A Sketch Grammar of Pondi by Russell Barlow

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Sketch Grammar of Pondi by Russell Barlow William A. Foley Russell Barlow. 2020. A Sketch Grammar of Pondi. Canberra: Australian National University Press. xiv + 200 pp. ISBN 9781760463830. Downloadable at press.anu.au. This is a short grammar followed by a brief Pondi–English and English–Pondi lexicon of a severely endangered Papuan, or non-Austronesian, language spoken in the Lower Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. There are no texts appended, but that is to be expected given the very brief period of fieldwork, some thirty hours overall, that was available to the author to document the language. The documentation of Pondi was a small side study by the author while he undertook his main project, a detailed documentation of the closely related Ulwa language, which resulted in his PhD dissertation at the University of Hawai'i (Barlow 2018). One might regard thirty hours as insufficient for the documentation of any language, and clearly this limits the scope of this description. However, given the close relationship between Pondi and Ulwa, which the author did very extensive fieldwork on over a few years, and his clear native ability as a linguist, this grammar actually has good coverage, though of course it is necessarily brief and many gaps exist. Pondi and Ulwa along with Mwakai (Barlow 2020) belong to the small Ulmapo family (formerly known as the Mongol–Langam family or as the Koam family in Foley [2018]), which in combination with some languages to their immediate east forms a subgroup within the larger Ramu family, which in turn, with the addition of the Lower Sepik family, constitutes the Lower Sepik–Ramu family (Foley 2018), one of the larger language families of Papuan languages, comprised of some thirty-five members. The author (p. 17) expresses skepticism of any genetic relationship between the Ulmapo and the Lower Sepik languages, but for this reviewer there is little doubt of that, and further evidence to support his claim will be presented below. Pondi like most languages of the Lower Sepik region is severely endangered, with no children now learning it and with no speakers under twenty. All good fluent speakers were over thirty at the time of the author's fieldwork, and with life expectancy in the region around sixty, its prognosis is very poor indeed. Its functions have been entirely usurped by Tok Pisin (see also Kulick 2019), and with no domains favored for its usage, its extinction in the next few decades seems assured. The phonology of Pondi is simple and quite typical of its region. There are voiceless and prenasalized voiced stops at four places of articulation, bilabial, alveolar, palatal, and velar (/s/ being the realization of the voiceless palatal [End Page 485] stop), with a corresponding nasal at each place, though surprisingly the language lacks /ŋ/. There are two semivowels /w/ and /y/ and again like most languages in the region a single liquid, the lateral /l/. Languages in the Lower Sepik region almost always have a single liquid, but its realization varies between a lateral /l/ and a flap /r/; for example, while Pondi has /l/, its close relative Mwakai has /r/, and even in Pondi, /l/ is realized as the flap [r] when following /t/. The vowel system is also very typical of its region, the standard five /i e a o u/ plus a nonlow central vowel, variably realized as high or mid, that is, [ɨ] or [ə]. The author writes this last vowel as <ï>, a convention for Pondi I hold to here. The morphosyntactic typology of Pondi is very typical of Ramu family languages, largely analytic and neutral or dependent marking, in very marked contrast to the highly wrought polysynthetic head marking typology of Lower Sepik family languages. Yet in spite of this huge typological divide, there are clear markers of genetic relationship, and Pondi exhibits a number of these. First are a few probable lexical cognates between Pondi and two geographically widely separated Lower Sepik family languages that I noticed while reading the grammar, given in table 1. Second, nouns in Pondi are inflected for number and in an unusual way that is common among Ramu family languages: a contrast between plural, which is overtly...