Hawu language

Hawu *s, attested during the Portuguese colonial era, has debuccalized to /h/, a change that has not happened in Dhao. The Hawu consonant inventory is smaller than that of Dhao:

Consonants of the /n/ column are apical, those of the /ɲ/ column laminal. In common orthography, the implosives are written ⟨b', d', j', g'⟩. ⟨w⟩ is pronounced [v], [β], or [w]. A wye sound /j/ (written ⟨y⟩) is found at the beginning of some words in Seba dialect where Timu and Raijua dialects have /ʄ/.

Vowels are /i u e ə o a/, with /ə/ written ⟨è⟩ in common orthography. Phonetic long vowels and diphthongs are vowel sequences. The penultimate syllable/vowel is stressed. (Every vowel constitutes a syllable.) A stressed schwa lengthens the following consonant:

/ŋa/ [ŋa] 'with', /niŋaa/ [niˈŋaː] 'what?', /ŋaʔa/ [ˈŋaʔa] 'eat, food', /ŋali/ [ˈŋali] 'senile', /ŋəlu/ [ˈŋəlːu] 'wind'.

Syllables are consonant-vowel (CV) or vowel-only (V).

Implosives

Hawu shares implosive (or perhaps pre-glottalized) consonants with several other languages of the Lesser Sundas, including Bimanese, Kambera, Komodo, Li'o, Ngad'a, and Riung. While these languages are somewhat geographically close, they are not necessarily closely related. Many belong to different high-order Austronesian subgroups. As a result, implosives seem to be an areal feature—perhaps motivated by language contact and the reduction of homorganic nasal clusters in some languages—as opposed to an innovated feature.[6]

Hawu, however, is the only language in the region with four implosives in its phonological inventory. All four implosives can occur both word-initially and intervocalically. [2]

The phonological history of Hawu is characterized by an unusual, but fully regular vowel metathesis, which affects the Proto-Malayo-Polynesian (PMP) vowel sequences *uCa/*uCə and *iCa/*iCə. The former changes into əCu, the latter into əCi, as illustrated in the following table.[7]

Hawu is an ergative–absolutive language with ergative preposition ri (Seba dialect), ro (Dimu), or la (Raijua).[8] Clauses are usually verb-initial. However, the presence of the ergative preposition allows for a freer word order. Among monovalent verbs, S may occur before or after the verb. According to speakers, there is no difference in meaning between the two following constructions.

In the absence of the ergative preposition, bivalent constructions have strict AVO word order.

When the ergative preposition is present, word order becomes quite free. In addition, with the presence of the ergative preposition, many transitive verbs have a special form to indicate singular number of the object by replacing the final vowel of the verb with "-e" when the verb ends in /i/, /o/, or /a/ (e.g. ɓudʒu 'touch them', ɓudʒe 'touch it') or "-o" when the verb ends in /u/ (bəlu, bəlo 'to forget'). Verbs that end in /e/ have no alternation. The following examples (from the Seba dialect) present a few of the word order options available, and also show the alternation of the verb nga'a 'to eat' to nga'e when ri is present.[9]

Within noun phrases, modifiers usually follow the noun, though there are some possibly lexicalized exceptions, such as ae dəu 'many people' (compare Dhao ɖʐəu ae 'people many').

Apart from this, and unlike in Dhao, all pronominal reference uses independent pronouns. These are:

The demonstratives are complex and poorly understood. They may be contrasted by number (see Walker 1982), but it is not confirmed by Grimes.

These can be made locative (here, now, there, then, yonder) by preceding the n forms with na; the neutral form na əne optionally contracting to nəne. 'Like this/that' is marked with mi or mi na, with the n becoming h and the neutral əne form appearing irregularly as mi (na) həre.

Sample clauses (Grimes 2006). (Compare the Dhao equivalents at Dhao language#Grammar.)