Linguistics and Archaeology in the Americas Brill’S Studies in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas
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Linguistics and Archaeology in the Americas Brill’s Studies in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas Series Editors David Beck, University of Alberta Mily Crevels, Radboud University Nijmegen Hein van der Voort, Radboud University Nijmegen Roberto Zavala, CIESAS-Sureste Editorial Board Peter Bakker, Aarhus University Nora England, University of Texas, Austin Ana Fernández Garay, Universidad Nacional de La Pampa Michael Fortescue, University of Copenhagen Victor Golla, Humboldt State University Pieter Muysken, Radboud University Nijmegen Enrique Palancar, Universidad Autónoma Querétaro Keren Rice, University of Toronto Frank Seifart, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leo Wetzels, CNRS/Sorbonne-Nouvelle, VU Amsterdam VOLUME 2 Linguistics and Archaeology in the Americas The Historization of Language and Society Edited by Eithne B. Carlin and Simon van de Kerke LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010 Cover illustration: Countryside near Lampa (Peru). © 2008, Violet Bonnet. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Linguistics and archaeology in the Americas : the historization of language and society / edited by Eithne B. Carlin and Simon van de Kerke. p. cm. — (Brill’s studies in the Indigenous languages of the Americas; v. 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. “This book has been written by a select group of leading international scholars of Amerindian studies in honour of Professor Willem Adelaar on the occasion of his 60th birthday in 2008.” ISBN 978-90-04-17362-0 (alk. paper) 1. Indians of South America—Languages—Grammar. 2. Indians of North America—Languages—Grammar. 3. Indians of South America—Languages. 4. Indians of North America—Languages. 5. Language and culture. 6. Archaeology. 7. Adelaar, Willem F. H. I. Carlin, Eithne. II. Kerke, Simon van de. III. Title. IV. Series. PM5008.L56 2010 498—dc22 2010005005 ISSN 1876-5580 ISBN 978 90 04 17362 0 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands CONTENTS Preface vii Acknowledgements xii Bibliography of Willem F.H. Adelaar xiii PART I HISTORICAL COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS OF SOUTH AMERICA 1. Linguistic Reconstruction of Elements of Prehistoric Tupi Culture 1 Aryon Dall’Igna Rodrigues 2. Problems of Distinguishing Nominal Compounding from Syntactic and Noun Categorization Devices in Tupi-Guarani Languages 11 Wolf Dietrich PART II ARCHAEOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS OF MESO-AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN 3. Preposed Phonetic Complements in Maya Hieroglyphic Writing 27 Nikolai Grube 4. Mixtec Cultural Vocabulary and Pictorial Writing 45 Maarten E.R.G.N. Jansen and Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez 5. Unspecified Arguments, Predicates, and Events in Nahuatl 83 Michel Launey 6. The Ever-Dynamic Caribbean: Exploring New Approaches to Unraveling Social Networks in the Pre-Colonial and Early Colonial Periods 107 Corinne L. Hofman and Eithne B. Carlin vi CONTENTS PART III SOCIOLINGUISTICS 7. ‘Why do they steal our phonemes?’ Inventing the Survival of the Cañari Language (Ecuador) 123 Rosaleen Howard 8. Lenguas e Ídentidades Étnicas 147 Xavier Albó PART IV MORPHOPHONOLOGY AND MORPHOSYNTAX 9. Sobre el Morfo Vacío -ni del Quechua 177 Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino 10. The Copula in Ecuadorian Quechua 191 Pieter Muysken 11. O ‘Caduco’ e o ‘Frustrativo’ nas Línguas Baniwa do Içana e Nheengatu (Alto Rio Negro, Brasil) 207 Gerald Taylor 12. Reflexivity and Reciprocity in Tehuelche and Selknam (Chon family) 215 Ana Fernández Garay 13. Gender, Noun Class and Language Obsolescence: The Case of Paumarí 235 Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald 14. Word Prosody and the Distribution of Oral/Nasal Contour Consonants in Kaingang 253 W. Leo Wetzels Subject Index 271 List of Contributors 275 PREFACE This book has been written by a select group of leading international scholars of Amerindian studies in honour of Professor Willem Adelaar on the occasion of his 60th birthday in 2008. The contributions focus on the dynamicity and historicity of the Americas, evident in migra- tory movements, language contact situations, and the concomitant grouping and re-grouping of identities. Above all, the flexibility of the inhabitants to adapt to their changing situations through the ages is shown from an archaeological, anthropological, and linguistic view- point, thereby reflecting Willem Adelaar’s broad research interests and scholarship relating to the Americas. In 1994, Willem Adelaar was appointed the new Chair “Languages and Cultures of Native America” at Leiden University, a position he has held since then and from which he has been able to disseminate his ideas in his teaching, his research, and his publications. While his re- search on the languages and cultures of the Americas spans more dec- ades than the Chair he has come to hold, his research interests also span the full spectrum of academic interest in the Americas, from ar- chaeology and history through anthropology to historical comparative and descriptive linguistic research. Because of his broad interests, his encyclopaedic knowledge, and his nigh photographic memory, Willem Adelaar has become something of an oracle, consulted by scholars far and near on a wide range of research topics. In his inaugural lecture given in 1995, he presented several avenues of research that required correction and re-thinking. His insights advanced there were indeed prophetic as later and ongoing research has shown. One of the stum- bling blocks to our understanding the history of the region, he claimed, was the assumption that the peopling of the Americas only goes back as far as the Clovis period. According to the model of Greenberg (1987), which postulated three large families Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and Amerind, this third family, would have covered large areas of North America, and the entire region Meso- and South Amer- ica. The implication is that the linguistic diversity found there all goes back to one common origin. Adelaar, whose passion remains to this day the historical linguistic reconstruction of the languages of the PREFACE viii Americas, argued that the linguistic diversity in the Americas required a much greater time depth than the 12.000 years which marked the end of the last glacial period (Wisconsin). It is precisely in this area that significant advances have been made in more recent research. The archaeological evidence for a pre-Clovis settlement of the Americas can no longer be ignored, and the results from ongoing historical comparative linguistic research allow us to make strong inferences about languages and language families that correlate with the archaeo- logical findings. Advances have also been made in charting the history of Amazonia, steadily pushing back the date of its peopling and clarify- ing migratory routes. In addition, as pointed out in his inaugural lecture, Adelaar’s in- terest in the peoples of the Americas, in particular those of Middle and South America, is not one where they are simply objects of study, but rather one which recognizes them as agents themselves, actors invok- ing change and in constant contact with not only other parts of the Amerindian world, mutually influencing each other both culturally and linguistically, but also with the modern states within whose bor- ders they reside. His deep interest in and respect for the Amerindian people themselves is reflected in his treatise on the meaning of the concept “Indian” through the centuries, in the writings of the Spanish colonizers. The native peoples became a native people although the implicit “unity” was hardly a word that could be applied to these first inhabitants. Today in the face of an ever-consuming globalization, members of Amerindian communities struggle to form an entity uni- fied by a shared identity, history, and fate, in order to find their niche in the modern world, fighting an apparently losing battle to claim for themselves their cultural and linguistic heritage. His concern with the rapidity with which many of the languages are disappearing is not only one of an irreparable loss of linguistic diversity, but is also a still con- tinuing testimony to the severe wrongs done to these native peoples, both in the past and the present. Much of Adelaar's work over the last fifteen years has focused on the languages of South and Middle America that were/are on the brink of extinction. He, like no other, is acutely aware of the fact that great discoveries can be made no matter what the stage of decay of the lan- guage, as is evidenced by his insights into a now extinct morphological category found in the Huarochirí Quechua manuscript (Adelaar 1994). Adelaar is of course, above all, a gifted linguist, who is equally at PREFACE ix home in modern linguistic description as he is in historical compara- tive linguistics, both aspects which come to the fore clearly in his book (with his colleague Pieter Muysken) “Languages of the Andes”. The Andes may remain his first area of expertise but this is supplemented by many others. His close international cooperation and his expansive expertise is evidenced by the honorary doctorate awarded him in 2007 by the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima. This book was concipated to reflect as many of Adelaar’s interests and areas of expertise as possible, and to show something of the extent of his many international contacts and partners with whom he col- laborates and with whom he eagerly shares his bird’s eye view of the Americas.