Northern Adelbert languages


The Northern Adelbert or Pihom–Isumrud languages are a family of two dozen languages in the Madang stock of New Guinea. The occupy the coastal northern Adelbert Range of mountains, vs. the Southern Adelbert languages, another branch of Madang.
Malcolm Ross posited a "linkage" connecting the Northern Adelbert languages with the Mabuso languages, and named this group Croisilles, as the two families bracket Cape Croisilles. However, Ross never claimed Croisilles was an actual language family, and other researchers have rejected the connection.

Languages

Croisilles was first posited by Malcolm Ross, not as an actual language family, but as a linkage. It was a merger of Wurm's Pihom-Isumrud-Mugil and Mabuso stocks, each of which contained 25–30 languages. Pick and Usher reject the merger, and provisionally the inclusion of Mugil, though Pick retains the name. Usher disambiguates the family as 'Adelbert Range'.

Usher (2018)

Timothy Usher classifies the languages as follows.
;Adelbert Range
A quite similar internal classification was worked out independently by Pick. Pick could not establish regular sound correspondences with Kobol–Pal or Amaimon, and thus leaves them out of the family.
;Northern Adelbert
Pick notes that Barem and Malas share pronominal markers on the verbs 'to teach' and 'to show' that are unique to those two verbs.

Phonology

Pick reconstructs the phonemes of Proto-Croisilles as,
with five vowels *a *e *i *o *u.