Ngadha (also known as Ngada or Ngad'a) is an Austronesian language, one of six languages spoken in the central stretch of the Indonesian island of Flores.
From west to east these languages are: Ngadha, Nage, Keo, Ende, Lio, and Palu'e.
Ngadha is "bizarre" because it has no prefixes nor suffixes at all. This "stragely streamlined language" is thought by linguist John McWhorter to have originated when "little people" were "subjugated" into Indonesian society in the past. McWhorter (2006) speculates this rare linguistic transformation would have occurred to the ancestor of Ngadha and the related Keo and Rongga languages.
These languages form the proposed Central Flores group of the Sumba–Flores languages, according to Blust (2009). However, according to the Ethnologue, Ngad'a is one of the 27 Bima-Sumba languages that are a group of the 169 languages of the Central Malayo-Polynesian family.
Ngadha is a very small member of the huge, well-documented family of the Malayo-Polynesian languages, which includes Tagalog, Malagasy, and Malay, each with millions of speakers. Its basic vocabulary, such as body parts, numbers, and action verbs, are very similar to those languages; Ngadha has kept 94 out of 247 common words in the lexicon of the Proto-Malayo-Polynesian language.
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)