Amto

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Amto
State : Papua New GuineaPapua New Guinea Papua New Guinea
Province : Flag of Sandaun.svg Sandaun
Coordinates : 4 ° 3 ′  S , 141 ° 20 ′  E Coordinates: 4 ° 3 ′  S , 141 ° 20 ′  E
Height : 100  m
Time zone : AEST (UTC + 10)
Amto (Papua New Guinea)
Amto
Amto
Amto

Spoken in

Papua New Guinea
speaker 300 (native speaker, as of 2006)
Linguistic
classification
Official status
Official language in nowhere
Language codes
ISO 639-3

office

Amto is a small village on the Simaiya (Samaia), a tributary of the Upper Sepik , in the Yapsie Rural local-level government of the Telefomin District of the Sandaun Province of Papua New Guinea . It is about 5 kilometers south of the Sepik in the mountains of the West Range , which form the northwesternmost foothills of the Bismarck Mountains in New Guinea .

The approximately 300 inhabitants of the mountain village and the neighboring villages Sisilo , Habiyon and Amu , who live in the valley, speak a completely independent language, Amto (or Ki ), which is subsumed under the Papuan languages , only in the east is the still smaller group of the Musan ( Siawi) a linguistically related idiom. Abau is spoken to the north of the Sepik and to the west of the Idam ; Sepik-Ramu languages ​​also predominate to the east , to which the Amto-Musan form an island of languages, with the island of the Left-May languages ​​adjacent to the east. The Amto were especially hostile to the neighboring Idam before tribal fighting was banned by the government.

No further detailed studies are available on the language. Naturally, it is one of the most threatened languages .

Like the neighboring Abau am Sepik, the Amto live in shared stilt houses , in which the men's hearths are on one side and the women's on the other side, while the children sleep with the women, but move freely around the house. There are verandas with ladders on both sides of the houses . They sleep in hammocks . A special form of these houses is the dance house (amto Fokiya ), which is widespread throughout the Sepik and in the highlands , in which the beds are located on both sides of the central, free-swinging dance floor.

literature

  • Barry Craig :: The Abau and Amto - Introduction to the Legends of the Abau and Amto of West Sepik Province . In: Oral history , Volume 8, No. 4/5, Institute of Papua New Guinea, 1980 pp. 1-44 ( online, uscngp.com , illustrated work on the Idam-Simaiya / Amto region).
  • Barry Craig: (Ed.): Legends of the Amto, Simaiya Valley: part 1 of two issues on the West Sepik Province . In: Oral history , Volume 8, No. 4, Institute of Papua New Guinea, pp. 59–113 ( online , uscngp.com)
  • Martin Stehr: Languages ​​of the Upper Sepik and Central New Guinea . Institute of Papua New Guinea, September 2005 ( online , uscngp.com, review article, Amto esp. P. 10 f)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Amto , entry in ethnologue.com; based on Raymond G. Gordon Jr (Ed.): Ethnologue: Languages ​​of the World. Summer Institute of Linguistics.
  2. ↑ Information from the map in Dataset , Upper Sepik-Central New Guinea Project and Papua New Guinea, Map 5 , ethnologue.com
  3. ^ B. Craig: Abau , Section History and Cultural Relations , 2002, encyclopedia.com
  4. ↑ see Language: Amto  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , sil.org@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / ftp.sil.org  
  5. ^ Lit. Craig: The Abau and Amto - Introduction , 1.7 Housing , pp. 10 ff; with illustrations and plan drawings
  6. ↑ on the author see Papua New Guinea – My 'last frontier': Barry Craig , PNGAA Library