1. Introduction to The Papuan languages of Timor, Alor and Pantar. Volume 3

Abstract

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Understanding through the Numbers: Number Systems, Their Evolution, and Their Perception among Kula People from Alor Island, Southeastern Indonesia

“…Williams [4] produced, indeed, an essential sketch grammar of the language, which can be useful also in the broader context of the Papuan languages spoken in Timor and in the Alor-Pantar archipelago [7][8][9]. The documentation effort is commendable, and the description of grammatical phenomena is very precise.…”

“…Other studies on the Alor-Pantar languages in general (especially on the Alor context) collect very significant details on Kula and even on its numeral system. Among them, it is possible to mention some very relevant chapters from Klamer [3], in particular Schapper and Klamer [10]. The same volume includes comprehensive descriptions of the languages spoken in Alor, often developed through a comparative approach.…”

“…In Alor-Pantar languages, according to the speakers, the terms for the numbers from 'one' to 'five' are typically mono-morphemic words [10] (p. 299), as shown in Table 1. Their mono-morphemic nature is not apparent and some terms are, technically, composed of two morphemes.…”

The dialect chain of the Timor-Alor-Pantar language family

“…On the low end of the scale, Klamu has only 200 speakers (Holton, 2004), while Sar had only one active speaker left in 2018 (Klamer and Sir, 2018) who passed away in 2019. The Kroku language is barely documented and possibly extinct (Schapper, 2020;Steinhauer, 2020), and will not feature further in this article for lack of data.…”

The Greater West Bomberai Language Family

“…Documentation of the TAP languages has significantly advanced in the last decade (see , for a history of their documentation). Since the turn of the 21st century, grammatical descriptions have been produced for a dozen TAP languages, as well as several sets of lexical materials and numerous paper-length treatments of specific features (see Schapper 2014aSchapper :11, 2017aSchapper :6-7, 2020a, for recent updates). The TAP languages divide into three primary subgroups that correspond to present day geographical groupings: (i) Bunaq, a single language spoken in the central mountainous region of Timor surrounded on all sides by Austronesian languages, (ii) the East Timor subgroup, the four members of which are spoken at the eastern tip of Timor and in a small pocket on the island of Kisar immediately to the north, and (iii) the Alor-Pantar subgroup in which at least sixteen languages are spoken over the islands of the same names as well as several smaller islands between them in the Pantar straits.…”