Saliba ( es, Sáliba, ) is an indigenous language of
Eastern Colombia and
Venezuela
Venezuela (; ), officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela ( es, link=no, República Bolivariana de Venezuela), is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many islands and islets in th ...
.
Saliba was used by
Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century to communicate with indigenous peoples of the
Meta,
Orinoco, and
Vichada valleys. An 1856 watercolor by
Manuel María Paz
Manuel María Paz Delgado (July 6, 1820, Almaguer, Cauca, Colombia - September 16, 1902 Bogotá) was a Colombian cartographer, military officer, artist and watercolorist.
Biography
Manuel María Paz Delgado was born June 6, 1820 in the town o ...
is an early depiction of the Saliva people in
Casanare Province.
Use
"Saliba was spoken by an ethnic group that lived along the central reaches of the
Orinoco River
The Orinoco () is one of the longest rivers in South America at . Its drainage basin, sometimes known as the Orinoquia, covers , with 76.3 percent of it in Venezuela and the remainder in Colombia. It is the fourth largest river in the wor ...
."
"This language group was so isolated that the language was reported extinct in 1965."
It is not being passed on to many children, but that practice is being reconsidered. As of 2007, "Sáliva speakers now are almost all 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 Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
, and Sáliva children are only learning Spanish instead of their ancestral language."
As of 2007, "In the
Orocué
Orocué is a town and municipality in the Department of Casanare, Colombia, located on the shore of the Meta River. Historically, it went by the name San Miguel del Macuco.
It is located 180 km from Yopal, and 546 km from Bogotá.
...
area the language is only conserved to a high degree among elderly women; others understand Sáliba but no longer express themselves in the language."
[ Native speakers have a literacy rate of 1-5%, and second-language speakers have a Sáliba literacy rate of 15-25%.
]
Grammar
"Sáliba is an SOV language with noun classes and nominal classifiers. The language has a rich morphological system. In some cases, the realization of a verbal morpheme depends upon the form of the stem."
Phonology
"Sáliba has a limited voicing distinction, and boasts six places of articulation for plosives. There are also two rhotics, and nasal counterparts for each of the five places of articulation for vowels."[Alexandra Y. Aikhenvlad & R. M. Dixon (1999).]
Writing system
Saliba is written with the Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...
.
The Saliba-Spanish dictionary by Benaissa uses the following orthography:
* Nasal vowels are indicated with a tilde <ã, ẽ, ĩ, õ, ũ>;
* Long vowels are indicated with a double letter ;
* The consonants are pronounced as doubled sonorants when between two vowels;
* is pronounced as a bilabial fricative;
* represents a glottal fricative and represents a velar fricative;
* represents a glottal stop
The Salibas of Orocué
Orocué is a town and municipality in the Department of Casanare, Colombia, located on the shore of the Meta River. Historically, it went by the name San Miguel del Macuco.
It is located 180 km from Yopal, and 546 km from Bogotá.
...
, Caño Mochuelo, and Santa Rosalía have used a different orthography since April 12 2002. This orthography is based in part on the phonetic realisation by María Claudia González Rátiva and Hortensia Estrada Ramírez, and can be considered as a phonological orthography that takes dialectal variation into account.
References
Works cited
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*
External links
*
Bilingual Spanish-Saliba dictionary
Dictionaries and vocabulary
*
*
*
* Huber, Randall Q.; Reed, Robert B.; ''Vocabulario comparativo. Palabras selectas de lenguas indígenas de Colombia'', Bogota, Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1992.
General works
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{{Authority control
Piaroa–Saliban languages
Venezuelan culture
Colombian culture
Subject–object–verb languages
Languages of Venezuela
Languages of Colombia