Kalamang language explained

Kalamang
Region:West Papua
Speakers:100
Date:2000
Ref:[1]
Familycolor:Papuan
Fam1:Trans–New Guinea
Fam2:Berau Gulf
Fam3:West Bomberai
Iso3:kgv
Glotto:kara1499
Glottorefname:Kalamang
Coordinates:-3.47°N 132.68°W
Pushpin Map:Indonesia Western New Guinea#Indonesia#Southeast Asia
Map2:Lang Status 40-SE.svg

Kalamang, sometimes also called Karas, is a divergent Trans–New Guinea language spoken on the biggest of the Karas Islands off the Bomberai Peninsula, that is part of the West Bomberai family. It is spoken in Antalisa and Mas villages on Karas Island.

Phonology

Consonants[2] !!Labial!Alveolar!Dorsal
Plosivepronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/
Fricative(pronounced as /link/)pronounced as /link/(pronounced as /link/)
Nasalpronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/
Approximantpronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/
Vowels!!Front!Central!Back
Highpronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/
Midpronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/
Lowpronounced as /link/

Additionally, the following diphthongs are present: /ei/, /oi/, /ou/, /ui/.

Pronouns

Cowan (1953) records the following pronouns for Karas.

singulardualplural
1st
person
exclusiveaan inir piridok
inclusiveaantemu (?)
2nd personkame ? kijumene
3rd personmame mjeir mubameir

Visser (2020) records the following pronouns for Karas of Maas village:

The free possessives and possessive suffixes can occur together.[3]

Machine Translation from One Book

In 2023, Kalamang was used by machine learning researchers for a benchmark called "Machine Translation from One Book". It was chosen because of its negligible presence in the Internet and because field research materials were collected by Eline Visser, who published "A grammar of Kalamang" as her PhD thesis. Although Kalamang is primarily oral language, it can be written in the Indonesian alphabet. Researchers used all existing materials (grammar book, short dictionary, and small set of Kalamang-English sentences) to test how large language models (LLM) can learn a language from a single source, and tested the quality of translations.[4] In 2024, researchers from Google showed that their latest LLM, Gemini 1.5, can translate English to Kalamang with similar quality to a human who learned from the same resources.

Sources

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in danger. www.unesco.org. en. 2018-08-18.
  2. Visser . Eline . A Grammar Sketch of Kalamang with a Focus on Phonetics and Phonology . 2016 . Master . University of Oslo . . en.
  3. Book: Visser . Eline . A grammar of Kalamang . 19 January 2022 . Language Science Press . 978-3-96110-343-0 . en.
  4. 2309.16575 . Tanzer . Garrett . Suzgun . Mirac . Visser . Eline . Jurafsky . Dan . Melas-Kyriazi . Luke . A Benchmark for Learning to Translate a New Language from One Grammar Book . 2023 . cs.CL .