Researched by: Bert Remijsen

Primary Source(s):

General facts

The Matbat number between one and two thousand people on Misool Island, in the Raja Ampat archipelago of New Guinea. They are of the Papuan physical type. Until they moved to the coast and took the Christian religion about the middle of the 20th century, the Matbat (the name means 'people of the land') inhabited the interior of Misool, while the Ma'ya, another group, lived on the coast.



Matbat is an Austronesian language of the South Halmahera subgroup of the South Halmahera - West New Guinea (SHWNG) group. Because its speakers lived in relative isolation until recently, hardly anything is known about this language. Until the current research project, the only data available was an unidentified wordlist (number 50) in Wallace (1869). Comparison of words in this list with words for the same items I collected in Mage (southeast Misool) shows that Matbat is the language of Wallace's wordlist 50.

Tone and Stress

Matbat features a complex lexical tone system, with 5 lexically contrastive tonemes. Table 1 lists a number of minimal sets illustrating the contrasts. The Low Fall toneme has two phonetically distinct allotones, which, in most words, are not interchangeable. Quite remarkable is the Extra High Fall, which features a considerable drop in F0.

       Table 1: Examples of lexical tones (click to hear audio samples).

Extra High Fall

High (level)

Low Rise

Low (level)

Low Fall

 

 

 

 

Rise-Fall allotone

Fall allotone

 

 

nǎn
'animal'

nàn
'betelnut'

 

nân
 'name'

mőn
 'pinang'

 

 

mòn
 'heavy'

 

 

 

tól
 'three'

t-ǒl
'1pl.inc.stand'

 

 

tôl
 'egg'

de̋
 'to throw'

dé
 'house'

 

 

dē
 'sick'

 

NB. In the audio examples in Table 1, the target word is uttered in the following frame utterance: /hafô fû [target word]/ 'they say [target word]'.

The Matbat lexicon is for the larger part monosyllabic. While collecting a 300-item wordlist, I have not encountered any monomorphemic words with more than three syllables. Disyllbic words often have a weak (toneless) initial syllable vowel /a/. In the small number of trisyllabic words collected, this is always the case. In monomorphemic polysyllabic words, either one or two syllables carry a tone (penultimate and/or final). Examples: /kamǒw/ 'star'; /wúyte/ 'sea shore'; /sapűlǔy/ 'round'.

NB. In the /kamǒw/ and /sapűlǔy/ audio examples, the target word is uttered in the following frame utterance: /yak fu [target word]/ 'I say [target word]'.

Although there are perceived prominence contrasts in relation with the lexical tones, there is no evidence for lexical stress as a phonological property independent of lexical tone. For example, in polysyllabic words with only one tone, the syllable with the tone stands out among the neighboring toneless syllables. In words with two tones, often one seems more prominent to me, e.g. the penultimate one in /sapu!lu?/, but that is probably because my native language is intonational, with high F0 associated with stressed syllables.

Polymorphemic polysyllabic words feature any combination of tones. E.g. /hél yáp/ 'volcano' lit.: 'mountain fire'; /yi̋ plǎ/ 'hot spring' lit. 'water hot'.