Kokoda

Timothy Usher, Santa Fe Institute

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Kokoda is spoken in by 6,000 people (2004) living in eight villages …. The term Kokoda /'kokoda/ means “lake” or “flooded land,” as much of the Kokada territory is inundated for most of the year. De Vries distinguishes two dialects, the Kasueri dialect, spoken in Kasueri, Migori and Siwatori villages, and the Nebes dialect, spoken in Tarof, Negeri Besar, Tambani, Udagaga and Nebes villages (de Vries 2004: 129, 130.)

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Voorhoeve (1985: 23-38) 84 comparative terms for Tarof and Kasuweri villages drawn from Anceaux (n.d.)

Berry and Berry (1987: 99-117) … comparative terms for Kokoda of Kasuweri and Negri Besar villages

de Vries (2004: 130-137) grammar sketch and … comparative terms for Kokoda of Kasueri village

De Vries (2004: 130) gives 19 consonants and 8 vowels for Kokoda as follows:

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Neither word-final consonants nor consonant-clusters occur.

De Vries (2004: 135) gives Kokoda free pronouns in two case forms and prefixed possessors as follows; it's unclear if the missing forms below are genuine gaps in the system or were merely unelicited:

It may be seen in Voorhoeve (1985: 37) that de Vries' first person plural is an inclusive form, with /nidi/ signifying the exclusive; this is comparable to Puragi /ni'didi/ (q.v. de Vries 2004: 140.)

Like other South Bird's Head languages, Kokoda distinguishes nominals, demonstratives and adjectives by gender, with the latter inflecting in agreement with the former. For a small number of animate nominals, gender is contrastive and semantically determined. To other nominals gender is assigned according to the final vowel, with front vowels /i e/ generally indicating masculine and /a o u/ feminine (de Vries 2004: 134-135):

Adjectives agree with the gender of their referents using one of two suffxes /-ja -omo/:

According to de Vries, both masculine and feminine nouns are inflected as feminine in the plural. The only example given takes the suffixes found on adjectives alongside a vocally-determined masculine base form:

Berry and Berry (1987: 83) state that the plural is marked by /-u/, as it is in de Vries' (2004: 142) Puragi:

It may also be seen that there is a masculine suffix /-era/:

De Vries (2004: 135-137) gives Kokoda subject desinences in three tense forms as follows, with past tense /-ra/ realized as /-da/ when following verb stems with final /i/: