The Northern Adelbert or Pihom–Isumrud languages are a family of twenty languages in the Madang stock of New Guinea. The occupy the coastal northern Adelbert Range of mountains directly opposite Karkar Island, as opposed to the Southern Adelbert languages, another branch of Madang.
Malcolm Ross posited a "linkage" connecting the Northern Adelbert languages with the Mabuso languages, and named this group Croisilles/krɔɪˈsɪlz/,[1] as the two families bracket Cape Croisilles (Northern Adelbert to the north, Mabuso to the south). However, Ross never claimed Croisilles was an actual language family, and other researchers have rejected the connection.
Languages
There are approximately 20 Northern Adelbert languages.
Below is a comparison of Northern Adelbert language names in Pick (2020)[2] and Z'graggen (1980).[3] A few alternate names from Capell (1952) are also given.[4]
Croisilles was first posited by Malcolm Ross (1995), not as an actual language family, but as a linkage. It was a merger of Wurm's Pihom-Isumrud-Mugil and Mabuso stocks, each of which contained 25–30 languages. Pick (2017, 2020) and Usher reject the merger, and provisionally the inclusion of Mugil (Bargam), though Pick retains the name. Usher disambiguates the (non-Mabuso) family as 'Adelbert Range'.
Usher (2020)
Timothy Usher classifies the languages as follows.[6]
A quite similar internal classification was worked out independently by Pick (2017).[1] Pick could not establish regular sound correspondences with Kobol–Pal (Omosan) or Amaimon (Mabulap), and thus leaves them out of the family.
Pick (2020) reconstructs the phonemes of Proto-Northern Adelbert as:[2]
labial
alveolar
palatal
velar
unvoiced stops
*p
*t
*k
voiced stops
*b
*d
*g
nasals
*m
*n
*ŋ
fricatives
*s
laterals
*l
rhotics
*r
glides
*w
*y
Four vowels are reconstructed by Pick (2020): *a, *e, *i, *u. Although Northern Adelbert languages usually have the five vowels /a e i o u/, Pick (2020) does not consider *o to be reconstructable.
^Z'graggen, J.A. A comparative word list of the Northern Adelbert Range languages, Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. D-31, xvi + 194 pages. Pacific Linguistics, The Australian National University, 1980. doi:10.15144/PL-D31
^Capell, Arthur. 1952. Languages of the Bogia District, New Guinea. Oceania 22(2), 130-147; 22(3), 178-207.
^Petir, Amova, Dum Materem, Pakong Yapong, Sakel Mukarek, Moyang Okira, & Tim Platts-Mills. 1996. Useful Plants of Salembem Village, Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. Madang: Kristen Pres.
