Foja Range languages explained

Foja Range
Acceptance:	Tor–Kwerba
Familycolor:	Papuan
Fam1:	Northwest Papuan?
Child4:	Mawes
Glotto:	none

The Foja Range languages, or Tor–Kwerba in more limited scope, are a family of about two dozen Papuan languages. They are named after the Foja Mountains of western New Guinea.

Languages

All the languages had been part of Stephen Wurm's 1975 Trans–New Guinea proposal, but he did not recognize them as a unit, retaining Kwerba within Capell's 1962 Dani–Kwerba proposal, for example. Foley (2018) classifies the Orya–Tor and Kwerbic languages together, as Tor–Kwerba. Usher (2020) adds Nimboran and Mawes, naming the expanded family Foja Range, after the Foja mountain range^[1] that passes through all four branches of the family.^[2]

• Foja Range
  • Orya–Tor
  • Nimboran
  • Mawes
  • West Foja Range (Greater Kwerbic)
    • Isirawa
    • Masep
    • Kapauri–Sause
    • Apauwar–Kwerba (Kwerbic)
      • Apauwar Coast
      • Kwerba

Typological overview

Even though grammatical gender is present in Tor-Kwerba languages, there is no overt gender marking on nouns.

Pronouns

Reconstructed proto-Tor-Kwerba independent pronouns are:^[3]

Cognates

Reconstructed proto-Tor-Kwerba words that are widely distributed throughout the family (Foley 2018):^[3]

• * 'eye'
• * 'leg'
• * 'louse'
• * 'sky'
• * ~ * 'tree'

External links

• Tor-Kwerba languages database at TransNewGuinea.org

Notes and References

1. "Foja" is the Dutch spelling, often rendered "Foya" in English, so one might expect that in modern Indonesian orthography it would be "Foya" as well. However, the Indonesian spelling remains "Foja", as it was before the spelling reform. Thus the "j" may be pronounced as either an English "y" or an English "j".
2. Web site: New Guinea World . 2020-01-27 . 2020-10-16 . https://web.archive.org/web/20201016032214/https://sites.google.com/site/newguineaworld/families/northwest-new-guinea/foja-range . dead .
3. Book: Foley, William A. . Palmer . Bill . 2018 . The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide . The languages of Northwest New Guinea . The World of Linguistics . 4 . Berlin . De Gruyter Mouton . 433–568 . 978-3-11-028642-7.