ICA Course on Toponymy

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

INFORMATION 9. CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES - Q. AMERINDIAN LANGUAGES The languages spoken by the pre-Columbian societies of North and South America are currently classified in at least 50 separate language families. The largest of these are: (1) the Oto-Manguean family, consisting of a 170 languages, all but one Costa Rican outlier being spoken in Mexico; (2) the 75 Arawakan languages, ranging from Honduras, the Caribbean Islands and Surinam in the north to Argentina in the south; (3) the 70 Tupi languages spoken in Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay and French Guyana; (4) the Mayan family, also represented with 70 languages, all spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula; (5) the Uto- Aztecan family, with a little over 60 languages extending from the western USA throughy Mexico into El Salvador; (6) the 47 Quechuan (Inca) languages spoken in the mountainous Andean area; (7) the Na- Dene family, with 42 languages represented from Alaska to the southwestern United States; (8) the 33 Algic languages, consisting of the Algonquin subgroup, Wiyot and Yurok, al spoken in Canada and the USA; (9) the 32 Macro-Ge languages of Brazil and Bolivia; (10) the 29 Panoan languages of Brazil, Peru and Bolivia; (11) the 29 Carib languages, spoken from the area south of the Caribbean Sea into the Guyanas; (12) the 27 Penutian languages, spoken in the western USA and Canada; (13) the 27 Hokan languages of Mexico and the southwestern United States; (14) the 27 Salishan languages of Canada and the northwestern USA; (15) the 26 Tucanoan languages of Colombia, Ecuador and Brazil; (16) the 22 Chibchan languages spoken from Ecuador to the southern states of Central America; (17) the 17 Siouan languages of the Great Plains area of Canada and the USA; (18) the 16 Mexican Mixe-Zoque languages; (19) the 11 Eskimo-Aleut languages of the Arctic tundras from Greenland to eastern Siberia; (20) the 11 Mataco-Guaicuru languages of Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. Others include the Iroquoian, Muskogean and Aymaran families. Just like the language of the Australian aboriginals, the native American languages have spectacularly dropped in numbers as a result of Western colonization: more than 75% of the original number of languages may have disappeared. Copyright United Nations Statistics Division and International Cartographic Association, July 2012 .

Copy Link

Recommended publications

Toward the Reconstruction of Proto-Algonquian-Wakashan. Part 3: the Algonquian-Wakashan 110-Item Wordlist
Sergei L. Nikolaev Institute of Slavic studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow/Novosibirsk); [email protected] Toward the reconstruction of Proto-Algonquian-Wakashan. Part 3: The Algonquian-Wakashan 110-item wordlist In the third part of my complex study of the historical relations between several language families of North America and the Nivkh language in the Far East, I present an annotated demonstration of the comparative data that was used in the lexicostatistical calculations to determine the branching and approximate glottochronological dating of Proto-Algonquian- Wakashan and its offspring; because of volume considerations, this data could not be in- cluded in the previous two parts of the present work and has to be presented autonomously. Additionally, several new Proto-Algonquian-Wakashan and Proto-Nivkh-Algonquian roots have been set up in this part of study. Lexicostatistical calculations have been conducted for the following languages: the reconstructed Proto-North Wakashan (approximately dated to ca. 800 AD) and modern or historically attested variants of Nootka (Nuuchahnulth), Amur Nivkh, Sakhalin Nivkh, Western Abenaki, Miami-Peoria, Fort Severn Cree, Wiyot, and Yurok. Keywords: Algonquian-Wakashan languages, Nivkh-Algonquian languages, Algic languages, Wakashan languages, Chimakuan-Wakashan languages, Nivkh language, historical phonol- ogy, comparative dictionary, lexicostatistics. The classification and preliminary glottochronological dating of Algonquian-Wakashan currently remain the same as presented in Nikolaev 2015a, Fig. 1 1. That scheme was generated based on the lexicostatistical analysis of 110-item basic word lists2 for one reconstructed (Proto-Northern Wakashan, ca. 800 A.D.) and several modern Algonquian-Wakashan lan- guages, performed with the aid of StarLing software 3.
[Show full text]
Expanding the JHU Bible Corpus for Machine Translation of the Indigenous Languages of North America
Expanding the JHU Bible Corpus for Machine Translation of the Indigenous Languages of North America Garrett Nicolai, Edith Coates, Ming Zhang and Miikka Silfverberg Department of Linguistics University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract ence of the language communities. We demonstrate the usefulness of our Indigenous parallel corpus by build- We present an extension to the JHU Bible ing multilingual neural machine translation systems for corpus, collecting and normalizing more than North American Indigenous languages. Multilingual thirty Bible translations in thirty Indigenous training is shown to be beneﬁcial especially for the languages of North America. These exhibit a most resource-poor languages in our corpus which lack wide variety of interesting syntactic and mor- complete Bible translations. phological phenomena that are understudied in the computational community. Neural transla- 2 Corpus Construction tion experiments demonstrate signiﬁcant gains obtained through cross-lingual, many-to-many The Bible is perhaps unique as a parallel text. Partial translation, with improvements of up to 8.4 translations exist in more languages than any other text 2 BLEU over monolingual models for extremely (Mayer and Cysouw, 2014). Furthermore, for nearly low-resource languages. 500 years, the Bible has had a canonical hierarchical structure - the Bible is made up of 66 books, each of 1 Introduction which contains a number of chapters, which are, in turn, broken down into verses. Each verse corresponds In 2019, Johns Hopkins University collated a corpus of to a short segment – often no more than a sentence.
[Show full text]
Languages of the Middle Andes in Areal-Typological Perspective: Emphasis on Quechuan and Aymaran
Languages of the Middle Andes in areal-typological perspective: Emphasis on Quechuan and Aymaran Willem F.H. Adelaar 1. Introduction1 Among the indigenous languages of the Andean region of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, northern Chile and northern Argentina, Quechuan and Aymaran have traditionally occupied a dominant position. Both Quechuan and Aymaran are language families of several million speakers each. Quechuan consists of a conglomerate of geo- graphically defined varieties, traditionally referred to as Quechua “dialects”, not- withstanding the fact that mutual intelligibility is often lacking. Present-day Ayma- ran consists of two distinct languages that are not normally referred to as “dialects”. The absence of a demonstrable genetic relationship between the Quechuan and Aymaran language families, accompanied by a lack of recognizable external gen- etic connections, suggests a long period of independent development, which may hark back to a period of incipient subsistence agriculture roughly dated between 8000 and 5000 BP (Torero 2002: 123–124), long before the Andean civilization at- tained its highest stages of complexity. Quechuan and Aymaran feature a great amount of detailed structural, phono- logical and lexical similarities and thus exemplify one of the most intriguing and intense cases of language contact to be found in the entire world. Often treated as a product of long-term convergence, the similarities between the Quechuan and Ay- maran families can best be understood as the result of an intense period of social and cultural intertwinement, which must have pre-dated the stage of the proto-lan- guages and was in turn followed by a protracted process of incidental and locally confined diffusion.
[Show full text]
33 Contact and North American Languages
9781405175807_4_033 1/15/10 5:37 PM Page 673 33 Contact and North American Languages MARIANNE MITHUN Languages indigenous to the Americas offer some good opportunities for inves- tigating effects of contact in shaping grammar. Well over 2000 languages are known to have been spoken at the time of first contacts with Europeans. They are not a monolithic group: they fall into nearly 200 distinct genetic units. Yet against this backdrop of genetic diversity, waves of typological similarities suggest pervasive, longstanding multilingualism. Of particular interest are similarities of a type that might seem unborrowable, patterns of abstract structure without shared substance. The Americas do show the kinds of contact effects common elsewhere in the world. There are some strong linguistic areas, on the Northwest Coast, in California, in the Southeast, and in the Pueblo Southwest of North America; in Mesoamerica; and in Amazonia in South America (Bright 1973; Sherzer 1973; Haas 1976; Campbell, Kaufman, & Stark 1986; Thompson & Kinkade 1990; Silverstein 1996; Campbell 1997; Mithun 1999; Beck 2000; Aikhenvald 2002; Jany 2007). Numerous additional linguistic areas and subareas of varying sizes and strengths have also been identified. In some cases all domains of language have been affected by contact. In some, effects are primarily lexical. But in many, there is surprisingly little shared vocabulary in contrast with pervasive structural parallelism. The focus here will be on some especially deeply entrenched structures. It has often been noted that morphological structure is highly resistant to the influence of contact. Morphological similarities have even been proposed as better indicators of deep genetic relationship than the traditional comparative method.
[Show full text]
California Indian Languages
SUB Hamburg B/112081 CALIFORNIA INDIAN LANGUAGES VICTOR GOLLA UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London CONTENTS PREFACE ix PART THREE PHONETIC ORTHOGRAPHY xiii Languages and Language Families Algic Languages / 61 PART ONE Introduction: Defining California as a 3.1 California Algic Languages (Ritwan) / 61 Sociolinguistic Area 3.2 Wiyot / 62 3.3 Yurok / 65 1.1 Diversity / 1 Athabaskan (Na-Dene) Languages / 68 1.2 Tribelet and Language / 2 3.4 The Pacific Coast Athabaskan Languages / 68 1.3 Symbolic Function of California Languages / 4 3.5 Lower Columbia Athabaskan 1.4 Languages and Migration / 5 (Kwalhioqua-Tlatskanai) / 69 1.5 Multilingualism / 6 3.6 Oregon Athabaskan Languages / 70 1.6 Language Families and Phyla / 8 3.7 California Athabaskan Languages / 76 Hokan Languages / 82 PART TWO 3.8 The Hokan Phylum / 82 History of Study 3.9 Karuk / 84 3.10 Chimariko / 87 3.11 Shastan Languages / 90 Before Linguistics / 12 3.12 Palaihnihan Languages / 95 2.1 Earliest Attestations / 12 3.13 Yana / 100 2.2 Jesuit Missionaries in Baja California / 12 3.14 Washo / 102 2.3 Franciscans in Alta California / 14 3.15 Porno Languages / 105 2.4 Visitors and Collectors, 1780-1880 / 22 3.16 Esselen / 112 3.17 Salinan / 114 Linguistic Scholarship / 32 3.18 Yuman Languages / 117 3.19 Cochimi and the Cochimi-Yuman Relationship / 125 2.5 Early Research Linguistics, 1865-1900 / 32 3.20 Seri / 126 2.6 The Kroeber Era, 1900 to World War II / 35 2.7 Independent Scholars, 1900-1940 / 42 Penutian Languages / 128 2.8 Structural Linguists / 49 2.9 The
[Show full text]
[.35 **Natural Language Processing Class Here Computational Linguistics See Manual at 006.35 Vs
006 006 006 DeweyiDecimaliClassification006 006 [.35 **Natural language processing Class here computational linguistics See Manual at 006.35 vs. 410.285 *Use notation 019 from Table 1 as modified at 004.019 400 DeweyiDecimaliClassification 400 400 DeweyiDecimali400Classification Language 400 [400 [400 *‡Language Class here interdisciplinary works on language and literature For literature, see 800; for rhetoric, see 808. For the language of a specific discipline or subject, see the discipline or subject, plus notation 014 from Table 1, e.g., language of science 501.4 (Option A: To give local emphasis or a shorter number to a specific language, class in 410, where full instructions appear (Option B: To give local emphasis or a shorter number to a specific language, place before 420 through use of a letter or other symbol. Full instructions appear under 420–490) 400 DeweyiDecimali400Classification Language 400 SUMMARY [401–409 Standard subdivisions and bilingualism [410 Linguistics [420 English and Old English (Anglo-Saxon) [430 German and related languages [440 French and related Romance languages [450 Italian, Dalmatian, Romanian, Rhaetian, Sardinian, Corsican [460 Spanish, Portuguese, Galician [470 Latin and related Italic languages [480 Classical Greek and related Hellenic languages [490 Other languages 401 DeweyiDecimali401Classification Language 401 [401 *‡Philosophy and theory See Manual at 401 vs. 121.68, 149.94, 410.1 401 DeweyiDecimali401Classification Language 401 [.3 *‡International languages Class here universal languages; general
[Show full text]
Polysynthetic Structures of Lowland Amazonia
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Sat Aug 19 2017, NEWGEN Chapter 15 Polysynthetic Structures of Lowland Amazonia Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald 15.1 Lowland Amazonian languages: a backdrop The Amazon basin is an area of high linguistic diversity (rivalled only by the island of New Guinea). It comprises around 350 languages grouped into over fifteen language families, in addition to a number of isolates. The six major linguistic families of the Amazon basin are as follows. • The Arawak language family is the largest in South America in terms of its geographical spread, with over forty extant languages between the Caribbean and Argentina. Well- established subgroups include Campa in Peru and a few small North Arawak groupings in Brazil and Venezuela. Arawak languages are spoken in at least ten locations north of the River Amazon, and in at least ten south of it. European languages contain a number of loans from Arawak languages, among them hammock and tobacco. • The Tupí language family consists of about seventy languages; nine of its ten branches are spoken exclusively in Amazonia. The largest branch, Tupí- Guaraní, extends beyond the Amazonian Basin into Bolivia and Paraguay. Loans from Tupí-Guaraní languages include jaguar and jacaranda. • Carib languages number about twenty five, and are spoken in various locations in Brazil and Venezuela in northern Amazonia, and in the region of the Upper Xingu and adjacent areas of Mato Grosso in Brazil south of the River Amazon. The place name ‘Caribbean’ and the noun cannibal (a version of the ethnonym ‘Carib’) are a legacy from Carib languages. • Panoan languages number about thirty, and are spoken on the eastern side of the Andes in Peru and adjacent areas of Brazil.
[Show full text]
Language Index
Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-86573-9 - Endangered Languages: An Introduction Sarah G. Thomason Index More information Language index ||Gana, 106, 110 Bininj, 31, 40, 78 Bitterroot Salish, see Salish-Pend d’Oreille. Abenaki, Eastern, 96, 176; Western, 96, 176 Blackfoot, 74, 78, 90, 96, 176 Aboriginal English (Australia), 121 Bosnian, 87 Aboriginal languages (Australia), 9, 17, 31, 56, Brahui, 63 58, 62, 106, 110, 132, 133 Breton, 25, 39, 179 Afro-Asiatic languages, 49, 175, 180, 194, 198 Bulgarian, 194 Ainu, 10 Buryat, 19 Akkadian, 1, 42, 43, 177, 194 Bushman, see San. Albanian, 28, 40, 66, 185; Arbëresh Albanian, 28, 40; Arvanitika Albanian, 28, 40, 66, 72 Cacaopera, 45 Aleut, 50–52, 104, 155, 183, 188; see also Bering Carrier, 31, 41, 170, 174 Aleut, Mednyj Aleut Catalan, 192 Algic languages, 97, 109, 176; see also Caucasian languages, 148 Algonquian languages, Ritwan languages. Celtic languages, 25, 46, 179, 183, Algonquian languages, 57, 62, 95–97, 101, 104, 185 108, 109, 162, 166, 176, 187, 191 Central Torres Strait, 9 Ambonese Malay, see Malay. Chadic languages, 175 Anatolian languages, 43 Chantyal, 31, 40 Apache, 177 Chatino, Zenzontepec, 192 Apachean languages, 177 Chehalis, Lower, see Lower Chehalis. Arabic, 1, 19, 22, 37, 43, 49, 63, 65, 101, 194; Chehalis, Upper, see Upper Chehalis. Classical Arabic, 8, 103 Cheyenne, 96, 176 Arapaho, 78, 96, 176; Northern Arapaho, 73, 90, Chinese languages (“dialects”), 22, 35, 37, 41, 92 48, 69, 101, 196; Mandarin, 35; Arawakan languages, 81 Wu, 118; see also Putonghua, Arbëresh, see Albanian. Chinook, Clackamas, see Clackamas Armenian, 185 Chinook.
[Show full text]
ARAWAK LANGUAGES” by Alexandra Y
OXFORD BIBLIOGRAPHIES IN LINGUISTICS “ARAWAK LANGUAGES” by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald © Oxford University Press Not for distribution. For permissions, please email [email protected]. xx Introduction General Overviews Monographs and Dissertations Articles and Book Chapters North Arawak Languages Monographs and Dissertations Articles and Book Chapters Reference Works Grammatical and Lexical Studies Monographs and Dissertations Articles and Book Chapters Specific Issues in the Grammar of North Arawak Languages Mixed Arawak-Carib Language and the Emergence of Island Carib Language Contact and the Effects of Language Obsolescence Dictionaries of North Arawak Languages Pre-andine Arawak Languages Campa Languages Monographs and Dissertations Articles and Book Chapters Amuesha Chamicuro Piro and Iñapari Apurina Arawak Languages of the Xingu Indigenous Park Arawak Languages of Areas near Xingu South Arawak Languages Arawak Languages of Bolivia Introduction The Arawak family is the largest in South America, with about forty extant languages. Arawak languages are spoken in lowland Amazonia and beyond, covering French Guiana, Suriname, Guiana, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, and Bolivia, and formerly in Paraguay and Argentina. Wayuunaiki (or Guajiro), spoken in the region of the Guajiro peninsula in Venezuela and Colombia, is the largest language of the family. Garifuna is the only Arawak language spoken in Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala in Central America. Groups of Arawak speakers must have migrated from the Caribbean coast to the Antilles a few hundred years before the European conquest. At least several dozen Arawak languages have become extinct since the European conquest. The highest number of recorded Arawak languages is centered in the region between the Rio Negro and the Orinoco.
[Show full text]
Johann Natterer and the Amazonian Languages Johann Natterer E As Línguas Da Amazônia Willem F.H
Artigos • Articles Johann Natterer and the Amazonian languages Johann Natterer e as línguas da Amazônia Willem F.H. Adelaar Hélène B. Brijnen1 Abstract Johann Natterer (1787-1843) was a member of the Austrian scientific expedition that was sent to Brazil in 1817. As a zoologist, Natterer practised taxidermy in situ and provided the Austrian court with a large collection of stuffed animals and ethnographic objects. Less known is his dedication to the collection of linguistic data. After the expedition was called back in 1822, Natterer obtained permission to stay on. He remained in Brazil until 1835 and collected language materials (Sprachproben) of 72 indigenous languages. For many of the languages concerned, Natterer’s hand-written data are either the first or the only records in existence. They are accompanied by ethnographic observations, indicating the original location of groups. In several cases, the speakers of language groups documented by Natterer have since then been removed from their original territories, if their languages were not brought to extinction. After a turbulent history, Natterer’s original language data, which for a long time remained unnoticed, are now kept at the Library of the University of Basel in Switzerland, where they have also been digitalized. Their transcription and publication is being undertaken by the authors of the present article. Keywords: Indian languages from South-America. Language samples from South-America. South-American ethnography. Indians in Amazonia. Johann Natterer. Resumo Johann Natterer (1787-1843) foi membro da expedição científica austríaca enviada para o Brasil em 1817. Como zoólogo, Natterer praticou a taxidermia in situ e forneceu à corte austríaca uma vasta coleção de animais empalhados e de objetos etnográficos.
[Show full text]
Arawak Languages
446 Aramaic and Syriac is the religious poetry of Saint Ephrem, which East Aramaic dialects have been employed. Modern was much admired and imitated even beyond the literary Syriac (Swadaya) may be said to have begun Syriac language area. From the 10th century, Arabic with the printing of books in the local dialect by the replaced Syriac among Christians as the chief lan- American Presbyterian Mission at Urmia in North- guage of theology, philosophy, and medicine, but west Iran. Although the number of people currently the 13th century saw a veritable West Syriac renais- using some form of Aramaic is small, their determi- sance, embodied especially in the great polymath nation to keep it alive is a testimony to their pride in a Bar Hebraeus, who wrote with equal facility in language whose demonstrable lifespan extends to Syriac and Arabic. In contrast to the wide use of 3000 years. Syriac, Syro-Palestinian Christian Aramaic (alterna- tively designated Syro-Palestinian Syriac because it was written in the West Syriac script) was employed See also: Ancient Near-Eastern Religions; Arabic; Bible; only in Palestine and Syria, and the extant texts Bible Translations: Ancient Versions; Christianity in Cen- (mostly biblical, liturgical, or hagiographical) are all tral Asia and the Near East; Hebrew, Biblical and Medie- val; Iran: Language Situation; Iraq: Language Situation; translations from Greek. Israel: Language Situation; Judaism; Lebanon: Language Spoken Aramaic dialects have been in continuous Situation; Semitic Languages; Syria: Language Situation; use in a number of places right into modern times. Syriac; Translation: History; Turkey: Language Situation. Modern Western dialects of Aramaic are spoken, by Christians and Muslims, in three villages north of Damascus, namely Ma‘lula, Bah‘a, and Jubb ‘Addin.
[Show full text]
Gender Flip and Person Marking in Benchnon (North Omotic) Matthew Baerman Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey, GB [email protected]
a journal of Baerman, Matthew. 2020. Gender flip and person marking general linguistics Glossa in Benchnon (North Omotic). Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5(1): 76. 1–20. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1191 RESEARCH Gender flip and person marking in Benchnon (North Omotic) Matthew Baerman Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey, GB [email protected] Subject agreement in the North Omotic language Benchnon (Rapold 2006) lacks dedicated per- son marking, but indirectly indicates person distinctions through asymmetries in the distribution of gender markers. In one verbal paradigm, first and second person subjects are expressed by feminine morphology, and in the other paradigm they are expressed by masculine morphology. This is hard to reconcile with any known notion of how gender assignment works. I show that it can be explained as the particular instantiation of a rare but cross-linguistically recurrent pat- tern in which a (reduced) person marking system is generated by restrictions on gender agree- ment: only third person subjects control semantic gender agreement, while first and second person are assigned default gender. In Benchnon the default gender switched from feminine to masculine over the course of its history, yielding two contrasting verbal paradigms. The older one is morphologically frozen, the newer one is a reflection of still-active agreement conditions. Further developments show that the older paradigm can be adapted to conform to the newer conditions, showing that the division between morphosyntactically motivated and arbitrarily stipulated morphology is a fluid one. Keywords: inflection; paradigms; gender; person; diachrony 1 Introduction Verbs in the North Omotic language Benchnon, spoken in Ethiopia, make unusual use of gender-marking morphology, in which an alternation between feminine and masculine forms takes the place of person marking.
[Show full text]