Itonama language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Itonama
Native toBolivia
RegionBeni Department
Ethnicity2,900 (2006)[1]
Native speakers
5 (2007)[1]
Language family
Language isolate
Writing system
Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3ito
Glottologiton1250
ELPItonama
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Itonama is a moribund language isolate spoken by the Itonama people in the Amazonian lowlands of north-eastern Bolivia. Greenberg’s (1987) classification of Itonama as Paezan, a sub-branch of Macro-Chibchan, remains unsupported and Itonama continues to be considered an isolate or unclassified language.

It was spoken on the Itonomas River and Lake[2] in Beni Department.

Language contact[]

Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Nambikwaran languages due to contact.[3]

An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)[4] found lexical similarities between Itonama and Movima, likely due to contact.

Phonology[]

Vowels[]

Front Central Back
High i ɨ u
Mid e o
Low a

Diphthongs: /ai au/.

Consonants[]

Bilabial Alveolar Post-
alveolar 		Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal m n
Plosive/
Affricate 		plain p t tʃ tʲ k ʔ
ejective tʼ tʃʼ kʼ
voiced b d
Fricative s h
Liquid lateral l
rhotic ɾ
Semivowel w j

The postalveolar affricates /tʃ tʃʼ/ have alveolar allophones [ts tsʼ]. Variation occurs between speakers, and even within the speech of a single person.

The semivowel /w/ is realized as a bilabial fricative [β] when preceded and followed by identical vowels.

Morphology[]

Itonama is a polysynthetic, head-marking, verb-initial language with an accusative alignment system along with an inverse subsystem in independent clauses, and straightforward accusative alignment in dependent clauses.

Nominal morphology lacks case declension and adpositions and so is simpler than verbal morphology (which has body-part and location incorporation, directionals, evidentials, verbal classifiers, among others).[5]

Vocabulary[]

Loukotka (1968) lists the following basic vocabulary items for Itonama.[2]

gloss Itonama
one chash-káni
two chash-chupa
tooth huomóte
tongue páchosníla
hand mapára
woman ubíka
water huanúhue
fire ubári
moon chakakáshka
maize udáme
jaguar ótgu
house úku

See also[]

Further reading[]

  • Camp, E. L.; Liccardi, M. R. (1967). Itonama, castellano e inglés. (Vocabularios Bolivianos, 6.) Riberalta: Summer Institute of Linguistics.

References[]

  1. ^ a b Itonama at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. ^ a b Loukotka, Čestmír (1968). Classification of South American Indian languages. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center.
  3. ^ Jolkesky, Marcelo Pinho de Valhery (2016). Estudo arqueo-ecolinguístico das terras tropicais sul-americanas (Ph.D. dissertation) (2 ed.). Brasília: University of Brasília.
  4. ^ Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013).
  5. ^ Crevels, M. Who did what to whom in Magdalena. p. 3.

External links[]

Retrieved from ""