Awiakay

Timothy Usher, Santa Fe Institute

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Awiakay is spoken by … people (…) living in at least two villages, Kanjimei and Imboin, located respectively on the Konmei and Arafundi rivers, tributaries of the Karawari which in turn feeds the Sepik, in Papua New Guinea's East Sepik Province just across the border from Enga Province to the south. (…)

Dye (n.d.) survey vocabularies of Imboin and Kansomai villages provided in spreadsheet format by Paul Whitehouse via the Summer Institute of Linguistics

Hoenigman (2015) grammar of Awiakay of Kanjimei village

Foley (2017: 232-233) Awiakay pronouns after Hoenigman

Hoenigman (2015: 289-292) gives 12 consonants and 5 vowels for Awiakay of Kanjimei village as follows:

In addition to the simple vowels given above, 7 diphthongs are found as follows:

The unexpected distinction between /oᴵ ɔᴵ/ is not indicated in Hoenigman's orthography, wherein both are written as <oy&gt..

Voiceless stops /p t k/ can be realized as voiced [b d g] between vowels or when folowing a nasal consonant in a cluster.

As Hoenigman's voiced palatal stop [ɟ] occurs only following a nasal consonat, and homorganic nasal plus stop clusters are both very common and correspond to their plain voiced equivalents in the Schraeder Range family, we reinterpret Hoenigman's phonemic inventory to include 15 consonants as follows, with laminal /s/ as the voiceless counterpart to prenasalied /ɲɟ/ (possibly really affricate /ndʒ/):

This inventory is systemically identical to that Foley (2017: 235-236) presents for Lower Arafundi (Nanubae) of Auwim village.

In addition to diphthongs, vowels can occur in sequence where they are distinguished from diphthongs by stress patterns.

Hoenigman (2015: 294-295, 301-302) gives pronouns for Awiakay of Kanjimei village in five case forms as follows:

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