Kibiri Wordlist - Items 1 - 100

This deposit contains the first 100 items of a Kibiri wordlist. Additional wordlists are currently being processed. The items include kinship terms, animals, natural objects, and tools. The entire elicitation session has been uploaded in order to preserve the valuable lexical discussion it contains, including semantic clarifications and minimal pairs identified during the session. The phonetic transcription reflects the segments as perceived during analysis, while the tonal transcription represents the current surface tonal analysis. On the right side of the page, readers will find a downloadable .xlsx file containing all transcriptions and translations: English and Hiri Motu translations, phonetic transcription, orthographic transcription, and tonal transcription. On the present page, the phonetic transcription is provided between brackets [ ], while the orthographic transcription appears in blue letters and follows the conventions described below. According to the current analysis, Kibiri has three tones: H, LH, and HL, and the tone-bearing unit is the syllable. High tone (H) is represented orthographically by a macron on the vowel of the syllable (e.g. ei.tā ‘father’, where the second syllable bears H tone). Low tone (L) is not orthographically marked (e.g. ei.tā ‘father’, where the first syllable bears L tone). Contour tones HL and LH are indicated by a grave and an acute accent respectively, and, in vowel sequences, these accents are always placed on the second vowel (e.g. kāpuì ‘urine’, iá ‘mother’). There is a phonemic distinction between short and long /a/ and /u/ (but not, so far, for the other vowels), following comparative evidence from Porome. Proto-Kibiri-Porome likely had an intervocalic [k] that was lenited and subsequently elided in Kibiri, resulting in syllable loss, while Porome retains it (Porome [kūɣūɾi] vs. Kibiri [kūːɾi] ‘door’). In such cases, vowel length is orthographically represented by double vowels, and H tone is indicated by a macron on the first, rather than the second, vowel letter (e.g. āabūri ‘stone’). This convention is also followed in cases of phonetic (but not phonemic) vowel length (e.g. [iː] in īi ‘sago’, for which no short /i/ counterpart has been identified to date).