US linguist John McWhorter cited Berik as an example of a language which puts concepts "together in ways more fascinatingly different from English than most of us are aware". Illustrating this, in the phrase Kitobana (meaning "[he] gives three large objects to a male in the sunlight"), affixes indicating time of day, object number, object size, and gender of recipient are added to the verb.
Westrum (1988:150) briefly indicates that Berik encodes whether the action takes place during the day (diurnal) or during the night (nocturnal) in the verb morphology, a rare case of periodic tense whose markers are not easily segmentable.
Sample of diurnal and nocturnal distinctions in the paradigm of the verb ‘to give’ in
Berik (Westrum 1988:150, Jacques 2023:5, Table 1).
Period
Present
Past
Future
Diurnal
gulbana
gulbanant
gulbafa
Nocturnal
gulbasa
gulbafant
gubafa
Sample
Angtaneʻ bosna Usafe je gatas tarnap ge nuin. Tesa ga belim taban, ga jes talebowel.
"There was once a person named Usafe who lived near the sago acreages. Whenever he finished cutting down a sago tree, he pounded it"
↑Taken from Jones, "In Pursuit of Discourse Particles", p. 130
References
Jones, Linda K. (1992), "In Pursuit of Discourse Particles", in Hwang, Shin Ja J.; Merrifield, William R. (eds.), Language in context: Essays for Robert E. Longacre(PDF), Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington Publications in Linguistics, 107, Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington, pp.127–36, archived from the original(PDF) on 2012-10-16
Matthews, Delle P. (1990), "The Berik Literacy Program: From Illiteracy to National Language Proficiency", Irian: Bulletin of Irian Jaya, 18: 109–24
