Talk:Äiwoo language

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 25 January 2019 and 23 March 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Seanmks106.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 05:32, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

More examples

Various subsections lack examples altogether (e.g. class prefixes). These should be added. Kevinbaet (talk) 18:34, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Phonology

There is hardly any information in the phonology section. This is highest priority to be filled in. The phoneme inventory should be presented according to point and manner of articulation. Kevinbaet (talk) 18:34, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Paradigms

Instead of giving just one example of a pronoun, the whole pronominal paradigm should be presented. Likewise, the demonstrative paradigm. And the agreement affixes on the verb. Kevinbaet (talk) 18:34, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Causative verbs

In the section entitled "Special verbs", it is unclear whether verbs starting with v- or w- are already causative verbs, or only the ones that are prefixed with vä- and wä-. Kevinbaet (talk) 18:34, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Word order?

The article says Äiwoo follows the word order OVS, but the World Atlas of Language Structures gives SVO: https://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_ayw Exarchus (talk) 12:20, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Hi, good question. In fact, both are true. See p.480 of Ross & Naess (2007): “The transitive clause with full noun phrase arguments has a constituent order unlike that of any Oceanic or Papuan language that we know, namely OVS, as (42a) shows. The subject and object are each coreferenced by the verbal suffixes listed in table 3. A semitransitive clause is used with a generic, plural or nonspecific object, and with a repeated or habitual action. Its verb is formally intransitive, has a subject prefix and SVO order.” -- Womtelo (talk) 14:50, 11 February 2023 (UTC).

Åshild Næss writes in her 2021 paper Voice and Valency Morphology in Äiwoo: "In the actor voice, unmarked word order is AVO [...] in the undergoer voice, unmarked word order with full NP arguments is OVA...". She analyses the verb system of Äiwoo as having symmetrical voice. Translated into typological primitive variables, this means that Äiwoo has SVO word order.

But: if one takes undergoer voice as the basic transitive construction (as Ross & Næss 2007 do) and actor voice as semi-transitive (thus antipassive-like), basic trasitive word order would be OVS. So it depends very much on how you analyse the verb system; a perennial question in Austronesian syntax. –Austronesier (talk) 15:10, 11 February 2023 (UTC)