Abstract
Akabea belongs to the Great Andamanese family, one of the two indigenous language families of the Andaman Islands. All that remains today of this family is a handful of “rememberers” of so-called Present-day Great Andamanese, based on the language furthest removed from Akabea. None of the traditional languages was the subject of professional linguistic documentation or analysis. However, two government officials collected extensive material, with Akabea being the language most thoroughly treated. Neither was a trained linguist, and one might wonder whether anything reliable can be derived from their documentation. We have worked in detail with the Akabea material, and conclude that while there are obvious gaps (e.g. in the phonetics), the overall picture is that of a very consistent and elaborate grammatical and lexical structure. We present two typologically unusual features of Akabea. One relates to the conceptual basis of the language’s lexicon, which makes extensive use of somatic (body-part) prefixes, e.g. Akabea aka- ‘mouth’. These are sometimes used literally (as in the word for ‘mouth’), sometimes by semantic extension (e.g. in words relating to food and speech). The other concerns an unusual grammatical feature of the language, namely verb root ellipsis. In English, it is possible to omit verbs under appropriate pragmatic conditions, e.g. in response to Is he reading? one can answer Yes, he is, with omission of the whole word reading, but not *Yes, he is -ing, with omission of just the root read. Precisely this bizarre non-existent English type is what is attested in Akabea.
Highlights
Akabea belongs to the Great Andamanese family, one of the two indigenous language families of the Andaman Islands
The part of the world that we will be dealing with in this article is the Andaman Islands, an archipelago located in the Indian Ocean, more precisely in the Bay of Bengal
There are at least two indigenous language families spoken on the Andaman Islands: Great Andamanese, the language family that we will be concerned with here, and Ongan
Summary
Given the limitations of the documentation, there are clear limits on our knowledge in several areas. In phonology, we know from the discussion provided by Portman and Man that the Great Andamanese languages, including Akabea, have retroflex consonants as distinct phonemes. They go on to say that since they did not hear the distinction consistently they decided not to try to represent it. We know that there were distinct retroflex consonants, but we do not know exactly where they occurred. We can get some information by comparing with Present-day Great Andamanese, thanks to the work of Anvita Abbi. Present-day Great Andamanese clearly has phonemically distinct retroflex consonants [ʈ], [ʈh], [ɖ], and [ɽ]. The six spontaneous texts comprise the three narratives already alluded to, and three songs which provide problems of their own: even to native speakers at the time not everything in the songs was intelligible
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