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Berik language
Tor language spoken in Indonesia From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Berik is a Papuan language spoken in eastern Papua. Speakers are located in four village groups on the Tor River towards the northern coast of Indonesian-controlled Irian Jaya.[2]
US linguist John McWhorter cited Berik as an example of a language which puts concepts "together in ways more fascinatingly different from English than most of us are aware".[3] Illustrating this, in the phrase Kitobana (meaning "[he] gives three large objects to a male in the sunlight"), affixes indicating time of day, object number, object size, and gender of recipient are added to the verb.[3]
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Locations
In Tor Atas District, Berik is spoken in Beu, Bora Bora, Dangken, Doronta, Kondirjan, Safrontani, Sewan, Somanente, Taminambor, Tenwer, Togonfo, and Waf villages.[1]
Phonology
Consonants
Vowels
Berik has the common six vowel system (/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/ plus /ə/).[4]
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Verbal morphology
Westrum (1988:150) briefly indicates that Berik encodes whether the action takes place during the day (diurnal) or during the night (nocturnal) in the verb morphology, a rare case of periodic tense whose markers are not easily segmentable.[5]
Sample
Notes
References
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