Introduction

The following brief grammatical outline is provided to help the reader interested in examining the lines of Ku Waru text in Appendix A and Chapter 7. Ideally, those texts would include a third line of morpheme-by-morpheme glosses throughout, but length restrictions preclude that here. This outline is intended to facilitate the reader's efforts to identify noun and verb endings, and basic construction types at phrase and clause levels. Where possible, verb inflections are summarily presented as paradigms in tables. There is brief discussion of the meaning and functions of some categories of the noun and verb (especially the latter) where these would otherwise be particularly difficult to infer from the category labels alone. We include an inventory of Ku Waru phonemes, but only the briefest indications concerning pronunciation. Despite all its limitations, this outline should make the recognition of morphemes and construction types possible for the reader who wishes to use it as an aid in working through the texts included in this book.

While most of New Guinea's 700–1000 languages are spoken by fewer than 2000 people each, most of the 250,000 people in the Western Highlands Province speak dialects belonging to a single dialect continuum, which ranges east at least as far as Kujip, north to Ruti, west to the Kaugel Valley, and south to Ialibu in the Southern Highlands Province (see Map 1). People who live at extreme ends of the continuum cannot generally understand each other unless they have had enough exposure to become bi-dialectal. In the modern context, opportunities for such exposure have greatly increased.