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 reader uses his eyes as well as or instead of his ears and is in every way encouraged to take a more abstract view of the language he sees. The written or printed sentence lends itself to structural analysis as the spoken does not because the reader’s eye can play back and forth over the words, giving him time to divide the sentence into visually appreciated parts and to reflect on the grammatical function.”
—J. David Bolter (b. 1951)