The Mairasi languages, also known as Etna Bay[1] are a small independent family of Papuan languages in the classifications of Malcolm Ross and Timothy Usher, that had been part of Stephen Wurm's Trans–New Guinea proposal.
They are named after Etna Bay, located in the southeastern corner of West Papua province, in Indonesia.
Pawley and Hammarström (2018) do not consider there to be sufficient evidence for the Mairasi languages to be classified as part of Trans-New Guinea, though they do note the following lexical resemblance between Mairasi, Semimi, and proto-Trans-New Guinea.
[2] Usher (2020) reconstructs the consonant inventory as follows:[3] Vowels are *a *e *i *o *u.
Usher (2020) reconstructs the free and possessive pronouns as:[3] Some lexical reconstructions by Usher (2020) are:[3] Below is a basic vocabulary table of Mairasi languages (Mairasi, Mer, Semimi) with potential cognate matches, from Peckham (1991a,b), quoted in Foley (2018):[4][5][6] Usher's protoforms of the 20 most stable items[7] in the Swadesh list include the following.