Itonama is a

moribund Moribund refers to a literal or figurative state near death. Moribund may refer to: * ''Moribund'' (album), a 2006 album by the Norwegian black metal band Koldbrann * " Le Moribond", a song by Jacques Brel known in English as "Seasons in the Sun ...

language isolate A language isolate is a language that has no demonstrable genetic relationship with any other languages. Basque in Europe, Ainu and Burushaski in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, Haida and Zuni in North America, Kanoê in South America, and Tiwi ...

once spoken by the Itonama people in the Amazonian lowlands of north-eastern

Bolivia Bolivia, officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia, is a landlocked country located in central South America. The country features diverse geography, including vast Amazonian plains, tropical lowlands, mountains, the Gran Chaco Province, w ...

. It was spoken on the Itonomas River and Lake in

Beni Department Beni (), sometimes El Beni, is a northeastern Departments of Bolivia, department of Bolivia, in the lowlands region of the country. It is the second-largest department in the country (after Santa Cruz), covering 213,564 square kilometers (82,458 ...

. In Magdalena town on the western bank of the Itonama River (a tributary of the Iténez River), located in Iténez Province, only a few elderly people remember a few words and phrases.

Language contact

Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Nambikwaran languages due to contact. An automated computational analysis ( ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013.
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013)
'. found lexical similarities between Itonama and Movima, likely due to contact.

Phonology

Vowels

Diphthong A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of ...

s: .

Consonants

The postalveolar affricates have alveolar allophones . Variation occurs between speakers, and even within the speech of a single person. The semivowel is realized as a bilabial fricative when preceded and followed by identical vowels.

Morphology

Itonama is 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 ...

, head-marking, verb-initial language with an accusative alignment system along with an inverse subsystem in independent clauses, and straightforward accusative alignment in dependent clauses. Nominal morphology lacks case declension and adpositions and so is simpler than verbal morphology (which has body-part and location incorporation, directionals, evidentials, verbal classifiers, among others).

Vocabulary

Loukotka (1968) lists the following basic vocabulary items for Itonama. They are shown here alongside the forms cited in the Intercontinental Dictionary Series (IDS). :

References

External links

Sample of Itonama fragment

Lenguas de Bolivia
(online edition)
Itonama
( Intercontinental Dictionary Series) {{Jesuit Missions of Moxos Critically endangered languages Language isolates of South America Macro-Paesan languages Languages of Bolivia Mamoré–Guaporé linguistic area