Yaminawa (Yaminahua) is a
Panoan language of western Amazonia. It is spoken by the
Yaminawá and some related peoples.
Yaminawa constitutes an extensive
dialect cluster. Attested dialects are ''two or more Brazilian Yaminawa dialects, Peruvian Yaminawa, Chaninawa, Chitonawa, Mastanawa, Parkenawa'' (= Yora or "Nawa"), ''Shanenawa'' (Xaninaua, = Katukina de Feijó), ''Sharanawa'' (= Marinawa), ''Shawannawa'' (= Arara), ''Yawanawá, Yaminawa-arara'' (obsolescent; very similar to Shawannawa/Arara), ''Nehanawa''
†).
[David Fleck, 2013, ]
Panoan Languages and Linguistics
', Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History #99
Very few Yaminawá speak Spanish or Portuguese, though the Shanenawa have mostly shifted to Portuguese.
Phonology
The vowels of Yaminawa are /a, i, ɯ, u/. /i, ɯ, u/ can also be heard as
ª, ɨ, o Sharanawa, Yaminawa, and Yora have nasalized counterparts for each of the vowels, and demonstrate contrastive nasalization.
is heard as an allophone of /ɾ/. /j/ can also be heard as a nasal .
Yawanawá has a similar phonemic inventory to Yaminawa, but uses a
voiced bilabial fricative
The voiced bilabial fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is B. The official symbol is the ...
in place of the
voiceless bilabial fricative
The voiceless bilabial fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is .
Features
Features of the voiceless bilabial fricative:
Occ ...
.
Yawanawá and Sharanahua have an additional phoneme, the
voiced labio-velar approximant
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced.
The term, however, is used to re ...
.
Shanewana has a labiodental fricative instead of .
Yaminawa has contrastive tone, with two surface tones, high (H) and low (L).
[Faust, Norma and Eugene Loos. (2002). ''Gramática de la lengua yaminahua''. Serie lingüÃstica peruana, no. 51. Instituto LingüÃstico de Verano.]
Grammar
Yaminawa is a polysynthetic, primarily suffixing language that also uses compounding, nasalization, and tone alternations in word-formation. Yaminawa exhibits split ergativity; nouns and third person pronouns pattern along ergative-absolutive lines, while first and second person pronouns pattern along nominative-accusative lines. Yaminawa verbal morphology is extensive, encoding affective (emotional) meanings and categories like associated motion. Yaminawa also has a set of switch reference enclitics that encode same or different subject relationships as well as aspectual relationships between the dependent (marked) clause and the main clause.
Notes
External links
Yaminahua language dictionary online from IDSSharanahua Language Collection of Pierre Déléage
(includes myths, shamanistic songs, and ceremonial songs) at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA).
Yaminahua
( Intercontinental Dictionary Series)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Yaminahua Language
Panoan languages
Indigenous languages of Western Amazonia
Languages of Bolivia
Languages of Peru
Languages of Brazil