Aramba (formerly spelled Arammba) is a Papuan language of Papua New Guinea. It is spoken to the south of Western Province in the Trans Fly region. Aramba belongs to the Tonda Sub-Family, which is next to the Nambu Sub-Family region and the Suki language. Alternative names for the language include Upper Morehead (a name shared with the Upper Morehead language), Rouku, Kamindjo and Tjokwasi.
Background The Aramba language is spoken in five main villages by approximately 2000 people. Children learn how to read and write the Aramba language in preschool, before entering primary school which is conducted in English.
The Aramba people are semi nomadic, and live off the animals and plants in the surrounding rainforest and savannah. They also have gardens in which primarily yams are grown, but this depends on the season (Boevé & Boevé, 1999). There is no cash economy and few basic services. Aid posts for healthcare services are usually understaffed and have no supplies. While elementary school in the vernacular language is available, most do not have reading and writing materials. It is rare for students to go to secondary school as there are no secondary schools around. The Aramba region could be accessed by airplane, or by boat from the provincial capital, Daru island, though this could take up to a week.
Phonology and Orthography The following tables lists the phonemes of Aramba. Graphemes are included in where different from phonemic representation.
Bilabial Dental Alveolar Palatel Velar Uvular Plosive/Affricate () Nasal Fricative Trill Approximant
+Vowels Front Central Back High Mid Low
Major word classes
Verbs Alongside with nouns, verbs constitute the only open word class in Aramba. Syntactically, they fall into three subtypes: transitive verbs, (inherently) intransitive verbs and derived intransitive verbs. Transitive verbs like 'pound' are inflected with a so-called absolutive prefix (which denotes the Undergoer of an action) and an appropriate nominative suffix (denoting the Actor of an action). (For more details on absolutive and nominative affixes ) Intransitive verbs like 'live' are also inflected with an absolutive prefix and nominative suffix; however, here it is the prefix that denotes the Actor of the action (S), whereas the nominative suffix remains invariant (i.e. it invariantly marks for third person singular). Derived intransitive verbs like 'learn' are derived from transitive roots (here: < 'teach'); they carry a detransitiviser prefix (e.g. ) and are suffixed by the same set of nominative suffixes as their transitive counterparts (the only difference being of course that these suffixes now mark for S and not A function). Examples (1)-(3) below illustrate each verbal subtype as outlined above.
In addition to subject/object marking, Aramba verb affixes also mark for a complex set of tense/aspect categories as will be outlined in . Furthermore, all verbs occur in two forms referred to as "common root" (C) and "limited action root" (L) (Boevé and Boevé, 1999: 49). For instance, the verb meaning 'pound' has a common root form 'pound' as well as a limited action root form 'pound'. (The possible differences in meaning will be discussed .) The common root form of most verbs can be used to derive nouns by adding to it the nominal suffix ; e.g. 'pound' can be nominalized to meaning 'the act of pounding'.
Nouns
Just like verbs, Aramba nouns present an open word class. With regard to morphology, nouns may optionally inflect for number, taking the plural suffix (e.g. 'thing-s', 'ancestor-s'). However, there are a few suppletive plural forms ( 'women' < 'woman'; 'children/boys' < 'child/boy'; 'girls' < 'girl'), and the plural suffix can also not be used on verbal nouns like (< 'pound').
Reduplication is used on some (underived) nouns to indicate smallness or definiteness; e.g. the reduplicated form of 'house' is and means 'small house', reduplication of 'cassowary nail' yields 'finger nail', and the reduplicated form of 'yam house' is or '(this/that) yam house'. Compare this with the reduplication effect on derived (verbal) nouns: 'making noise' > 'making much noise'; 'walking, going' > 'strolling around'.
Syntactically, nouns can make up an entire NP and they can be marked by a long list of 'postpositional clitics' (Boevé & Boevé, 1999: 53). Some of these clitics have derivational function (e.g. adjectiviser 'with the quality of'; genitive 'of') while most others carry case-marking functions (e.g. ergative ; instrumental 'with'; comitative 'together with'; human comitative 'together with' benefactive 'to, for'; locative 'in'; non-human allative 'towards, to, at the place of, into'; human allative 'towards, to'; non-human ablative 'from, away from, from the side of'; human ablative 'from, away from'; purposive 'for, (in order) to' etc.).
For examples of adjectivising . For a discussion of alienable and inalienable possession in Aramba .
Adjectives
Aramba is one of those languages with a very limited set of underived adjectives. Boevé & Boevé (1999: 61) give the following list of 13 adjectival forms: 'big', 'small', 'old', 'young, new', 'long', 'short', 'far', 'close by', 'good', 'straight', 'first', 'after' and 'up'.
Compare: In his famous article 'Where have all the adjectives gone?' (Dixon, 1977), Bob Dixon presented the results of a survey carried out on 20 different languages (among them were African, Australian, Mesoamerican and Papuan languages). 17 languages had only small adjective classes and three had morphologically determined subsets within the larger class of adjectives. The size of the classes/subsets in the 20 languages ranged from 7 to 24, with an average of 13. The following adjectival meanings turned out to be (among) the most frequent: 'large' (found in all 20 languages), 'small' (19), 'long' (14), 'short' (15), 'new' (15), 'old' (14), 'good' (13), 'bad' (14), 'black' (13), 'white' (14), 'red' (8), 'raw, green, unripe' (7) (cf. Dixon, 1982: 7).
Based on Boevé & Boevé (1999)'s list of adjectives, Aramba shares 7 out of the 12 cross-linguistically most frequent adjectival meanings, though it lacks 5 of the other most frequent meanings. At the same time, it has 6 adjectives which have different meanings from the ones (by Dixon) listed above, predominantly in the domain of locational and temporal qualification ('far', 'close by', 'up', 'after', 'first').
The Aramba adjectives can generally be distinguished from other word classes in that they do not exhibit any nominal or verbal morphology. Unlike nouns, they cannot make up an entire NP on their own and they cannot be used with the adjectiviser suffix . It seems that adjectivised nouns often make up for the limited repertoire of underived adjectives:
Personal Pronouns
In Aramba, free personal pronouns exhibit the ergative-absolutive case marking pattern, i.e. the unmarked (absolutive) forms are used in intransitive subject (S) and transitive object (O) function (cf. third column in Table 3), while the marked (ergative) form is used in transitive subject (A) function (cf. second column in Table 3). (cf. Boevé & Boevé, 1999: 54)
ErgativeAbsolutive1sg.231pl.23
Table 3: Personal pronouns in Aramba.
Pronouns can also take the postpositional clitic which either functions as intensifier (emphasis) or as reflexive (Actor acting upon himself), e.g. 'you (A) yourselves' or 'you (S) yourselves'. Note that this use of pronouns in context with intensification and reflexivity is analogous to English and its set of pronominal self-forms: He himself had baked the cake (intesifying self-form) vs. He hit himself on the head (reflexive self-form).
3.5 Demonstratives
Aramba has three demonstrative forms: proximal 'this', medial 'that' and distal 'that over there'. They can function as demonstrative pronoun (example (9); in example (10), is used with the 'locative' postpositional clitic ) or as demonstrative determiner (see example (11)):
Quantifiers
This class includes numeral and non-numeral expressions. The numeral system takes the base 6 and involves the following forms:
'one''two''three''four''five''six''36''6x36''6x 'wermeke}}'6x '
There is also (a more English-oriented way of) counting with the base of five, involving the composite form 'five (lit. one hand part)'. Thus, for 'ten' you get '(lit.) two hands parts', for 'fifteen' you get '(lit.) three hands parts', or for '24' you get '(lit.) four hands parts (and) four'. Non-numeral quantifiers include 'one, some, another', 'uncountable', 'not much', 'all', 'many', 'many' and 'plenty'. (cf. Boevé and Boevé, 1999: 63)
Adverbs
Adverbs are uninflected forms which are never governed by a postposition, and do not function as arguments or predicates in single clauses. In addition to degree adverbs like 'very', 'somewhat' and fefe}} 'really, very', there are also a number of adverbs indicating tense, aspect or mood: 'past tense', 'future tense', 'still', 'again', 'no matter', 'irrealis', 'as if', 'would, should', 'counterfactual', 'negative' and 'prohibitive'. (cf. Boevé and Boevé, 1999: 64)
Conjunctions
Aramba has coordinate conjunctions and subordinate conjunctions (complementizers). Coordinate conjunctions functioning at noun phrase as well as clause/sentence level are 'and' and 'or'; the expressions 'and/then', 'but', 'and' and 'and/then', on the other hand, only function on clause/sentence level. The subclass of complementizers includes 'when, if', 'until', and interrogative pronouns me 'whichever', 'like what', 'from where', 'wherever', 'whatever' and 'how big'. (Boevé and Boevé, 1999: 65–69)
Possession
Aramba makes a formal distinction between alienable and inalienable possession. The possessive relationship holding between a possessor noun and a possessed noun is commonly marked by the postpositional clitic . Consider the examples below.
In addition, Boevé and Boevé (1999: 59) observe the following subset of so-called inalienable nouns in the language: 'mother', 'father', 'father', 'friend', 'husband', 'wife', 'daughter, 'son', 'name sake'. These nouns obligatorily take the inalienable noun prefix (see Tab. 4) without the possessive postpositional clitic , which is used with alienable nouns.
1sg. 2 3 1pl. 2 3
Table 4: Inalienable noun prefixes varying according to person and number.
The list of inalienable nouns suggests that the formal marking of inalienable possession is restricted to nouns denoting social (and biological) kinship relations. Nevertheless, the examples below demonstrate that by no means all semantically inalienable nouns are formally marked as such.
Yet another way of marking possessive relationships is demonstrated by the following example (19); here the otherwise locative postpositional clitic - is employed as possessive marker. Note that the possessed noun 'husband' belongs to our above list of (formally marked) inalienable nouns.
Verbal morphology
As already indicated in , Aramba verbs occur in two forms: 'common root' (C) and 'limited action root' (L) (cf. §5.1). To these roots, obligatory prefixes and suffixes are attached. The verb morphology is unusual in that it displays a mixture of ergative-absolutive marking and nominative-accusative marking. Tense/Aspect marking in Aramba is rather complex (cf. §5.2).
Common root vs. Limited action root
The limited action root of a verb is used when there is only one instance of the action, when the action implied is restricted in time, intensity or amount or when the number of participants in the event is limited. The common root, on the other hand, implies no such restrictions. Consider examples (20) and (21) involving the limited action root and the common root of the verb meaning 'tell':
The limited action root also serves as a stylistic device in certain discourse contexts, e.g. when issuing a command or directive. Compare example (22) with the limited action root 'help' with (23) where the common root 'help' is being used.