Erromanga language
This sketch was never published but it is referred to in detail, however, in unpublished correspondence dated 1927 from Dempwolff to Ray, so he obviously had copies passed on to others.Erromangans will point out quickly the differences in the language of the people from Potnarvin and Dillon's Bay but for an outsider these are very small.Sye is typological fairly typical for an Oceanic language with regard to word classes.Inflectional morphology with Sye noun phrases is restricted to the marking of number and some types of possession.The absence of the widespread patterns of serial verbs makes Sye different from other Oceanic languages.Lacking serial verbs, Sye – along with the other languages of the Southern Vanuatu subgroup – has what we can refer to as an echo subject construction.'The near categorical marking of number on nouns is another important feature of the nominal morphology of Sye.There is a huge number of distinct inflectional sets of subject markers on verbs expressing a variety of tense-aspect-mood categories.A complex scheme of root-initial mutation is a salient feature of the verb morphology of Erromangan languages in general.This stands in typological contrast to the other Central Vanuatu languages which have root forms that are invariant.NONSG:non-singular 1NONSG:first person, non-singular ACC:accompanitive CONST:construct suffix TOP:toponymic BR:basic root MR:modified root DISTPAST:distant past RECPAST:recent past ES:echo subject