|
Chikitano–Boróroan
Amerind is a hypothetical higher-level language family proposed by Joseph Greenberg in 1960 and elaborated by his student Merritt Ruhlen. Greenberg proposed that all of the indigenous languages of the Americas belong to one of three language families, the previously established Eskimo–Aleut and Na–Dene, and with everything else—otherwise classified by specialists as belonging to dozens of independent families—as Amerind. Because of a large number of methodological disagreements with the 1987 book ''Language in the Americas'', the relationships he proposed between these languages have been rejected by the majority of historical linguists as spurious. The term ''Amerind'' is also occasionally used to refer broadly to the various indigenous languages of the Americas without necessarily implying that they are a genealogical group. To avoid ambiguity, the term Amerindian is often used for the latter meaning. Background The idea that all the languages of the Americas are rela ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indigenous Languages Of The Americas
The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas before the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples. Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, while many more are now extinct. The Indigenous languages of the Americas are not all related to each other; instead, they are classified into a hundred or so language families and isolates, as well as several extinct languages that are unclassified due to the lack of information on them. Many proposals have been made to relate some or all of these languages to each other, with varying degrees of success. The most widely reported is Joseph Greenberg's Amerind hypothesis, which, however, nearly all specialists reject because of severe methodological flaws; spurious data; and a failure to distinguish cognation, contact, and coincidence. According to UNESCO, most of the Indigenous languages of the Americas are critically endangered, and many are dormant (wit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Americas
The Americas, sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North America and South America.''Webster's New World College Dictionary'', 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Cleveland, Ohio. When viewed as a single continent, the Americas or America is the 2nd largest continent by area after Asia, and is the 3rd largest continent by population. The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and comprise the New World. Along with their Lists of islands of the Americas, associated islands, the Americas cover 8% of Earth's total surface area and 28.4% of its land area. The topography is dominated by the American Cordillera, a long chain of mountains that runs the length of the west coast. The flatter eastern side of the Americas is dominated by large river basins, such as the Amazon basin, Amazon, St. Lawrence River–Great Lakes, Mississippi River System, Mississippi, and Río de la Plata Basin, La Plata basins. Since the Americ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linguistic Reconstruction
Linguistic reconstruction is the practice of establishing the features of an unattested ancestor language of one or more given languages. There are two kinds of reconstruction: * Internal reconstruction uses irregularities in a single language to make inferences about an earlier stage of that language – that is, it is based on evidence from that language alone. * Comparative reconstruction, usually referred to just as reconstruction, establishes features of the ancestor of two or more related languages, belonging to the same language family, by means of the comparative method. A language reconstructed in this way is often referred to as a proto-language (the common ancestor of all the languages in a given family). Texts discussing linguistic reconstruction commonly preface reconstructed forms with an asterisk (*) to distinguish them from attested forms. An attested word from which a root in the proto-language is reconstructed is a . More generally, a reflex is the known deriv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alfredo Trombetti
Alfredo Trombetti (16 January 1866 in Bologna – 5 July 1929 in Venice) was an Italian linguist active in the early 20th century. Career overview Trombetti was a professor at the University of Bologna. He was a member of the Italian Academy. He is best known as an advocate of the doctrine of monogenesis, according to which all of the world's language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...s go back to a single common ancestral language. His arguments for monogenesis were first presented in his book ''L'unità d'origine del linguaggio,'' published in 1905. This doctrine is still extremely controversial. Proposed etymologies A selection of Trombetti's proposed global etymologies:Trombetti, Alfredo. 1905. L'unità d'origine del linguaggio'' Bologna: Luigi Beltrami. : ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Araucanian Languages
The Araucanian languages are a small language family of indigenous languages of the Americas spoken in central Chile and neighboring areas of Argentina. The living representatives of this family are Mapudungun (ISO 639-3: arn) and Huilliche (ISO 639-3: huh), spoken respectively by the Mapuche and Huilliche people. These are usually considered divergent dialects of a single language isolate. Demographics It is estimated that there are approximately 200,000 Mapudungun speakers in Chile and 40,000 speakers in Argentina. Huilliche is the native language of a few thousand Chileans. Language contact Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Kunza, Mochika, Uru-Chipaya, Arawak, Pano, Cholon-Hibito, and Kechua language families due to contact. Internal classification Mason (1950) Internal classification of Araucanian languages by Mason (1950): *Araucanian **North ***Picunche ***Mapuche The Mapuche ( , ) also known as Araucanians are a group of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mapudungun Language
Mapuche ( , ; from 'land' and 'people', meaning 'the people of the land') or Mapudungun (from 'land' and 'speak, speech', meaning 'the speech of the land'; also spelled Mapuzugun and Mapudungu) is either a language isolate or member of the small Araucanian family related to Huilliche spoken in south-central Chile and west-central Argentina by the Mapuche people. It was formerly known as Araucanian, the name given to the Mapuche by the Spanish; the Mapuche avoid it as a remnant of Spanish colonialism. Mapudungun is not an official language of Chile and Argentina, having received virtually no government support throughout its history. However, since 2013, Mapuche, along with Spanish, has been granted the status of an official language by the local government of Galvarino, one of the many communes of Chile. It is not used as a language of instruction in either country's educational system despite the Chilean government's commitment to provide full access to education in Mapuche ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aymaran Languages
Aymaran (also Jaqi or Aru) is one of the two dominant language families in the central Andes alongside Quechuan. The family consists of Aymara, widely spoken in Bolivia, and the endangered Jaqaru and Kawki languages of Peru. Hardman (1978) proposed the name ''Jaqi'' for the family of languages (1978), Alfredo Torero ''Aru'' 'to speak', and Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino ''Aymaran'', with two branches, Southern (or Altiplano) Aymaran and Central Aymaran (Jaqaru and Kawki). Other names for the family are Jaqui (also spelled Haki) and Aimara. Quechuan languages, especially those of the south, share a large amount of vocabulary with Aymara, and the languages have often been grouped together as Quechumaran. This proposal is controversial, however; the shared vocabulary may be better explained as intensive borrowing due to long-term contact. Family division Aymaran consists of two or three languages: * Aymara. Southern and Central dialects divergent and sometimes considered separate ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aymara Language
Aymara (; also ) is an Aymaran languages, Aymaran language spoken by the Aymara people of the Bolivian Andes. It is one of only a handful of Indigenous languages of the Americas, Native American languages with over one million speakers.The other native American languages with more than one million speakers are Nahuatl, Quechua languages, and Guarani language, Guaraní. Aymara, along with Spanish language, Spanish and Quechua language, Quechua, is an official language in Bolivia and Peru. It is also spoken, to a much lesser extent, by some communities in northern Chile, where it is a Minority language, recognized minority language. Some linguists have claimed that Aymara is related to its more widely spoken neighbor, Quechua languages, Quechua. That claim, however, is disputed. Although there are indeed similarities, like the nearly identical phonologies, the majority position among linguists today is that the similarities are better explained as areal feature (linguistics), areal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chibchan Languages
The Chibchan languages (also known as Chibchano) make up a language family indigenous to the Isthmo-Colombian Area, which extends from eastern Honduras to northern Colombia and includes populations of these countries as well as Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. The name is derived from the name of an extinct language called ''Chibcha language, Chibcha'' or ''Muisca'', once spoken by the people who lived on the Altiplano Cundiboyacense of which the city of Bogotá was the southern capital at the time of the Spanish Conquista. However, genetic and linguistic data now indicate that the original heart of Chibchan languages and Chibchan-speaking peoples might not have been in Colombia, but in the area of the Costa Rica-Panama border, where the greatest variety of Chibchan languages has been identified. External relations A larger family called ''Macro-Chibchan'', which would contain the Misumalpan languages, Xinca language, Xinca, and Lenca language, Lenca, was found convincing by Kau ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arhuaco Language
Arhuaco, commonly known as Ikʉ (), is an Indigenous American language of the Chibchan language family, spoken in South America by the Arhuaco people.Arhuaco by Arango and Sánchez, Ethnologue, 1998, access date There are 8000 speakers, all in the region of , 90% of whom are monolingual. Literacy is 1 to 5% in their native language. Some speak , and 15 to 25% are literate in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Uto-Aztecan Languages
The Uto-Aztecan languages are a family of native American languages, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The name of the language family reflects the common ancestry of the Ute language of Utah and the Nahuan languages (also known as Aztecan) of Mexico. The Uto-Aztecan language family is one of the largest linguistic families in the Americas in terms of number of speakers, number of languages, and geographic extension. The northernmost Uto-Aztecan language is Shoshoni, which is spoken as far north as Salmon, Idaho, while the southernmost is the Nawat language of El Salvador and Nicaragua. ''Ethnologue'' gives the total number of languages in the family as 61, and the total number of speakers as 1,900,412. Speakers of Nahuatl languages account for over 85% of these. The internal classification of the family often divides it into two branches: a northern branch including all the languages ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nahuatl Language
Nahuatl ( ; ), Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahuas, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller populations Nahuatl language in the United States, in the United States. Nahuatl has been spoken in central Mexico since at least the seventh century CE. It was the language of the Mexica, who dominated what is now central Mexico during the Late Postclassic period of Mesoamerican chronology, Mesoamerican history. During the centuries preceding the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, the Aztecs had expanded to incorporate a large part of central Mexico. Their influence caused the variety of Nahuatl spoken by the residents of Tenochtitlan to become a prestige language in Mesoamerica. Following the Spanish conquest, Spanish colonists and missionaries introduced the Latin script, and Nahuatl became a literary language. Many chronicles, gram ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
