Kalamang language
{{Short description|Berau Gulf language spoken in Indonesia}}
{{Infobox language
|name=Kalamang
|region=West Papua
|speakers=100
|date=2000
|familycolor=Papuan
|fam1=Trans–New Guinea
|fam2=Berau Gulf
|fam3=West Bomberai
|iso3=kgv
|glotto=kara1499
|glottorefname=Kalamang
|coordinates={{coord|-3.47|132.68}}
|pushpin_map=Indonesia Western New Guinea#Indonesia#Southeast Asia
|map2=Lang Status 40-SE.svg
|mapcaption2={{center|{{small|Karas is classified as Severely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger}}}}
}}
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.{{e25|kgv}}
Phonology
| class="wikitable"
! |
| Plosive
|{{IPA link|p}} {{IPA link|b}} |{{IPA link|t}} {{IPA link|d}} |{{IPA link|k}} {{IPA link|g}} |
|---|
| Fricative
|({{IPA link|f}}) |{{IPA link|s}} |({{IPA link|h}}) |
| Nasal
|{{IPA link|m}} |{{IPA link|n}} |{{IPA link|ŋ}} |
| Approximant
|{{IPA link|w}} |{{IPA link|r}}, {{IPA link|l}} |{{IPA link|j}} |
- The consonants /f/ and /h/ are marginal.
| class="wikitable"
! !Back |
| High
|{{IPA link|i}} | |{{IPA link|u}} |
|---|
| Mid
|{{IPA link|e}} | |{{IPA link|o}} |
| Low
| |{{IPA link|a}} | |
- 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.
| class="wikitable" |
| colspan="2" |
! singular ! dual ! plural |
|---|
| rowspan="2" | 1st person ! exclusive | rowspan="2" | aan || rowspan="2" | inir || piridok |
| inclusive
| aantemu (?) |
| colspan="2" | 2nd person
| kame || ? || kijumene |
| colspan="2" | 3rd person
| mame || mjeir || mubameir |
Visser (2020) records the following pronouns for Karas of Maas village:
| {| class="wikitable"
|+Free nominative |
| colspan="2" |
! singular ! dual ! plural |
|---|
| rowspan="2" | 1st person ! {{small|exclusive}} | rowspan="2" | an | in-ier | in |
| {{small|inclusive}}
| pi-er | pi |
| colspan="2" | 2nd person
| ka | ki-er | ki |
| colspan="2" | 3rd person
| ma | m-ier | mu |
|
|
| class="wikitable"
|+Free possessive |
| colspan="2" |
! singular ! plural |
|---|
| rowspan="2" | 1st person ! {{small|exclusive}} | rowspan="2" | aŋ-gon | pi-n |
| {{small|inclusive}}
| iŋ-gon |
| colspan="2" | 2nd person
| ka-in | ki-n |
| colspan="2" | 3rd person
| ma-in | mu-in |
|
|
| class="wikitable"
|+Possessive suffix |
| colspan="2" |
! singular ! plural |
|---|
| rowspan="2" | 1st person ! {{small|exclusive}} | rowspan="2" | -an | -pe, -p-in |
| {{small|inclusive}}
| -un |
| colspan="2" | 2nd person
| -tʃa | -tʃe |
| colspan="2" | 3rd person
| -un | -un |
|}
The free possessives and possessive suffixes can occur together.{{cite book |last1=Visser |first1=Eline |title=A grammar of Kalamang |date=19 January 2022 |publisher=Language Science Press |isbn=978-3-96110-343-0 |url=https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/344 |language=en}}
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.{{cite arXiv |eprint=2309.16575 |last1=Tanzer |first1=Garrett |last2=Suzgun |first2=Mirac |last3=Visser |first3=Eline |last4=Jurafsky |first4=Dan |last5=Melas-Kyriazi |first5=Luke |title=A Benchmark for Learning to Translate a New Language from One Grammar Book |date=2023 |class=cs.CL }} 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.{{citation |url=https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_v1_5_report.pdf |title=Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context |author=Gemini Team, Google |date=February 2024}}
References
{{Reflist}}
Sources
- {{Cite book |last=Cowan |first=H. K. J. |date=1953 |title=Voorlopige Resultaten van een Ambtelijk Taalonderzoek in Nieuw-Guinea |location='s-Gravenhage |publisher=Martinus Nijhoff |language=nl}}
- {{cite book |last1=Visser |first1=Eline |title=A grammar of Kalamang |date=19 January 2022 |publisher=Language Science Press |isbn=978-3-96110-343-0 |url=https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/344 |language=en}}
- Visser, Eline. 2021. {{cite web |title=Kalamang dictionary |url=https://ids.clld.org/contributions/844 |website=ids.clld.org}}. In: Key, Mary Ritchie & Comrie, Bernard (eds.) The Intercontinental Dictionary Series. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. ([https://zenodo.org/record/5139559 CLDF dataset])
External links
- Timothy Usher, New Guinea World, [https://newguineaworld.linguistik.uzh.ch/families/trans-new-guinea/berau-gulf/west-bomberai/kalamang Kalamang]
{{Papuan languages}}
{{West Trans–New Guinea languages}}
Category:Languages of Western New Guinea