Cheke Holo language
Cheke Holo (also called Maringe or Mariŋe, A’ara, Holo, Kubonitu) is an Oceanic language spoken in the Solomon Islands. Its speakers live on Santa Isabel Island.
| Cheke Holo | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Central Solomon Islands |
| Region | Santa Isabel Island |
Native speakers | 10,800 (1999)[1] 1,500 monolinguals[1] |
Austronesian
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | mrn |
| Glottolog | chek1238 |
Phonology
The phonology of Cheke Holo shows some peculiarities, shared with other Santa Isabel languages, like the aspirated stops and the voiceless sonorants. The five-vowel system instead conforms to the prototypical system of the Oceanic area (White, Kokhonigita & Pulomana 1988). Boswell (2018:16) has /x/ rather than /ɣʰ/.
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m̥ | m | n̥ | n | ɲ̊ | ɲ | ŋ̊ | ŋ | |||
| Stop | plain | p | b | t | d | t͡ʃ | d͡ʒ | k | ɡ | ʔ | |
| aspirated | pʰ | tʰ | kʰ | ||||||||
| Fricative | plain | f | v | s | z | ɣ | h | ||||
| aspirated | ɣʰ | ||||||||||
| Lateral | l̥ | l | |||||||||
| Trill | r̥ | r | |||||||||
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i | u | |
| Mid | e | o | |
| Low | a |
Morphosyntax
Verbs in Cheke Holo are marked neither for tense nor for person, although they can be prefixed with fa- (a causative marker) and they take enclitics. Among the possible clitics are the direct object pronouns, the completive aspect markers hi and hila, and the continuative aspect marker u (Boswell 2018).
Reduplication is commonly employed with verb roots to express iteration or intensification and as a valency changing device (from intransitive to transitive), although there are attested cases of adjective and (less so) noun reduplication (Boswell 2018). Different types of reduplications are possible in Cheke Holo:
- Full reduplication
- /vra/ 'jump up' > /vravra/ 'be quick to act'
- Partial (or White's rule) reduplication
- /bela/ 'wooden platform' > /beabela/ 'stack up firewood'
- Syllable reduplication
- /nolo/ 'to walk' > /nonolo/ 'go walking about'
- /kmokhu/ 'stop' > /kmokmohu/ 'continue to cease'
- /fruni/ 'cover' > /fufruni/ 'cover completely' (when the second consonant of a cluster is /r/, this is dropped in the reduplicated syllable)
Notes
- Cheke Holo at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
References
- Boswell, Fredrick Alvin (2018). A Grammar of Cheke Holo (Doctoral thesis). LOT Publications (Leiden University). hdl:1887/67082. ISBN 978-94-6093-301-1.
- White, Geoffrey; Kokhonigita, Francis; Pulomana, Hugh (1988). Cheke Holo (Maringe/Hograno) Dictionary. Pacific Linguistics Series C - No. 97. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. doi:10.15144/pl-c97. hdl:1885/145429. ISBN 0-85883-368-9.
- Palmer, Bill (2009). "Clause Order and Information Structure in Cheke Holo". Oceanic Linguistics. 48 (1): 213–249. doi:10.1353/ol.0.0038. S2CID 145092013.
External links
- Keha Tarai Mala Lao Legu Narone Anglican devotional material in Cheke Holo (1934)
- Buka Tharai Ka Cheke Marine Portions of the Book of Common Prayer in Cheke Holo (1973) digitized by Richard Mammana