Eastern Trans-Fly languages

Eastern Trans-Fly
Geographic distribution:	New Guinea
Linguistic classification:	a primary family of Papuan languages
Subdivisions:	Meriam Bine Wipii (Gidra) Gizra

The Eastern Trans-Fly languages are a small independent family of Papuan languages in the classification of Malcolm Ross, that constituted a branch of Stephen Wurm's 1970 Trans-Fly proposal, which he later incorporated into his 1975 expansion of the Trans–New Guinea family as part of a Trans-Fly – Bulaka River branch. Wurm himself concluded that some of the Trans-Fly languages were not Trans–New Guinea languages but rather heavily influenced by them. Ross (2005) removed the bulk of the languages from Wurm's TNG, including Eastern Trans-Fly.

Eastern Trans-Fly includes Meriam, located within the national borders of Australia, as well as Bine, Wipii (Gidra) and Gizra.

Pronouns

The pronouns Ross reconstructs for proto–Eastern Trans-Fly are,

I	*ka	exclusive we	*ki
		inclusive we	*mi
thou	*ma	you	*we
he/she/it	*tabV; e	they	*tepi

There's a possibility of a connection here to Trans–New Guinea. If the inclusive pronoun is historically a second-person form, then there would appear to be i-ablaut for the plural: *ka~ki, **ma~mi, **tapa~tapi. This is similar to the ablaut reconstructed for TNG (*na~ni, *ga~gi). Although the pronouns themselves are dissimilar, ablaut is not likely to be borrowed.

On the other hand, there is some formal resemblance to Austronesian pronouns (*(a)ku I, *(ka)mu you, *kita we inc., *(ka)mi we exc., *ia he; some archeological, cultural and llinguistic evidence of Austronesian contact and settlement in the area exists.

References

• Ross, Malcolm (2005). "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages". In Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Robin Hide, Jack Golson, eds. Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pp. 15–66. ISBN 0858835622. OCLC 67292782.