Torricelli languages
From Freepedia
The Torricelli languages are a hypothetical language family of about fifty languages of the northern Papua New Guinea coast, spoken by only about 80 000 people in all. The most populous and best known Torricelli language is Arapesh, with about 20 000 speakers.
The linguist who proposed the Torricelli hypothesis, Stephen Würm, developed it as part of an initial attempt to classify the Papuan languages on often scanty data, and he does not expect it to stand up well to scrutiny. Many of the features he used to identify the Torricelli languages as a family, such as characteristic personal pronouns, may turn out to be areal features. The Papuan languages have, for example, shown themselves to be adept at borrowing pronouns.
Würm identifies the subdivisions of his Papuan classification as families (on the order of the Germanic languages), stocks (on the order of the Indo-European languages), and phyla (on the order of the Nostratic hypothesis). Torricelli is a phylum in this terminology. A language that is not related to any other at a family level will be called an isolate in this scheme. However, the reader should note that no liguistic clade in New Guinea above the 'family' level is demonstrably valid.
Classification
Torricelli phylum
- Urim isolate
- Kombio-Arapesh stock
- Kombio family: Eitiep, Torricelli (Lou), Kombio, Yambes, Aruek, Wom
- Arapesh family: Mountain Arapesh, Coastal Arapesh, Southern Arapesh, Bumbita
- Maimai stock
- West Wapei family: Seti, Seta, One languages (Molmo, Inebu, Kwamtim, Kabore, Northern One, Southern One)
- Monumbo family: Monumbo, Lilau
- Marienberg family: Bungain, Wiarumus (Mandi), Muniwara, Urimo, Kamasau, Elepi, Buna
- Wapei-Pelei stock
