Cavineña Language
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Cavineña is an indigenous language spoken on the Amazonian plains of northern Bolivia by over 1,000 Cavineño people. Although Cavineña is still spoken (and still learned by some children), it is an endangered language. Guillaume (2004) states that about 1200 people speak the language, out of a population of around 1700. Nearly all Cavineña are bilingual in
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas **Spanish cuisine **Spanish history **Spanish culture ...
. The Cavineño people live in several communities near the
Beni River The Beni River () is a river in the north of Bolivia. It rises north of La Paz La Paz, officially Nuestra Señora de La Paz (Aymara language, Aymara: Chuqi Yapu ), is the seat of government of the Bolivia, Plurinational State of Bolivia. Wit ...
, which flows north from the Andes. The nearest towns are Reyes (to the south) and Riberalta (to the north).


Phonology

Where the practical orthography is different from IPA, it is shown between angled brackets: Examples in the morphology and syntax sections are written in the practical orthography.


Morphology


Verbs

Verbs do not show agreement with their arguments, but are inflected for tense, aspect, mood, negation, and aktionsart, among other categories. There are six tense, aspect, or mood affixes: The following examples show the remote past and perfective affixes: Aktionsart suffixes include: The following examples show the completive and reiterative suffixes: Cavineña is the first language in the Amazon for which an
antipassive voice The antipassive voice ( abbreviated or ) is a type of grammatical voice that either does not include the object or includes the object in an oblique case. This construction is similar to the passive voice, in that it decreases the verb's valenc ...
has been described. Dixon, R.M.W. & Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (eds) (1990). ''The Amazonian Languages''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. xxvii Cavineña has a
periodic tense Periodic tense is a subtype of the grammatical category of tense, which encodes that the event expressed by the verb occurs within a particular period of the day (such as 'at night', 'in the morning' etc.) or of the year ('in winter', 'in summer' ...
paradigm with four suffixes: diurnal -chinepe, nocturnal -sisa, auroral -wekaka and vesperal -apuna (Guillaume 2008:126), with cognates in the rest of Tacanan. These markers can be redundantly combined with temporal adverbs: Among the verbal suffixes, we also find a celerative -wisha encoding quick speed.


Syntax


Nouns and noun phrases


Subtypes of nouns

There are three subtypes of nouns in Cavineña: # e-nouns, which are a closed class of about 100 to 150 terms which must take a prefix e-. (The prefix is realised as y- before the vowel a). # kinship nouns, which are a small class of about 30 terms which are obligatorily inflected for their possessor. # independent nouns, which are an open class of a couple of thousand terms. Independent nouns do not take any e- prefix nor any possessor inflections.


Case marking

Case marking on noun phrases is shown through a set of clitic postpositions, including the following: The dative and genitive cases are homophonous. Pronouns (independent or bound) also show these case distinctions. The following example shows several of the case markers in context:


Order in noun phrases

Noun phrases show the order: : (Relative Clause)-(Quantifier)-(Possessor)-Noun-(Adjective)-(Plural marker)-(Relative clause) The following examples show some of these orders. (The clitic 'ligature' appears at the end of a relative clause.)


Pronouns

Pronouns in Cavineña can appear in either independent or bound forms. The two kinds of pronouns are pronounced almost exactly the same, but the bound pronouns appear in second position, after the first word of the sentence. Independent pronouns tend to be contrastive, and usually appear first in the sentence. The following pronouns are found: notes that the formative suffix -ke (of singular absolutive bound pronouns) and the ergative suffix -ra (in ergative bound pronouns) do not show up when absolutive or ergative pronouns occur last among the second position clitics.


Sentences

Cavineña has ergative case marking on the subject of a transitive verb. For sentences with a non-pronominal subject, this is shown with an ergative case clitic /=ra/: For a sentence with a pronominal subject, there are distinct ergative and absolutive forms of the pronouns: Verbs do not inflect for the person of the subject or other arguments in the clause. Instead, a set of clitic pronouns occurs in the second position of the clause, as in the following examples: The clitics are ordered so that 3rd person pronouns precede 2nd person pronouns, which precede 1st person pronouns. (Some of the clitic pronouns in these examples have a formative element /-ke/ after them and some do not.)


References


Bibliography

* *Camp, Elizabeth, L. and Millicent R. Liccardi. 1978. Necabahuityatira Isaraisara Huenehuene. (Aprendamos a Leer y Escribir), Cochabamba: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano. (Revised edition.) *
FM:formative ASSOC:associative LIG:ligature APPROX:approximative COMP:completive REITR:reiterative INT:interrogative RESTR:restrictive CONTR:contrastive IMPFV:imperfective AFFTN:affection TEMP:temporarily NPF:noun prefix RES:resultative


External links


Lenguas de Bolivia
(online edition)
Cavineña
(
Intercontinental Dictionary Series The Intercontinental Dictionary Series (commonly abbreviated as IDS) is a large database of topical vocabulary lists in various world languages. The general editor of the database is Bernard Comrie of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary An ...
) {{DEFAULTSORT:Cavinena Language Languages of Bolivia Tacanan languages Endangered Indigenous languages of the Americas