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The Piawi languages are a small family of Papuan languages spoken in the Schraeder Range of the Madang Highlands of Papua New Guinea that had been part of Stephen Wurm's Trans–New Guinea proposal. They are now connected to the Arafundi and Madang languages.

The name "Piawi" is an acronym of three language varieties: Pinai (Pinaye), Aramo/Aramaue (Hagahai) and Wiyaw (Harway/Waibuk). Pinai and Hagahai are often classified as a single language.

Classification

Piawi consists of only two languages:

• Piawi family: Pinai-Hagahai, Haruai (Waibuk)

Davies and Comrie (1985) noted some pronominal similarities with the Engan languages in Trans–New Guinea, which Ross took into consideration, but no lexical similarities. Comrie believes the family is as isolate. William A. Foley suggested that Piawi and Arafundi may be related (Comrie 1992), and according to Ross a connection with Arafundi or Ramu appears more promising than Engan. Timothy Usher confirms the link to Arafundi.

Pronouns

Below is a comparison of proto-Piawi, proto-Ramu, Arafundi, and proto-North Engan pronouns, per Ross. Initial nasals are ubiquitous, and indeed are very common throughout New Guinea, so they are in themselves not good evidence of a relationship.

Both Engan and Piawi have a dual suffix *li.

Vocabulary comparison

The following basic vocabulary words are from Davies & Comrie (1985), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database. The Haruai data is from Tonson (1976).

The words cited constitute translation equivalents, whether they are cognate (e.g. waɲa, wəɲa, wɛɲa for “dog”) or not (e.g. haŋietʰ, nauŋasi, namagə for “nose”).

See also

• Upper Yuat languages

References

1. ^ Davies, J. and Comrie, B. "A linguistic survey of the Upper Yuat". In Adams, K., Lauck, L., Miedema, J., Welling, F., Stokhof, W., Flassy, D., Oguri, H., Collier, K., Gregerson, K., Phinnemore, T., Scorza, D., Davies, J., Comrie, B. and Abbott, S. editors, Papers in New Guinea Linguistics No. 22. A-63:275-312. Pacific Linguistics, The Australian National University, 1985. doi:10.15144/PL-A63.275
2. Comrie, Bernard. "The recognition of the Piawi language family." In Tom Dutton, Malcolm Ross and Darrell Tryon, eds. The language game: Papers in memory of Donald C. Laycock. 111-113. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, 1992.
3. NewGuineaWorld Arafundi and Upper Yuat Rivers
4. Greenhill, Simon (2016). "TransNewGuinea.org - database of the languages of New Guinea". Retrieved 2020-11-05.
5. Tonson, J. 1976. The languages in the Schraeder ranges. Workpapers in Papua New Guinea Languages 16. Ukarumpa: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Pp. 91-112.

• Ross, Malcolm (2005). "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages". In Andrew Pawley; Robert Attenborough; Robin Hide; Jack Golson (eds.). Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pp. 15–66. ISBN 0858835622. OCLC 67292782.

External links

• Piawi languages database at TransNewGuinea.org

• Piawi languages
• Upper Yuat languages
• Languages of Madang Province