The Senagi languages are a small independent family of Papuan languages in the classification of Malcolm Ross, that had been part of Stephen Würm's Trans-New Guinea proposal. Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ... The term Papuan languages refers to those languages of the western Pacific which are neither Austronesian nor Australian. ... Malcolm Ross is a linguist and professor at the Australian National University. ... Trans-New Guinea is a family of languages spoken mainly on the island of New Guinea, which comprises the nation of Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya, Indonesia. ...
The Angor language is unusual in that it distinguishes gender in the second- and third-person dual and plural (you and they), but not in the singular. It is not clear if Dera does the same. Look up Dual in Wiktionary, the free dictionary A dual is a pair or a grouping of two. ...
Classification
The Senagi family consists of only two languages:
Senagi family: Angor, Dera
The most promising external links are with the Sepik and Torricelli languages. The pronoun for "I" is reconstructed as *wan for both proto-Senagi and proto-Sepik, while the Angor masculine dual and plural pronominal suffixes -fa- and -mu- appear to reflect the proto-Sepik and proto-Torricelli dual and plural pronominal suffixes *-p and *-m. The Torricelli languages are a hypothetical language family of about fifty languages of the northern Papua New Guinea coast, spoken by only about 80 000 people in all. ...
The term Papuan languages refers to those languages of the western Pacific which are neither Austronesian nor Australian. ...
Reference
Malcom Ross (2005). "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages." In: Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Robin Hide and Jack Golson, eds, Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples, 15-66. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
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