South Kamrau

Timothy Usher, Santa Fe Institute

South Kamrau (Kamberau,) also known as Asienara, is spoken by several hundred people (1988) living in at least five villages to the east of the lower Buruai river and south of its mouth along the west coast of Kamrau Bay in the southeast portion of the Bomberai peninsula in the Kaimana regency of Indonesia's West Papua province. According to Visser, Asienara is a North Kamrau term meaning “people with curled hair” and is somewhat derogatory (Anceaux 1958: 111, 116, Walker and Hesse 1988: 1, 2, 3, Visser 1989: 68.)

It is a widespread misconception that Asienara is the same language as Buruwai, also known as Sabakor (Sebakor,) spoken across the Buruai river to the southwest. It is actually somewhat more closely related to North Kamrau, also known as Iria, immdiately to the northeast (Walker and Hesse 1988: 2, 3.) The incorrect conflation of Asienara with Buruwai 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 first dialect are listed as Kuna, Esania, Murabia, Garosa, Jarona and Kembala, in close accordance with Walker and Hesse's (1988: 2) Esania-Kuna, Yarona, Edor and Kembala villages the speech of which is identified as South Kamberau. There are no known dialect distinctions within South Kamrau.

Anceaux (n.d.) comparative vocabulary of Asienara (unobtained)

Anceaux (1956) (unobtained,) reprinted in English as (1958)

Anceaux (1958: 119-120) 10 comparative terms for Asienara

Greenberg (n.d.) comparative vocabulary of Asienara after Anceaux (n.d.)

Walker (1983) 49 comparative terms for Kambola village

Walker and Hesse (1988) 126 comparative terms for Esania-Kuna and Yarona villages

Voorhoeve (2007) comparative vocabulary of Kamrau includes some South Kamrau words

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 99 comparative terms for Esania/Kuna village.

South Kamrau has 13 consonants and 5 vowels as follows::

Unoccluded fricative /h/ reflects Kamrau Bay bilabial /*ɸ/ as it does in North Kamrau.

Apical non-stop /*r/ has not been found initially. It can be realized as a tap [ɾ] or as a trill [r].

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.

Anceaux (n.d.) as excerpted in Greenberg (n.d.) gives Asienara free and possessive pronouns as follows:

No third person plural forms are given; we assume them to be the same as the third person singular as they are in the closely-related Asmat-Kamoro languages.

From these forms, we can conclude that the free forms of pronouns are suffixed with a particle /-ra/, as are regular nominals (below) though in these instances including offglides conditioned by the quality of the preceding vowel, while the possessive forms are suffixed with /-ja/. The reason for /-a/ rather than /-ra/ in the first persons may be the presence of an underlying final consonant which provokes the loss of [r] (below.)

Most South Kamrau nominals and nominal modifiers when occuring 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, or if a noun class analysis is synchronically correct.

No information about South Kamrau verbal morphology is available to us. It can be observed however that, as in Buruwai and North Kamrau, the majority of verbs in Walker's (1978, Walker and Hesse's 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.