Masep

Timothy Usher, Santa Fe Institute, developed with Mark Donohue

Masep (Massep,) or Wotaf, is spoken by between 40 and 50 people (2002) living in a single village located just east of the mouth of the Apauwar River on the north coast of Indonesia's Papua province. Masep is the name of their village and Wotaf is the native speakers' name for their language. Despite the low number of speakers, use of Masep is vigorous among all age groups. Masep speakers use Irianese Malay when communicating with speakers of the Airoran and Samarokena languages of Subu and Karfasia villages immediately to the west and east respectively (Clouse, Donohue and Ma 2002: 4, 11.)

Donohue (1998) survey vocabulary of Wotaf (Massep) of Masep village

Clouse, Donohue and Ma (2002: 6-7) phonemic inventory, pronouns and case forms for Masep

Erickson (n.d.) survey vocabulary of Massep provided in comparative spreadsheet form by Paul Whitehouse via the Summer Institute of Linguistics

Silen (n.d.) survey vocabulary of Massep provided in comparative spreadsheet form by Paul Whitehouse via the Summer Institute of Linguistics

Clouse, Donohue and Ma (2002: 6) tentatively propose 16 or 17 consonants and 5 vowels for Masep as follows:

(Clouse Donohue and Ma's <c j> are shown as [tʃ dʒ] above based upon the transcriptions of Donohue 1998)

Clouse, Donohue and Ma (2002: 6-7) give Masep free pronouns and prefixed possessors/undergoers as follows:

Clouse, Donohue and Ma (2002: 6-7) give case suffixes for Masep nominals as follows:

Besides the forms of prefixed undergoers (above,) nothing is known about Masep verbal morphology.