Buruwai

Timothy Usher, Santa Fe Institute

Buruwai (Buruai,) also known as Sabakor (Sebakor,) is spoken by several hundred people living in five villages, Guriasa, Gaka, Tairi, Hia and Yarona, around and to the west of the Buruai river on the west side of Kamrau Bay in the southeast portion of the Bomberai peninsula in the Kaimana regency of Indonesian's West Papua province. According to Visser, speakers call themselves Sabakor or Madewana (Medewana) after the Mandewa river, a tributary of the Buruai (Anceaux 1958: 116, Walker and Hesse 1988: 1, 2, 3, Visser 1989: 65-66, 68.)

It is a widespread misconception that Buruwai is the same language as South Kamrau, also known as Asienara, spoken across the Buruai river to the northeast and along the coast to the east. The latter is actually somewhat more closely related to North Kamrau, also known as Iria, immediately to the northeast (Walker and Hesse 1988: 2, 3.) The incorrect conflation of Buruwai with Asienara dates to Anceaux (1958: 116, recapitulated in Voorhoeve 1975: 31,) who presents a list of South Kamrau speaking villages alongside one of Buruwai villages as representing two dialects of Asienara; thus Anceaux's count of over 700 speakers can only have been overstated. The villages in Anceaux's second dialect are listed as Taeri, Guriasa and Gaka, in close accordance with Walker and Hesse's (1988: 2) Guriasa, Gaka, Tairi and Hia villages the speech of which is identified as Buruwai. Additionally the village of Yarona at the mouth of the Buruai river has a population of Buruwai speakers alongside speakers of South Kamrau (Walker and Hesse 1988: 2, 3.)

Anceaux (n.d.) vocabulary of Gaka-Guriasa village (unobtained)

Voorhoeve (1975: 100) 40 comparative terms for Asienara after Anceaux (n.d.) (likely Buruwai of Gaka-Guriasa village mixed with a few South Kamrau words)

Visser (1989) kin and miscellaneous terms for Sabakor of Gaka village

Voorhoeve (2007) 217 comparative terms for Buruwai (drawn primarily from Anceaux's (n.d.) vocabulary of Gaka-Guriasa village but mixed with a few South Kamrau words)

Walker (1978) 110 comparative terms for Gaka village

Walker and Hesse (1988) 209 comparative terms for Tairi village and 127 comparative terms for Yarona and Guriasa/Gaka villages

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 Gaka village.

Buruwai has 13 consonants and 5 vowels as follows::

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 simplified (below.) It is not clear if these final consonants should be analyzed as underlyingly present in the synchronic roots.

Walker (1978: 2, 1988: 3) gives pronouns for Buruwai of Gaka and Tairi villages respectively as follows. No second person plural is given in these termlists:

From these and from outcomparison to North Kamrau (Iria) we can discern that Buruwai pronouns are as follows:

The universality of final /-da/ is conspicuous and suggests that all free pronouns were or are all still underlyingly suffixed with a common formative which might have been /*-n/ or /*-r/ which is then followed by the nominal article /*-ra/ (below.) Based upon compoarison to Voorhoeve's (1980) proto-Asmat forms, the final was likely /*r/. The second person sngular and plural forms are probably underlyingly /or-or/ and /jar-or/ respectively.

Most Buruwai nominals and nominal modifiers when occurring 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 Buruwai verbal morphology is available tuo us. It can be observed however that, as in South Kamrau and North 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 contrast to the nominal /-ra/ (above) there are no special combinatory rules and these consonants take their usual medial reflexes.