Northern Adelbert languages

The Northern Adelbert or Pihom–Isumrud languages are a family of two dozen languages in the Madang stock of New Guinea. The occupy the coastal northern Adelbert Range of mountains, vs. the Southern Adelbert languages, another branch of Madang.

Northern Adelbert Range
Pihom–Isumrud
Geographic
distribution		Adelbert Range, Madang Province, Papua New Guinea
Linguistic classificationNortheast New Guinea?
  • Madang
    • Central Madang
      • Northern Adelbert Range
GlottologNone
croi1234  (Croisilles)

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

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) 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 (2018)

Timothy Usher classifies the languages as follows.[2]

Adelbert Range

Pick (2017)

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.

Northern Adelbert

Pick notes that Barem and Malas share pronominal markers on the verbs 'to teach' and 'to show' that are unique to those two verbs.

Phonology

Pick reconstructs the phonemes of Proto-Croisilles as,[1]

*m*n*ŋ
*p*t*k
*b*d*ɡ
*ɸ*s
*w*l, *r

with five vowels *a *e *i *o *u.

References
  1. Pick, Andrew (2017). "A Reconstruction of Proto-Croiselles Phonology and Lexicon". 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics. San Antonio, Texas, US. (video)
  2. Adelbert Range (NewGuineaWorld)
  3. Usher calls this branch the South Adelbert Range languages, as they are spoken in the mountains, as opposed to the Southern Adelbert languages (which he calls Ramu Tributaries), which are not actually spoken in the Adelbert Range.

Further reading
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