West Damar language

West Damar, or North Damar, is an Austronesian language of Damar Island, one of the Maluku Islands of Indonesia. In spite of rather low cognacy rates with its neighboring languages, it can be classified as part of the Babar languages based on qualitative evidence.

It is spoken in two villages (Batumerah, Kuai) located in the north-western part of Damar.

Phonology
The consonant inventory of West Damar is as follows:


 * Sounds only occur in loanwords from Indonesian.  also mostly, but not exclusively, appears in loanwords.

The vowel inventory of West Damar is simply.

Morphology
A few aspects of West Damar morphology are noted as follows.

Verb conjugation
Verbs in West Damar are conjugated according to person and number.

Possession
West Damar has a series of possessive suffixes that are attached to nouns. There is no possessive verb. The possessive suffixes are as follows:

The possessive suffixes are built from a base suffix -ni that also appears as a lexical derivational suffix:
 * ulcho + -ni > ulchuni "husband"
 * deweya + -ni > deweyeni "wife"
 * ullo "month" + -ni > ulloni "moon"

Negation
The word for "no" in West Damar is kewe. When split into a circumfix, ke- -we serves as a simple negator for content words like nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The -we part of the negator comes immediately after the stem it attaches to, but before other clitics. A few examples of negation provided by Chlenova are as follows:

ke-mormorsa-we

NEG-buffalo-NEG

"not a buffalo" Piter ke-tucha-we-mo odo-i

Peter NEG-old-NEG-? 1SG-DET

"Peter (is) not as old as I (am)"

Another negative predicative word krawui "unavailable" is also recorded.

Vocabulary
Vocabulary list:

Sample sentences
Ede mpondai? - Are you ill?

E’e, odo ulkonacheni nchepondo. - Yes, I have a headache.

Wohleyo Binayani idihe hulchupondeheti wohleyo Ahehendini - The mountain Binaya is the highest at the Seram island.