Duna–Pogaya languages

The Duna–Pogaya (Duna–Bogaia) languages are a proposed small family of Trans–New Guinea languages in the classification of Voorhoeve (1975), Ross (2005) and Usher (2018), consisting of two languages, Duna and Bogaya, which in turn form a branch of the larger Trans–New Guinea family. Glottolog, which is based largely on Usher, however finds the connections between the two languages to be tenuous, and the connection to TNG unconvincing.

Language contact

Duna has had significant influence on Bogaya due to the socioeconomic dominance of Duna speakers over the less populous, less influential Bogaya speakers. Duna also has much more influence from Huli (a widely spoken Trans-New Guinea language) at 27–32 percent lexical similarity with Huli, while Duna has only 5–10 percent.

Pronouns

Pronouns are:

Vocabulary comparison

The following basic vocabulary words are from McElhanon & Voorhoeve (1970), Shaw (1973), and Shaw (1986), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database.

The words cited constitute translation equivalents, whether they are cognate (e.g. ɔwa, hewa for "sun") or not (e.g. fando, tete for "louse").

Evolution

Duna reflexes of proto-Trans–New Guinea (pTNG) etyma are:

• amu ‘breast’ < *amu
• konane ‘ear’ < *kand(e,i)k(V]
• kuni ‘bone’ < *

References