The languages share a small closed class of verbs taking pronominal object prefixes some of which are cognate (Suter 2012), strong morphological evidence that they are related.

Huon and Finisterre, and then the connection between them, were identified by Kenneth McElhanon (1967, 1970).

When McElhanon compared notes with his colleague Clemens Voorhoeve, who was working on the languages of southern Irian Jaya, they developed the concept of Trans–New Guinea.

[3] The words cited constitute translation equivalents, whether they are cognate (e.g. hɔme, samo for “nose”) or not (e.g. mic-, sot, dzɔŋɔ for “tooth”).

Notice the very low number of cognate triplets, or even pairs, among these languages.