Some Notes on Prosody in Mpur and Local Indonesian

Abstract

Mpur (West Papuan Phylum) is a Non-Austronesian language with approximately 5,000 speakers in the Northeast Bird's Head Area, Irian Jaya, Indonesia. In the literature Mpur is sometimes referred to as Kebar or Amberbaken, which are geographic names for the two regions where it is spoken. Mpur is a phylum-level isolate with dialectal differences in at least lexicon and prosody between speakers in the Kebar valley, in the mountains and on the coast, respectively. Mpur has three lexical tones: high, mid and low. The analysis of the results of some perception and production experiments on tone is still in progress: the issue is whether a fourth, midrising tone is phonologically significant. In polysyllabic words, syllables can be more prominent than their surrounding syllables, especially under the influence of high tone; yet there is no evidence for lexical stress in Mpur. The lexicon is of Papuan origin, but morphology and syntax show Austronesian features (Reesink 1998: 603ff.), such as subject-verb-object word order and the absence of heavy verb morphology. For a discussion of features of Austronesian and Non-Austronesian languages, the reader is referred to Foley (1998). Many loans, predominantly from neighbouring languages, entered Mpur from Numforese, Irianese Malay, Standard Indonesian, and also from Dutch. Indonesian is taught in village schools mainly by non-Mpur teachers, but they play truant as much as Mpur children do. In town Mpur children learn Indonesian more properly and only they are fairly able to distinguish between Indonesian and Mpur words. Mpur is an unwritten language. Apart from my work, texts have been collected by Greg and Carol Kalmbacher (Summer Institute of Linguistics) and are written down in Indonesian orthography. A phonology of Mpur is forthcoming (Kalmbacher 1996). A brief description of Mpur morphology will appear (Ode). The prosodie phenomena discussed below are analysed by means of an analysis-by-resynthesis method, using GIPOS (Graphical Interactive Processing of Speech), developed at the Institute for Perception Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, by E. Gigi and L. Vogten, in which the PSOLA (Pitch Synchronous Overlap and Add) technique for speech synthesis based on waveform editing is implemented.