Linguistic prehistory of Papuan-Austronesian contact: An Abu' Arapesh case study

Abstract

ABSTRACTNew Guinea was settled by ancestors of present day Papuan-speaking communities 40,000 years ago. Between 3 and 5 millennia BP, waves of Austronesians (AN) followed and settled mostly on the offshore islands and along some coastal areas of the New Guinea mainland. According to a well-received view, AN Diaspora originated from Taiwan and dispersed from there to inhabit much of island Southeast Asia, Malagasy and islands of the South Pacific. Austronesian colonisation was augmented by their superior cultural traits including horticulture and marine technology. In their conquest they assimilated weaker, nomadic pre-AN aboriginal communities as was the case with the Negritos of northern Philippines; settled beside or with earlier sedentary communities as was the case in Western Melanesia; or settled on uninhabited islands in Eastern Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia (Pawley & Ross, 1995). Beside demographic movements, other forces were at work. Trade-induced contact between Asia and New Guinea was in place before European contact. A trade link promoted by the Sultan of Tidor was extended to involve some communities of West New Guinea (now Irian Jaya) and the West Sepik Province some 5,000 years ago. As a result, trade items such as plumes of the kumul (bird of paradise), spices, sandalwood, aromatic barks and sea slugs from “islands of the coast of Western New Guinea “found their way into the Middle East markets about 4,000 years ago (Swadling, 1996). Other internal or external forces such as intermarriages and so on were at work also (see Bellwood, 1978). This fairly brief prehistory of what went on in the northern region of New Guinea raises questions about possible cross-cultural or cross-linguistic influences. Indeed, it does pose a challenge to those who endeavour to piece together a pre-linguistic history of lexical “ruins” found to suggest cognate relationships among languages of the northern region of New Guinea. This essay attempts to adumbrate a linguistic etymology of “loan cognates” that Abu', a Papuan language of the Torricelli Phylum of the central Sepik region, shares with AN languages. It commences with a list of lexical items and statements about their etymologies. This approach inescapably leads to a delineation of the kinds of attitudes the Abu' have towards foreign linguistic elements. The paper concludes with a typological statement about grammatical typology as an additional explanation to both the Papuan-Austronesian contact, and the trade-link theory as bases for the diffusion of areal or regional linguistic features among languages of the East Sepik and Sandaun (West Sepik) provinces.