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Cheke Holo language

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Cheke Holo
Native toCentral Solomon Islands
RegionSanta Isabel Island
Native speakers
(10,800 cited 1999)[1]
1,500 monolinguals[1]
Austronesian
Language codes
ISO 639-3mrn
Glottologchek1238

Cheke Holo (also called Maringe or Mariŋe, A’ara, Holo, Kubonitu) is an Oceanic language spoken in the Solomon Islands. Its speakers live on Santa Isabel Island.

Phonology

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The phonology of Cheke Holo shows some peculiarities, shared with other Santa Isabel languages, like the aspirated stops and the voiceless sonorants. The five-vowel system instead conforms to the prototypical system of the Oceanic area (White, Kokhonigita & Pulomana 1988). Boswell (2018:16) has /x/ rather than /ɣʰ/.

Consonant phonemes
Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal m n ɲ̊ ɲ ŋ̊ ŋ
Stop plain p b t d t͡ʃ d͡ʒ k ɡ ʔ
aspirated
Fricative plain f v s z ɣ h
aspirated ɣʰ
Lateral l
Trill r
Vowel phonemes
Front Central Back
High i u
Mid e o
Low a

Morphosyntax

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Verbs in Cheke Holo are marked neither for tense nor for person, although they can be prefixed with fa- (a causative marker) and they take enclitics. Among the possible clitics are the direct object pronouns, the completive aspect markers hi and hila, and the continuative aspect marker u (Boswell 2018).

Reduplication is commonly employed with verb roots to express iteration or intensification and as a valency changing device (from intransitive to transitive), although there are attested cases of adjective and (less so) noun reduplication (Boswell 2018). Different types of reduplications are possible in Cheke Holo:

  • Full reduplication
    • /vra/ 'jump up' > /vravra/ 'be quick to act'
  • Partial (or White's rule) reduplication
    • /bela/ 'wooden platform' > /beabela/ 'stack up firewood'
  • Syllable reduplication
    • /nolo/ 'to walk' > /nonolo/ 'go walking about'
    • /kmokhu/ 'stop' > /kmokmohu/ 'continue to cease'
    • /fruni/ 'cover' > /fufruni/ 'cover completely' (when the second consonant of a cluster is /r/, this is dropped in the reduplicated syllable)

Notes

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  1. ^ a b Cheke Holo at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed access icon

References

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  • Boswell, Fredrick Alvin (2018). A Grammar of Cheke Holo (Doctoral thesis). LOT Publications (Leiden University). hdl:1887/67082. ISBN 978-94-6093-301-1.
  • White, Geoffrey; Kokhonigita, Francis; Pulomana, Hugh (1988). Cheke Holo (Maringe/Hograno) Dictionary. Pacific Linguistics Series C - No. 97. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. doi:10.15144/pl-c97. hdl:1885/145429. ISBN 0-85883-368-9.
  • Palmer, Bill (2009). "Clause Order and Information Structure in Cheke Holo". Oceanic Linguistics. 48 (1): 213–249. doi:10.1353/ol.0.0038. hdl:1959.13/916448. S2CID 145092013.
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