Languages of Papua New Guinea

1. List Of Abbreviations ...........................4 2. Introduction ........................................ 5 3. Phonemic Inventory ............................ 8 3.1. Consonants ....................................... 8 3.2. Vowel Phonemes ............................. 12 3.3. Consonant Co-occurrences .............. 15 3.4. Vowel Co-occurrences ..................... 17 4. Syllable and Word Types ..................... 22 4.1. Syllable Template ............................. 22 4.1.1. Possible Syllable Types .................. 22 4.1.2. Syllable Type Restrictions .............. 23 4.1.3. Syllables and Morphemes ............. 23 4.2. Word Types ...................................... 24 5. Pitch/Stress ......................................... 24 6. Morphophonemic Processes ............... 29 6.1. Vowel Harmony Processes ................ 29 6.1.1. Rounding in the First Person Singular Possessive Suffix ................ 29 6.1.2. Vowel Raising ................................. 29 6.1.3. Vowel Assimilation ......................... 32 6.2. Consonant Insertion Processes ......... 32 6.2.1. Insertion of /ɣ/ ............................... 33 6.2.2. Insertion of [ŋ] ................................ 33 6.3. Vowel Length Processes ..................... 35 6.3.1. Vowel Lengthening .......................... 35 6.3.2. Vowel Length Reduction .................. 35 7. Further Matters ..................................... 37 7.1. Reduplication ...................................... 37 7.2. Compounds ......................................... 39 7.3. Loan Words ......................................... 39 7.4. Orthographic Concerns ....................... 40 8. Appendix ................................................ 41 8.1. Summary of all Phonetic and morphophonemic processes ................ 41 8.2. Minimal Pair charts ............................ 43 8.3. Complete Paradigms of morphophonemic changes ............................ 44 9. Bibliography .......................................... 47