Itonama language
Itonama is a moribund language isolate spoken by the Itonama people in the Amazonian lowlands of north-eastern Bolivia. Greenberg’s (1987) classification of Itonama as Paezan, a sub-branch of Macro-Chibchan, remains unsupported and Itonama continues to be considered an isolate or unclassified language.
| Itonama | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Bolivia |
| Region | Beni Department |
| Ethnicity | 2,900 (2006)[1] |
Native speakers | 5 (2007)[1] |
| Latin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | ito |
| Glottolog | iton1250 |
| ELP | Itonama[2] |
It was spoken on the Itonomas River and Lake[3] in Beni Department.
Language contact
Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Nambikwaran languages due to contact.[4]
An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)[5] found lexical similarities between Itonama and Movima, likely due to contact.
Phonology
Consonants
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Postalveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop | Plain | p | t | tʲ | k | ʔ | |
| Ejective | tʼ | kʼ | |||||
| Voiced | b | d | |||||
| Affricate | Plain | tʃ | |||||
| Ejective | tʃʼ | ||||||
| Fricative | s | h | |||||
| Nasal | m | n | |||||
| Lateral | l | ||||||
| Flap | ɾ | ||||||
| Semivowel | w | j | |||||
The postalveolar affricates /tʃ tʃʼ/ have alveolar allophones [ts tsʼ]. Variation occurs between speakers, and even within the speech of a single person.
The semivowel /w/ is realized as a bilabial fricative [β] when preceded and followed by identical vowels.
Morphology
Itonama is a polysynthetic, 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).[6]
Vocabulary
Loukotka (1968) lists the following basic vocabulary items for Itonama.[3]
gloss Itonama one chash-káni two chash-chupa tooth huomóte tongue páchosníla hand mapára woman ubíka water huanúhue fire ubári moon chakakáshka maize udáme jaguar ótgu house úku
Further reading
- Camp, E. L.; Liccardi, M. R. (1967). Itonama, castellano e inglés. (Vocabularios Bolivianos, 6.) Riberalta: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
References
- Itonama at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
- Endangered Languages Project data for Itonama.
- Loukotka, Čestmír (1968). Classification of South American Indian languages. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center.
- Jolkesky, Marcelo Pinho de Valhery (2016). Estudo arqueo-ecolinguístico das terras tropicais sul-americanas (Ph.D. dissertation) (2 ed.). Brasília: University of Brasília.
- 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).
- Crevels, M. Who did what to whom in Magdalena. p. 3.
- Crevels, Mily (2002). "Itonama o Sihnipadara, Lengua no clasificada de la Amazonía Boliviana" (PDF). Estudios de Lingüística (in Spanish). 16.
External links
- Sample of Itonama fragment
- Lenguas de Bolivia (online edition)
- Itonama (Intercontinental Dictionary Series)