Tami language

Tami
Tami
Native to	Papua New Guinea
Region	Morobe Province
Native speakers	2,100 (2010)
Language family	Austronesian Vitiaz Tami; ;
Language codes
ISO 639-3	tmy
Glottolog	tami1290

Tami is an

subject–verb–object

(SVO).

Phonology

Tami distinguishes five vowels (i, e, a, o, u) and the following consonants (Colich 1995). Voiced obstruents do not occur in syllable-final position, while glottal stop only occurs at the end of a syllable.

	Bilabial	Labiovelar	Dental	Alveopalatal	Velar	Glottal
Voiceless	p	pw	t		k	-c [ʔ]
Voiced	b	bw	d	j [d͡ʒ]	g
Prenasalized	mb	mbw	nd	nj	ŋg
Nasal	m	mw	n		ŋ
Fricative	v [β]		s
Liquid			l
Approximant	w			y

Numerals

Traditional Tami counting practices begin with the fingers of the hands, then continue on the feet to reach twenty, which translates as 'whole person'. Higher numbers are multiples of 'whole person'. Nowadays, most counting above five is done in Tok Pisin. An alternate form of the numeral 'one', dan, functions as an indefinite article. Distributive numerals are formed via reduplication: lualu 'two by two', tolatol 'three by three' and so forth (Bamler 1900:204).

Numeral	Term	Gloss
1	te	'one'
2	lu	'two'
3	tol	'three'
4	pat	'four'
5	lim	'five, hand'
6	lim ma te	'hand and one'
7	lima ma lu	'hand and two'
8	lima ma tol	'hand and three'
9	lim ma pat	'hand and four'
10	limantalu	'hands both'
20	damo monte	'person whole'

References

Bamler, G. (1900). Bemerkungen zur Grammatik der Tamisprache. Vokabular der Tamisprache. Zeitschrift für afrikanische und ozeanische Sprachen 5: 198–253.
Colich, Kim (1995). Tami organized phonology data. Ukarumpa: SIL.

External links

Paradisec has two collections of Arthur Cappell's materials (AC1, AC2) and one collection of Malcolm Ross's (MR1) that include Sobei language materials.

Footnotes

^ Tami at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)

This article about North New Guinea languages is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

[e18-1] Tami at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)

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