Yanomaman, also as Yanomam, Yanomáman, Yamomámi, and Yanomamana (also Shamatari, Shirianan), is a family of languages spoken by about 20,000
Yanomami people
The Yanomami, also spelled Yąnomamö or Yanomama, are a group of approximately 35,000 indigenous people who live in some 200–250 villages in the Amazon rainforest on the border between Venezuela and Brazil.
Etymology
The ethnonym ''Yanomami' ...
in southern
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 ...
and northwestern
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
(
Roraima
Roraima (, ) is one of the 26 states of Brazil. Located in the country's North Region, it is the northernmost and most geographically and logistically isolated state in Brazil. It is bordered by the state of Pará to the southeast, Amazonas ...
,
Amazonas).
Subdivision
Ferreira et al. (2019)
Ferreira, Machado & Senra (2019) divide the Yanomaman family into two branches, with six languages in total.
[Ferreira, Helder Perri; Machado, Ana Maria Antunes; Senra, Estevão Benfica. 2019. ]
As línguas Yanomami no Brasil: diversidade e vitalidade
'. São Paulo: Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) and Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional (IPHAN). 216pp.
# Ninam-Yanomam-Yaroamë
#*''Nimam''
#**
Ninam (also known as Yanami, Yanami-Ninami) - 900 speakers in Venezuela and Brazil
#*''Yanomam-Yaroamë''
#**
Yanomám (also known as Waiká) - 6,000 speakers mainly in Venezuela
#**
Yanomamö
The Yanomami, also spelled Yąnomamö or Yanomama, are a group of approximately 35,000 indigenous people who live in some 200–250 villages in the Amazon rainforest on the border between Venezuela and Brazil.
Etymology
The ethnonym ''Yanomam ...
(also known as Yanomame, Yanomami) - 20,000 speakers mainly in Brazil
#**
Yaroamë (also known as Jawari) - 400 speakers in Brazil
#**
Yãnoma - 178 speakers in Brazil
#Sanumá
#*
Sanumá (also known as Tsanuma, Sanima) - 5,100 speakers mainly in Venezuela
Sanumá is the most lexically distinct. Yanomamö has the most speakers (20,000), while Yãnoma has the fewest (178).
Jolkesky (2016)
Internal classification by Jolkesky (2016):
[Jolkesky, Marcelo Pinho de Valhery. 2016. ]
Estudo arqueo-ecolinguístico das terras tropicais sul-americanas
'. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Brasília
The University of Brasília ( pt, Universidade de Brasília, UnB) is a federal public university in Brasília, the capital of Brazil. It was founded in 1960 and has since consistently been named among the top five Brazilian universities and the ...
.
(† = extinct)
;Yanomami
*''
Sanuma''
*''
Yanam
Yanam (Telugu: ''యానాం'') is a town located in the Yanam district in Puducherry. It has a population of 35,000 and is entirely surrounded by Andhra Pradesh. It was formerly a French colony for nearly 200 years, and, though united ...
''
*Yanomami, Central
**''
Yaroame''
**''
Yanomam
Yanomaman, also as Yanomam, Yanomáman, Yamomámi, and Yanomamana (also Shamatari, Shirianan), is a family of languages spoken by about 20,000 Yanomami people in southern Venezuela and northwestern Brazil ( Roraima, Amazonas).
Subdivision
Fer ...
'', ''
Yanomamï''
Genetic relations
Yanomaman is usually not connected with any other language family.
Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.
Life Early life and education
Joseph Greenberg was born on ...
has suggested a relationship between Yanomaman and
Macro-Chibchan
Macro-Chibchan is a proposed grouping of the languages of the Lencan, Misumalpan, and Chibchan families into a single large phylum (macrofamily).
History
The Lencan and Misumalpan languages were once included in the Chibchan family proper, but ...
. Migliazza (1985) has suggested a connection with
Panoan
Panoan (also Pánoan, Panoano, Panoana, Páno) is a family of languages spoken in Peru, western Brazil, and Bolivia. It is possibly a branch of a larger Pano–Tacanan family.
Genetic relations
The Panoan family is generally believed to be relat ...
and Chibchan. Neither proposal is widely accepted.
Language contact
Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the
Irantxe,
Taruma,
Katukina-Katawixi,
Puinave-Kak,
Tupi,
Arawa,
Guahibo, and
Jivaro language families due to contact.
Name
''Yanomami'' is not what the Yanomami call themselves and is instead a word in their language meaning "man" or "human being". The American anthropologist
Napoleon Chagnon
Napoleon Alphonseau Chagnon (27 August 1938 – 21 September 2019) was an American cultural anthropologist, professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of Missouri in Columbia and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Chagn ...
adopted this term in the correct transcription ''Ya̧nomamö'' of its pronunciation to use as an
exonym
An endonym (from Greek: , 'inner' + , 'name'; also known as autonym) is a common, ''native'' name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside that particular place, group, ...
to refer to the culture and, by extension, the people. The word is correctly pronounced with nasalisation of all the vowels. As the phoneme indicated by the spelling 'ö' does not occur in English, variations in spelling and pronunciation of the name have developed, with ''Yanomami'', ''Yanomamö'', ''Ya̧nomamö'', and ''Yanomama'' all being used. Some anthropologists have used the spelling ''Yanomamɨ'' to indicate what they feel is a more correct indication of the pronunciation with the vowel , but because many presses and typesetters eliminate the diacritical marks, the incorrect pronunciation /i/ and spelling of the name with ⟨i⟩ has emerged.
Characteristics
Phonology
Yanomaman languages have a phonological distinction between oral and nasal vowels. There are seven basic vowel qualities: /a e i o u ɨ ə/, which can occur as oral or nasal sounds.
In the table above, the practical orthography is shown in angle brackets below the phoneme, if different.
The Yanomaman languages present extensive
nasal harmony
Consonant harmony is a type of "long-distance" phonological assimilation, akin to the similar assimilatory process involving vowels, i.e. vowel harmony.
Examples
In Athabaskan languages
One of the more common harmony processes is ''coronal harmo ...
. When in Yanomaman words, a
vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
is phonetically
nasalized
In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is .
In the Internationa ...
, all vowels that follow within the same word are also nasalized. The consonants of Yanomama are shown in the table below:
Syntax
Yanomaman languages are SOV, suffixing, predominantly
head-marking
A language is head-marking if the grammatical marks showing agreement between different words of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads (or nuclei) of phrases, rather than on the modifiers or dependents. Many languages employ both head-marking ...
with elements of
dependent-marking A dependent-marking language has grammatical markers of agreement and case government between the words of phrases that tend to appear more on dependents than on heads. The distinction between head-marking and dependent-marking was first explore ...
. Its typology is highly
polysynthetic
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able t ...
. Adjectival concepts are expressed by means of stative verbs, there are no true adjectives. Adjectival stative verbs follow their noun.
There are five demonstratives which have to be chosen according to distance from speaker and hearer and also according to visibility, a feature shared by many native Brazilian languages such as
Tupian
The Tupi or Tupian language family comprises some 70 languages spoken in South America, of which the best known are Tupi proper and Guarani.
Homeland and ''urheimat''
Rodrigues (2007) considers the Proto-Tupian urheimat to be somewhere between ...
ones including
Old Tupi
Old Tupi, Ancient Tupi or Classical Tupi (also spelled as Tupí) is an extinct Tupian language which was spoken by the aboriginal Tupi people of Brazil, mostly those who inhabited coastal regions in South and Southeast Brazil. It belongs to the ...
. Demonstratives, numerals, classifiers and quantifiers precede the head noun.
There is a distinction between
alienable and inalienable possession
In linguistics, inalienable possession (abbreviated ) is a type of possession in which a noun is obligatorily possessed by its possessor. Nouns or nominal affixes in an inalienable possession relationship cannot exist independently or be "ali ...
, again a common areal feature, and a rich system of verbal classifiers, almost a hundred, they are obligatory and appear just before the verb root. The distinction between inclusive and exclusive 1st person plural, a feature shared by most Native American languages, has been lost in Yanam and Yanomam dialects, but retained in the others.
Yanomami morphosyntactic alignment is
ergative–absolutive, which means that the subject of an intransitive verb is marked the same way as the object of a transitive verb, while the subject of transitive verb is marked differently. The ergative case marker is ''-ny''. The verb agrees with both subject and object.
Evidentiality
In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and if so, what kind. An evidential (also verificational or validational) is the particul ...
on Yanomami dialect is marked on the verb and has four levels: eyewitness, deduced, reported, and assumed. Other dialects have fewer levels.
The object of the verb can be incorporated into it, especially if it not in focus:
''Non-incorporated:''
''Incorporated:''
Relative clauses are formed by adding a relativizing ('REL' below) suffix to the verb:
Sanuma dialect also has a relative pronoun ''ĩ''.
Vocabulary
Loukotka (1968) lists the following basic vocabulary items for Yanomaman language varieties.
References
Bibliography
* Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. & Dixon R.M.W. (1999) ''The Amazonian Languages'' Cambridge Language Surveys (p. 341-351)
* Campbell, Lyle. (1997). ''American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America''. New York: Oxford University Press. .
* Greenberg, Joseph H. (1960). General classification of Central and South American languages. In A. Wallace (Ed.), ''Men and cultures: Fifth international congress of anthropological and ethnological sciences (1956)'' (pp. 791–794). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
* Greenberg, Joseph H. (1987). ''Language in the Americas''. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
* Kaufman, Terrence. (1990). Language history in South America: What we know and how to know more. In D. L. Payne (Ed.), ''Amazonian linguistics: Studies in lowland South American languages'' (pp. 13–67). Austin: University of Texas Press. .
* Kaufman, Terrence. (1994). The native languages of South America. In C. Mosley & R. E. Asher (Eds.), ''Atlas of the world's languages'' (pp. 46–76). London: Routledge.
*Mattei-Müller, M. (2007). Lengua y cultura yanomami: diccionario ilustrado yanomami-español, español-yanomami. Caracas: CONAC.
*Migliazza, E. C. (1972). Yanomama grammar and intelligibility. Indiana University. (Doctoral dissertation).
* Migliazza, Ernest C. (1985). Languages of the Orinoco-Amazon region: Current status. In H. E. Manelis Klein & L. R. Stark (Eds.), ''South American Indian languages: Retrospect and prospect'' (pp. 17–139). Austin: University of Texas Press.
* Migliazza, Ernest C.; & Campbell, Lyle. (1988). ''Panorama general de las lenguas indígenas en América''. Historia general de América (Vol. 10). Caracas: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia.
Dictionaries
* Müller, Marie-Claude Mattei. (2007) Diccionario ilustrado yanomami-español / español-yanomami. Caracas: Epsilon Libros. 782pp.
External links
*
* ELAR archive o
Documentation and Description of the Yanomama of PapiuThe Yanomami LanguageYanomámi(
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 ...
)
{{South American languages
Language families
Polysynthetic languages
Indigenous languages of Northern Amazonia