Maisin language

Language of Papua New Guinea

Maisin (or Maisan) is a divergent Austronesian language of Papua New Guinea, containing Papuan features. It is a Nuclear Papuan Tip language, with the Papuan element being Binanderean or Dagan. It is spoken by the Maisin people of Oro Province. Maisin displays significant lexical copying from Korafe, a neighboring Papuan language. Other languages with disputed affiliation between either Austronesian or Papuan are Magori, the Reefs Santa Cruz languages, the Lower Mamberamo languages, and the Pasismanua languages.

Syllables can begin and end with up to one consonant each. I. e., English wrong would be an acceptable word, but strength would not. Words can only end in either a vowel or The vowels and never occur word initially. never occurs before or .

Negation in Maisin is achieved predominantly by morphology. In the Marua communalect, negation is marked by isaa ka, while in the Sinapa communalect, negation is marked by saa ka. The negation marking is discontinuous. Isaa is a morpheme located prior to the predicate of the sentence, and can be roughly glossed as 'not' in English. Morphologically, it is classified as a separate word. ka is an enclitic that is found attached to a verb's tense or aspect marking enclitic. Alternatively, when there is no tense or aspect marking enclitic in the sentence, it attaches to the predicate's last item. Negation through isaa ka can be seen in the following examples. In Example 1, the verb stem 'swim' takes both the progressive marker ye (created through partial reduplication of the verb stem yee and the negative enclitic ka, as well as the male second person singular pronominal enclitic. The enclitic ka attaches to the progressive marker ye. The combination of isaa and ka in the sentence negates the action of swimming. Here negation is also shown through isaa ka. In this case, ka is attached directly to the end of the predicate, as there is no tense or aspect marking present. The first ka in the sentence (in bendoo ka) is not a negative marker; rather, it is a homophonous morpheme that functions as a topic marker. In Example 3, ka is found attached to the enclitic anan, which marks future tense. Again, negation is achieved through the combination of isaa and ka.

In the presence of the conjunction ate or the demonstrative nen, the ka enclitic is removed, leaving isaa as the sole negation marker in the sentence. This occurs because ate and nen are both located in the same position in a word as ka. isaa only negation is demonstrated in the following examples. The presence of the demonstrative morpheme nen in the first clause of Example 4 displaces (and removes) ka. Thus, isaa is the sole negator of the clause. This example shows the presence of the conjunction ate, which is attached to the end of the verb stem kan. This removes ka and again leaves isaa as the only negation marker in the sentence.

Maisin is an Oceanic language (Eberhard, Simons, & Fennig, 2019), and its negation system is fairly typical of Oceanic languages. Oceanic languages often express negation discontinuously, with the first element located preverbally and the second postverbally – Maisin fits this pattern, as the above examples demonstrate. Additionally, Maisin follows both the Polynesian pattern of marking negation clause initially and the Papuan pattern of marking negation clause finally.