- Shompen languages
Infobox Language family
name=Shompen
region=Great Nicobar Island
familycolor=isolate
fam1=unknown
child1=unknownThe Shompen languages are spoken onGreat Nicobar Island in the Indianunion territory of theAndaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean south of Burma.Partially because the native peoples of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are protected from outside researchers, these languages are poorly described, with much of the data from the 19th century, and the little 20th-21st century data generally brief and of poor quality.
peakers
The
Shompen arehunter-gatherer s living in the hilly interior of theGreat Nicobar Biosphere Reserve . Population estimates are approximately 400, though no census has been conducted.Classification
Although traditionally lumped in with the
Nicobarese languages , which are part of the Austro-Asiatic language family, little evidence has ever been presented to support this assumption. The only identifiable Austro-Asiatic roots are numerals, which are common borrowings, and a few body part-words, such as "koi" "head", which exists alongside native "fiāu." Instead, it appears that Shompen may be alanguage isolate .Variants
It is not known if the different language variants called "Shompen" are even related to each other. Word lists collected by different researchers are often completely dissimilar. For example, the word for "back (of the body)" has been reported to be "gikau, tamnōi," and "hokōa;" "to bathe" as "pu(g)oihoɔp" and "hōhōm."
Phonology
It is not clear if the following description applies to all variants of Shompen.
There are seven vowel qualities, IPA|/i e ɛ a ɔ o u/, all of which may be nasalized. Shompen has
vowel length , apparently for all vowel qualities, though it is not clear if all nasal vowels may also be long.The consonants are approximately as follows:
:
* The palatal "stops" are writtenand . It is not clear how these are realized phonetically. References
*Robert Blench, "The language of the Shom Pen: a language isolate in the Nicobar islands." [http://www.rogerblench.info/Language%20data/Isolates/Shompen%20paper.pdf] Manuscript, 2007.
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