Kalamang language
Berau Gulf language spoken in Indonesia From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kalamang, sometimes also called Karas, is a divergent Trans–New Guinea language spoken on the biggest of the Karas Islands off the Bomberai Peninsula, that is part of the West Bomberai family. It is spoken in Antalisa and Mas villages on Karas Island.[2]
Kalamang | |
---|---|
Region | West Papua |
Native speakers | (100 cited 2000)[1] |
Trans–New Guinea
| |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | kgv |
Glottolog | kara1499 |
ELP | Karas |
![]() Karas is classified as Severely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger | |
Coordinates: 3.47°S 132.68°E |
Phonology
- The consonants /f/ and /h/ are marginal.
- The vowels /a e i/ are reduced to [ə] in unstressed syllables in fast or casual speech.
Additionally, the following diphthongs are present: /ei/, /oi/, /ou/, /ui/.
Pronouns
Cowan (1953) records the following pronouns for Karas.
singular | dual | plural | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1st person |
exclusive | aan | inir | piridok |
inclusive | aantemu (?) | |||
2nd person | kame | ? | kijumene | |
3rd person | mame | mjeir | mubameir |
Visser (2020) records the following pronouns for Karas of Maas village:
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|
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The free possessives and possessive suffixes can occur together.[4]
Machine Translation from One Book
In 2023, Kalamang was used by machine learning researchers for a benchmark called "Machine Translation from One Book". It was chosen because of its negligible presence in the Internet and because field research materials were collected by Eline Visser, who published "A grammar of Kalamang" as her PhD thesis. Although Kalamang is primarily oral language, it can be written in the Indonesian alphabet. Researchers used all existing materials (grammar book, short dictionary, and small set of Kalamang-English sentences) to test how large language models (LLM) can learn a language from a single source, and tested the quality of translations.[5] In 2024, researchers from Google showed that their latest LLM, Gemini 1.5, can translate English to Kalamang with similar quality to a human who learned from the same resources.[6]
References
Sources
External links
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