Grammatically Marked Ideophones in Numbami and Jabem

Numbami and Jabêm, two Austronesian languages of Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea, share a trait rarely recorded for Oceanic languages: they each have a rich class of morphologically marked ideophones. In Numbami, the marker is a suffix -a(n)dala unique to ideophones, but clearly related to NUM andalowa 'path, way, road' and Proto-Oceanic *jalan. In Jabêm, the marker varies depending on the length of the ideophone itself, just as it does on other classes of adverbs. The shortest forms are usually followed by tageŋ 'one, at once, only', longer forms take the regular adverbial enclitic -geŋ, and fully reduplicated forms are usually left unmarked.