Ventureño is a member of the extinct

Chumashan languages Chumashan was a family of languages that were spoken on the southern California coast by Native American Chumash people, from the Coastal plains and valleys of San Luis Obispo to Malibu, neighboring inland and Transverse Ranges valleys and ca ...

, a group of Native American languages previously spoken by the

Chumash people The Chumash are a Native American people of the central and southern coastal regions of California, in portions of what is now San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties, extending from Morro Bay in the north to Mali ...

along the coastal areas of

Southern California Southern California (commonly shortened to SoCal) is a geographic and Cultural area, cultural region that generally comprises the southern portion of the U.S. state of California. It includes the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the second most po ...

from as far north as

San Luis Obispo San Luis Obispo (; Spanish for " St. Louis the Bishop", ; Chumash: ''tiłhini'') is a city and county seat of San Luis Obispo County, in the U.S. state of California. Located on the Central Coast of California, San Luis Obispo is roughly hal ...

to as far south as Malibu. Ventureño was spoken from as far north as present-day Ventura to as far south as present-day Malibu and the

Simi Hills The Simi Hills are a low rocky mountain range of the Transverse Ranges in eastern Ventura County and western Los Angeles County, of southern California, United States. Geography The Simi Hills are aligned east-west and run for , and average arou ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. Dialects probably also included Castac and Alliklik.Campbell 1997:126 Ventureño is, like its sister Chumashan languages, a

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 ...

language, having larger words composed of a number of morphemes. Ventureño has separate word classes of

verb A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...

noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, d ...

, and oblique adjunct; with no separate word class for adjectives or adpositions. Nouns and verbs are often heavily

affix In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ar ...

ed (mostly

prefix A prefix is an affix which is placed before the Word stem, stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix ''un-'' is added to the word ''happy'', it creates the word ''unhappy'' ...

ed) in Ventureño, affixing being a way to denote those meanings often conveyed by separate words in more

analytic language In linguistic typology, an analytic language is a language that conveys relationships between words in sentences primarily by way of ''helper'' words (particles, prepositions, etc.) and word order, as opposed to using inflections (changing the ...

s. Verbs play a primary role in Ventureño with utterances often composed only of a verb with clitics. Chumash word order is VSO/ VOS, or VS/ VO.

Phonology

Ventureño has a similar phonemic inventory to other Chumash languages. Ventureño consists of 30 consonants and 6 vowels.

Vowels

Ventureño consists of a regular 5-vowel inventory with a sixth vowel transcribed as . In Barbareño transcriptions, is used. It is not known whether these two phones are the same in both languages (and the difference in transcription merely one of convention), or whether the sounds were in fact different enough for Harrington to use different symbols.

Consonants

Orthography

Ventureño has been written in several different ways by different linguists. John Peabody Harrington, who compiled most of the data on Ventureño, used a modified version of the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...

. Harrington differed from the International Phonetic Alphabet in the following symbols: a kappa (small-cap 'k') for , a for , a slanted bar for , a reversed apostrophe for aspiration, and a right-turned (standard) apostrophe for a glottal stop (this symbol was also used for ejectives and glottalized sonorants).Harrington, J. P. (1981). The Papers of John Peabody Harrington in the Smithsonian 1907-1957: A Guide to the Field Notes: Native American History, Language, and Culture of Southern California/Basin, vol. 3. Elaine L. Mills and Ann J. Brockfield, eds. Microfilm reels 69, 89, and 94 on Ventureño. The Barbareño/Ventureño Band of Mission Indians has adopted an Americanist form of transcription for Ventureño based on the work done by Harrington: for , for , for , for aspiration, for , and for . A standard apostrophe continues to be used for a

glottal stop The glottal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents thi ...

and for denoting ejectives.

Glottalized Glottalization is the complete or partial closure of the glottis during the articulation of another sound. Glottalization of vowels and other sonorants is most often realized as creaky voice (partial closure). Glottalization of obstruent consona ...

sonorants are written with a combining apostrophe over the symbol. This transcription is in keeping with most current Chumashists (such as Wash below) except that alveolar affricates () are written as in Ventureño, where other Chumashists write them as . Likewise, Ventureño writes postalveolar affricates () as , where other Chumashists write this sound as .

Morphology

Chumash morphology is fairly

. This applies especially to the verbs of the language, which has over 15 distinct morphological slots (when counting nominalized verbs). This is illustrated in the table below by the nominalized verb meaning "your wanting to make fun of us".

Numbers

The Chumash languages exhibit a

quaternary numeral system A quaternary numeral system is base-. It uses the digits 0, 1, 2 and 3 to represent any real number. Conversion from binary is straightforward. Four is the largest number within the subitizing range and one of two numbers that is both a sq ...

. The numbers 1–16 exhibit certain characteristics which are different from the method of counting from 17 to 32. In all places, however, the multiple of 4 usually has a unique term. Ventureño Chumash has the most complete, native Chumash system of numbers on record.

References

External links

Ventureño language
overview at the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages *
OLAC resources in and about the Ventureño languageVentureño at the California Language Archive
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ventureno language Chumashan languages Indigenous languages of California Extinct languages of North America Languages extinct in the 20th century History of Ventura County, California