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West Damar, or North Damar, is an Austronesian language of Damar Island, one of the Maluku Islands of Indonesia. In spite of rather low cognacy rates with its neighboring languages, it can be classified as part of the Babar languages based on qualitative evidence.

It is spoken in two villages (Batumerah, Kuai) located in the north-western part of Damar.

Phonology

The consonant inventory of West Damar is as follows:

• Sounds /b ɡ/ only occur in loanwords from Indonesian. /ŋ/ also mostly, but not exclusively, appears in loanwords.

The vowel inventory of West Damar is simply /a e i o u/.

Morphology

A few aspects of West Damar morphology are noted as follows.

Verb conjugation

Verbs in West Damar are conjugated according to person and number.

1. Becomes ng- before velar consonants.
2. The -y- is attached after the initial consonant of a verb stem, so from -lo "go" is born mlyo.

Possession

West Damar has a series of possessive suffixes that are attached to nouns. There is no possessive verb. The possessive suffixes are as follows:

The possessive suffixes are built from a base suffix -ni that also appears as a lexical derivational suffix:

• ulcho + -ni > ulchuni "husband"
• deweya + -ni > deweyeni "wife"
• ullo "month" + -ni > ulloni "moon"

Negation

The word for "no" in West Damar is kewe. When split into a circumfix, ke- -we serves as a simple negator for content words like nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The -we part of the negator comes immediately after the stem it attaches to, but before other clitics. A few examples of negation provided by Chlenova are as follows:

ke-mormorsa-we

NEG-buffalo-NEG

ke-mormorsa-we

NEG-buffalo-NEG

"not a buffalo"

Piter

Peter

ke-tucha-we-mo

NEG-old-NEG-?

odo-i

1SG-DET

Piter ke-tucha-we-mo odo-i

Peter NEG-old-NEG-? 1SG-DET

"Peter (is) not as old as I (am)"

Another negative predicative word krawui "unavailable" is also recorded.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary list:

Sample sentences

Ede mpondai? - Are you ill?

E’e, odo ulkonacheni nchepondo. - Yes, I have a headache.

Wohleyo Binayani idihe hulchupondeheti wohleyo Ahehendini - The mountain Binaya is the highest at the Seram island.

See also

• East Damar language

References

1. West Damar at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
2. Mark Taber. 1993. Toward a better understanding of the Indigenous Languages of Southwestern Maluku. Oceanic Linguistics 32. 389-441.
3. Aone van Engelenhoven. 2010. Tentatively locating West-Damar among the languages of Southwest Maluku. In Chlenova, Svetlana and Fedorchuk, Artem (eds.), Studia Anthropologica: a Festschrift in Honor of Michael Chlenov, 297-326. Moscow-Jerusalem: Gesharim.
4. ^ "West Damar Language or Damar-Batumerah, an Isolate in South-Eastern Indonesia" (PDF). 2015-05-12. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-05-12. Retrieved 2020-07-04.
5. ^ Chlenova, Svetlana (2008). "Preliminary Grammatical Notes on Damar Batumerah or West Damar, a Language of Southwest Maluku". In Yury Lander; Alexander Ogloblin (eds.). Language and Text in the Austronesian World: Studies in honor of Ülo Sirk. München: Lincom. pp. 163–177.

Further reading

• Michael Chlenov & Svetlana Chlenova, 2006. "West Damar language or Damar-Batumerah, an isolate in South-Eastern Indonesia." Tenth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, 17–20 January 2006, Palawan, Philippines.

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