/ have denasalized allophones [b d k] word-initially. Bilabial prenasalized stop /mb/ is realized as plain stop /b/ medially. As apical prenasalized stop /nd/ occurs only initially, /r/ may be considered its non-initial allophone, though this is historically so only in the case of medial /r/, where the reflexes of Ok /nd/ have merged with those of /r/. Prenasalized velar stop /ŋg/ may be realized as nasal [ŋ ɴ] in any position, and is always a nasal finally.

Consonant clusters no not occur except across morpheme boundaries in compounds.

Only a restricted set of consonants occurs word-finally:

Hughes (2009: 28-29) gives Tangko free pronouns as follows:

Nothing is known about Tangko verbal morphology, although a common desinence /-em/ is easily spotted in Hughes' vocabulary (q.v. 2009: 35-37.)