Sawi

Timothy Usher, Santa Fe Institute

Situation

Sawi (Sawuy, Sawuj) is spoken by perhaps 3,000 people living in 16 villages (1988) along the Ayip, Fayit and Kronkel Rivers … 1,000 square miles, southern lowlands, sparsely-populated swamplands …just inland of southwest New Guinea's Casuarina Coast in Indonesia's West Papua province. The staple food of the Sawi region is sago (Voorhoeve 1971: 88, Yost 1988: 60-61.)

Sources

Voorhoeve (1971: 88-92) general description and (pp.110-114) 107 comparative terms for Sawuj of Kagas, Saremit and Sanapai villages (Fajit and Kronkel Rivers dialect)

Mills (1981) Sawi legend (unobtained)

Mills (1986) Sawi kinship and social terms

Yost (1988) Sawi religion and topical vocabulary

Dietz undated survey vocabulary provided in digitalized form by Paul Whitehouse via the Summer Institute of Linguistics

Richardson undated survey vocabulary provided in digitalized form by Paul Whitehouse via the Summer Institute of Linguistics

Phonology

Voorhoeve (1971: 90-91) gives 14 consonants and 5 vowels for Sawuj as follows:

m	n
p	t		k
b	d		g
f	s		x
w	r	j

i		u
e		o
	a

Voiced stops /b d g/ do not occur word-finally. Velar fricative /x/ does not occur before front vowels /i e/.

Voorhoeve gives consonant allophones as follows, where /˜/ symbolizes the nasalization of a preceding vowel:

	initial	medial	final
m	m	m	m
n	n	ŋ/k g	n ˜
p	p	p	p
t	t	t	t
k	k q	k q	k q
b	b	b β	b
d	d	d	d
g	g ɢ	g ɢ	g ɢ
f	pf f	f	—
s	ts s	s z	s
x	kx x qχ χ	x ɣ χ ʁ	x χ
w	w	w	w
r	l	ɾ r	ɾ r
j	j	j	j

Pronouns

[under construction]

Verbal morphology