Aymara language
Encyclopedia
Aymara is an Aymaran
language spoken by the Aymara people of the Andes
. It is one of only a handful of Native American languages
with over three million speakers. Aymara, along with Quechua and Spanish
, is an official language of Peru
and Bolivia
. It is also spoken to a much lesser extent in Chile
and in Northwest Argentina
.
Some linguists have claimed that Aymara is related to its more widely-spoken neighbour, Quechua
. This claim, however, is disputed — although there are indeed similarities such as the nearly identical phonologies, the majority position among linguists today is that these similarities are better explained as areal features
resulting from prolonged interaction between the two languages, and that they are not demonstrably related.
The Aymara language is an agglutinating and to a certain extent polysynthetic language
, and has a subject–object–verb word order.
The first official alphabet to be adopted for Aymara was the scientific alphabet. This system was approved by the III Congreso Indigenista Interamericano de la Paz in 1954, though its origins can be traced as far back as 1931. Rs. No 1593 (Deza Galindo 1989, 17). This is not to say that this was the first effort at a general alphabet, only that it was the first official record of such. In 1914 Sisko Chukiwanka Ayulo and Julián Palacios Ríos recorded what may be the first of many attempts to have one alphabet for both Quechua and Aymara. Theirs was called Syentifiko Qheshwa-Aymara Alfabeto and was composed of 37 graphemes. Several other attempts followed at various degrees of success to do the same. Some orthographic attempts even expand further: the Alfabeto Funcional Trilingüe, made up of 40 letters (including the voiced stops necessary for Spanish), and created by the Academia de las Lenguas Aymara y Quechua in Puno in 1944 is the one used by the lexicographer Juan Francisco Deza Galindo in his Diccionario Aymara – Castellano / Castellano – Aymara. This alphabet has five vowels {a, e, i, o, u}, aspiration is conveyed with an {h} next to the consonant and ejectives with {’}. The most unique characteristic is the expression of the uvular /x/ with {jh}. The other uvular segment, the /q/ is expressed by {q} but transcription rules mandate that the following vowel must be {a, e, o} (not {i, u}) presumably to account for uvular lowering and with the intent to facilitate multilingual orthography.
The alphabet created by the Comisión de Alfabetización y Literatura Aymara (CALA) which was officially recognized in Bolivia in 1968 (coexisting with the 1954 Scientific Alphabet) and aside from being the alphabet employed by Protestant missionaries, it is also the one used for the translation of the Book of Mormon
. It was also in 1968 that de Dios Yapita created his take on the Aymara alphabet at the Instituto de Lenga y Cultura Aymara (ILCA).
Nearly fifteen years later the Servicio Nacional de Alfabetización y Educación Popular (SENALEP) attempted to consolidate these alphabets to create a system which could be used to write both Aymara and Quechua, creating what was known as the Alfabeto Unificado. This alphabet, later sanctioned in Bolivia by Decree 20227 on 9 May 1984 and in Peru as la Resolución Ministeral Peruana 1218ED on 18 November 1985 consists of 3 vowels and 26 consonants and an umlaut to mark vowel length.
s /a i u/, which distinguish two degrees of length. Long vowels are indicated with a trema in writing: ä ï ü. The high vowels are lowered to mid height when near uvular consonants (/i/ → [e], /u/ → [o]).
s, Aymara has phonemic stops at the labial
, alveolar
, palatal, velar and uvular points of articulation. Stops show no distinction of voice (e.g. there is no phonemic contrast between [p] and [b]), but each stop has three forms: plain (unaspirated
), glottalized
, and aspirated. Aymara also has a trilled /r/, and an alveolar/palatal contrast for nasals and laterals, as well as two semivowels (/w/ and /j/).
es are monosyllabic. Roots conform to one of two templates: CV(C)CV or V(C)CV. The former is the most common, with CVCV being predominant. As for the suffixes, the majority are CV, though there are some exceptions: CVCV, CCV, CCVCV and even VCV are possible but rare.
The agglutinative nature of this suffixal language, coupled with morphophonological alternations caused by vowel deletion and phonologically-conditioned constraints give rise to interesting surface structures that operate in the domain of the morpheme, syllable, and phonological word/phrase. The phonological/morphophonological processes observed include syllabic reduction, epenthesis, deletion, and reduplication.
Inflectional and derivational morphemes can be subdivided into nominal and verbal categories. So for example, the inflectional sub-categories are as follows:
Verbal inflection
Nominal inflection
The same division can be done for the derivational morphemes
. Verbal derivation is characterized by a range of morphemes which indicate spatial direction and direction of motion.
Derivational morphemes: Direction of motion
Note that the downward morpheme -qa also expresses the act of division or splitting.
or the Aymara spoken around La Paz
. Lucy Therina Briggs classifies both of these regions as being part of the Northern Aymara dialect, which encompasses the department of La Paz in Bolivia and the department of Puno
in Peru. The Southern Aymara dialect is spoken in the eastern half of the Iquique
province in northern Chile and in most of the Bolivian department of Oruro
. It is also found in northern Potosí
and southwest Cochabamba
, but it is slowly being replaced by Quechua in those regions. Intermediate Aymara shares dialectical features with both Northern and Southern Aymara and is found in the eastern half of the Tacna
and Moquegua
departments in southern Peru and in the northeastern tip of Chile.
.
, on the grounds that it is the native language of that area today. This is very far from certain, however, and most specialists now incline to the idea that Aymara only expanded into the Tiwanaku area rather late, as it spread southwards from an original homeland more likely to have been in Central Peru. Aymara placenames are found all the way north into central Peru, and indeed (Altiplano) Aymara is actually but one of the two extant languages of a wider language family, the other surviving representative being Jaqaru/Kawki.
This family was established by the research of Martha James Hardman de Bautista of the Program in Linguistics at the University of Florida. Jaqaru [jaqi aru = human language] and Kawki communities are in the district of Tupe, Yauyos Valley, in the Dept. of Lima, in central Peru. Jaqaru has approximately 2,000 native speakers, nearly all Spanish bilinguals. Kawki is spoken in a neighboring community by a very small number of mostly elderly individuals and is a dying language. It was originally proposed by Dr Hardman that Jaqaru and Kawki should be classified as languages quite distinct from each other, but other more recent research classifies them as two very closely related varieties of the same mutually intelligible language.
Terminology for this wider language family is not yet well established. Dr Hardman has proposed the name 'Jaqi' ('human'), while other widely respected Peruvian linguists have proposed alternative names for the same language family. Alfredo Torero uses the term 'Aru' ('speech'); Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino, meanwhile, has proposed that the term 'Aymara' should be used for the whole family, distinguished into two branches, Southern (or Altiplano) Aymara and Central Aymara (i.e. Jaqaru and Kawki). Each of these three proposals has its followers in Andean linguistics. In English usage, some linguists use the term Aymaran for the family, reserving 'Aymara' for the Altiplano branch.
and Sweetser
also asserts that the Aymara have an apparently unique, or at least very rare, understanding of time, and Aymara is, with Quechua, one of very few languages where speakers seem to represent the past as in front of them and the future as behind them. Their argument is situated mainly within the framework of conceptual metaphor
, which recognizes in general two subtypes of the metaphor "the passage of time is motion": one is "time passing is motion over a landscape" (or "moving-ego"), and the other is "time passing is a moving object" ("moving-events"). The latter metaphor does not explicitly involve the individual/speaker; events are in a queue, with prior events towards the front of the line. The individual may be facing the queue, or it may be moving from left to right in front of him/her.
The claims regarding Aymara involve the moving-ego metaphor. Most languages conceptualize the ego as moving forward into the future, with ego's back to the past. The English
sentences prepare for what lies before us and we are facing a prosperous future exemplify this metaphor. In contrast, Aymara seems to encode the past as in front of individuals, and the future in back; this is typologically
a rare phenomenon.
The fact that English has words like before/前 and after/後 that are (currently or archaically) polysemous
between 'front/earlier' or 'back/later' may seem to refute the claims regarding Aymara uniqueness. However, these words relate events to other events, i.e., are part of the moving-events metaphor. In fact, when before means in front of ego, it can only mean future. For instance, our future is laid out before us while our past is behind us. Parallel Aymara examples describe future days as qhipa uru, literally 'back days', and these are sometimes accompanied by gestures to behind the speaker. The same applies to Quechua speakers, whose expression qhipa p'unchaw corresponds directly to Aymara qhipa uru. Possibly, the metaphor is that the past is visible to us (in front of our eyes), while the future is not.
programs with Aymara and Spanish have been introduced in the last two decades. There are even projects to offer Aymara through the internet, such as by ILCA.
Syntactic relations in Aymara
are generally case-marked, with the exception of the unmarked subject. Case is affixed to the last element of a noun phrase
, usually corresponding to the head. Aymara has 14 cases.
Note that in many contexts the nucleus of this morpheme is suppressed.
When functioning as a conjoiner, it may be affixed to one or both of the declined words.
In the first, it is affixed only to the word tutu 'toasted corn:
Next, it is attached to both juma 'you' and na 'I':
:Category:Indigenous languages of the Americas (division into geocultural areas)
Aymaran languages
Aymaran is one of the two dominant language families of the central Andes, along with Quechuan....
language spoken by the Aymara people of the Andes
Andes
The Andes is the world's longest continental mountain range. It is a continual range of highlands along the western coast of South America. This range is about long, about to wide , and of an average height of about .Along its length, the Andes is split into several ranges, which are separated...
. It is one of only a handful of Native American languages
Indigenous languages of the Americas
Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language...
with over three million speakers. Aymara, along with Quechua and Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, is an official language of Peru
Peru
Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
and Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...
. It is also spoken to a much lesser extent in Chile
Chile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
and in Northwest Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
.
Some linguists have claimed that Aymara is related to its more widely-spoken neighbour, Quechua
Quechua languages
Quechua is a Native South American language family and dialect cluster spoken primarily in the Andes of South America, derived from an original common ancestor language, Proto-Quechua. It is the most widely spoken language family of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a total of probably...
. This claim, however, is disputed — although there are indeed similarities such as the nearly identical phonologies, the majority position among linguists today is that these similarities are better explained as areal features
Areal feature (linguistics)
In linguistics, an areal feature is any feature shared by languages within the same geographical area as a consequence of linguistic diffusion....
resulting from prolonged interaction between the two languages, and that they are not demonstrably related.
The Aymara language is an agglutinating and to a certain extent polysynthetic language
Polysynthetic language
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes. Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have extremely high morpheme-to-word ratios.Not all languages can be...
, and has a subject–object–verb word order.
Etymology
The old suggestion that the word "Aymara" comes from the Aymara words "jaya" (ancient) and "mara" (year, time) is almost certainly a quite mistaken folk etymology. Many linguists now favor the theory that the term came from an ethnic group from the Apurimac region known as the Aymaraes, but the etymology remains unclear. A full discussion of the possible origins of the word can be found in the book Lingüística Aimara by the respected Peruvian linguist Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino.Orthography
Beginning with Spanish missionary efforts, there have been many attempts to create a writing system for Aymara. The colonial sources employed a variety of Hispanized writing systems, the most widespread being that of Bertonio. Many of the early grammars employed unique alphabets as well, e.g. that of Middendorf’s Aymara-Sprache (1891).The first official alphabet to be adopted for Aymara was the scientific alphabet. This system was approved by the III Congreso Indigenista Interamericano de la Paz in 1954, though its origins can be traced as far back as 1931. Rs. No 1593 (Deza Galindo 1989, 17). This is not to say that this was the first effort at a general alphabet, only that it was the first official record of such. In 1914 Sisko Chukiwanka Ayulo and Julián Palacios Ríos recorded what may be the first of many attempts to have one alphabet for both Quechua and Aymara. Theirs was called Syentifiko Qheshwa-Aymara Alfabeto and was composed of 37 graphemes. Several other attempts followed at various degrees of success to do the same. Some orthographic attempts even expand further: the Alfabeto Funcional Trilingüe, made up of 40 letters (including the voiced stops necessary for Spanish), and created by the Academia de las Lenguas Aymara y Quechua in Puno in 1944 is the one used by the lexicographer Juan Francisco Deza Galindo in his Diccionario Aymara – Castellano / Castellano – Aymara. This alphabet has five vowels {a, e, i, o, u}, aspiration is conveyed with an {h} next to the consonant and ejectives with {’}. The most unique characteristic is the expression of the uvular /x/ with {jh}. The other uvular segment, the /q/ is expressed by {q} but transcription rules mandate that the following vowel must be {a, e, o} (not {i, u}) presumably to account for uvular lowering and with the intent to facilitate multilingual orthography.
The alphabet created by the Comisión de Alfabetización y Literatura Aymara (CALA) which was officially recognized in Bolivia in 1968 (coexisting with the 1954 Scientific Alphabet) and aside from being the alphabet employed by Protestant missionaries, it is also the one used for the translation of the Book of Mormon
Book of Mormon
The Book of Mormon is a sacred text of the Latter Day Saint movement that adherents believe contains writings of ancient prophets who lived on the American continent from approximately 2600 BC to AD 421. It was first published in March 1830 by Joseph Smith, Jr...
. It was also in 1968 that de Dios Yapita created his take on the Aymara alphabet at the Instituto de Lenga y Cultura Aymara (ILCA).
Nearly fifteen years later the Servicio Nacional de Alfabetización y Educación Popular (SENALEP) attempted to consolidate these alphabets to create a system which could be used to write both Aymara and Quechua, creating what was known as the Alfabeto Unificado. This alphabet, later sanctioned in Bolivia by Decree 20227 on 9 May 1984 and in Peru as la Resolución Ministeral Peruana 1218ED on 18 November 1985 consists of 3 vowels and 26 consonants and an umlaut to mark vowel length.
Vowels
Aymara has three phoneme vowelVowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
s /a i u/, which distinguish two degrees of length. Long vowels are indicated with a trema in writing: ä ï ü. The high vowels are lowered to mid height when near uvular consonants (/i/ → [e], /u/ → [o]).
Consonants
As for the consonantConsonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
s, Aymara has phonemic stops at the labial
Labial consonant
Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals...
, alveolar
Alveolar consonant
Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...
, palatal, velar and uvular points of articulation. Stops show no distinction of voice (e.g. there is no phonemic contrast between [p] and [b]), but each stop has three forms: plain (unaspirated
Aspiration (phonetics)
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ...
), glottalized
Glottalization
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...
, and aspirated. Aymara also has a trilled /r/, and an alveolar/palatal contrast for nasals and laterals, as well as two semivowels (/w/ and /j/).
| Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:... |
Dental/ Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth... |
Post- alveolar Postalveolar consonant Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate... |
Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate... |
Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).... |
Uvular Uvular consonant Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be plosives, fricatives, nasal stops, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and... |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... |
m | n | ɲ | ||||
| Stop Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &... |
unaspirated Aspiration (phonetics) In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ... |
p | t | tʃ | k | q | |
| aspirated Aspiration (phonetics) In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ... |
pʰ | tʰ | tʃʰ | kʰ | qʰ | ||
| ejective Ejective consonant In phonetics, ejective consonants are voiceless consonants that are pronounced with simultaneous closure of the glottis. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated or tenuis consonants... |
pʼ | tʼ | tʃʼ | kʼ | qʼ | ||
| Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... |
s | x | χ | ||||
| Rhotic Rhotic consonant In phonetics, rhotic consonants, also called tremulants or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including "R, r" from the Roman alphabet and "Р, p" from the Cyrillic alphabet... |
r | ||||||
| Lateral Lateral consonant A lateral is an el-like consonant, in which airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth.... |
l | ʎ | |||||
| Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no... |
j | w | |||||
Stress
Stress is usually on the penult (the syllable before the last one), but long vowels may shift it. Also, the final vowel of words is elided except at the end of a phrase, but the stress remains on its original syllable.Syllable structure
The vast majority of roots are bisyllabic and, with few exceptions, suffixSuffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...
es are monosyllabic. Roots conform to one of two templates: CV(C)CV or V(C)CV. The former is the most common, with CVCV being predominant. As for the suffixes, the majority are CV, though there are some exceptions: CVCV, CCV, CCVCV and even VCV are possible but rare.
The agglutinative nature of this suffixal language, coupled with morphophonological alternations caused by vowel deletion and phonologically-conditioned constraints give rise to interesting surface structures that operate in the domain of the morpheme, syllable, and phonological word/phrase. The phonological/morphophonological processes observed include syllabic reduction, epenthesis, deletion, and reduplication.
Morphology
Aymara morphemes can be divided into the following categories:- Inflectional
- Derivational
- Transpositional
- Independent
- Sentence suffixes
Inflectional and derivational morphemes can be subdivided into nominal and verbal categories. So for example, the inflectional sub-categories are as follows:
Verbal inflection
- Tense (aorist, future, proximal past, distal past)
- Aspect (completive, progressive, sustainer, etc)
- Mood / Modality
- Person (1, 2, 3, 4)
- Number (plural)
Nominal inflection
- Number (plural)
- Possession
- Location
- Case (nominal, accusative, commitative, allative, etc)
The same division can be done for the derivational morphemes
Derivational morphology
Derivational morphology changes the meaning of words by applying derivations. Derivation is the combination of a word stem with a morpheme, which forms a new word, which is often of a different class...
. Verbal derivation is characterized by a range of morphemes which indicate spatial direction and direction of motion.
Derivational morphemes: Direction of motion
- upward -ta, -ja
- downward -qa
- outward -su
- inward -nta
Note that the downward morpheme -qa also expresses the act of division or splitting.
Geographical distribution
There are roughly two million Bolivian speakers, half a million Peruvian speakers, and perhaps a few thousand speakers in Chile and Argentina. At the time of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, Aymara was the dominant language over a much larger area than today, including most of highland Peru south of Cuzco. Over the centuries Aymara has gradually lost speakers both to Spanish and to Quechua; many Peruvian and Bolivian communities which were once Aymara-speaking now speak Quechua.Dialects
There is some degree of regional variation within the Aymara language, although all the dialects are mutually intelligible. Most study of the language has focused on either the Aymara spoken on the southern Peruvian shore of Lake TiticacaLake Titicaca
Lake Titicaca is a lake located on the border of Peru and Bolivia. It sits 3,811 m above sea level, making it the highest commercially navigable lake in the world...
or the Aymara spoken around La Paz
La Paz
Nuestra Señora de La Paz is the administrative capital of Bolivia, as well as the departmental capital of the La Paz Department, and the second largest city in the country after Santa Cruz de la Sierra...
. Lucy Therina Briggs classifies both of these regions as being part of the Northern Aymara dialect, which encompasses the department of La Paz in Bolivia and the department of Puno
Puno
Puno is a city in southeastern Peru, located on the shore of Lake Titicaca. It is the capital city of the Puno Region and the Puno Province with a population of approximately 100,000. The city was established in 1668 by viceroy Pedro Antonio Fernández de Castro as capital of the province of...
in Peru. The Southern Aymara dialect is spoken in the eastern half of the Iquique
Iquique
Iquique is a port city and commune in northern Chile, capital of both the Iquique Province and Tarapacá Region. It lies on the Pacific coast, west of the Atacama Desert and the Pampa del Tamarugal. It had a population of 216,419 as of the 2002 census...
province in northern Chile and in most of the Bolivian department of Oruro
Oruro Department
Oruro is a department in Bolivia, with an area of 53,588 km². Its capital is the city of Oruro. At the time of census 2001 it had a population of 391,870.- Provinces of Oruro :...
. It is also found in northern Potosí
Potosí
Potosí is a city and the capital of the department of Potosí in Bolivia. It is one of the highest cities in the world by elevation at a nominal . and it was the location of the Spanish colonial mint, now the National Mint of Bolivia...
and southwest Cochabamba
Cochabamba
Cochabamba is a city in central Bolivia, located in a valley bearing the same name in the Andes mountain range. It is the capital of the Cochabamba Department and is the fourth largest city in Bolivia with an urban population of 608,276 and a metropolitan population of more than 1,000,000 people...
, but it is slowly being replaced by Quechua in those regions. Intermediate Aymara shares dialectical features with both Northern and Southern Aymara and is found in the eastern half of the Tacna
Tacna
- Rail :Tacna is served by a cross-border standard gauge railway to Arica, Chile.It is also the location of the National Railway Museum of Peru.-Air:Tacna is served by the Crnl. FAP...
and Moquegua
Moquegua
Moquegua is a city in southern Peru, located in the Moquegua Region, of which it is the regional capital. It is also capital of Mariscal Nieto Province and Moquegua District. It is located 1144 kilometers south from the capital city of Lima.-History:...
departments in southern Peru and in the northeastern tip of Chile.
.
Wider language family
It is often assumed that the Aymara language descends from the language spoken in TiwanakuTiwanaku
Tiwanaku, is an important Pre-Columbian archaeological site in western Bolivia, South America. Tiwanaku is recognized by Andean scholars as one of the most important precursors to the Inca Empire, flourishing as the ritual and administrative capital of a major state power for approximately five...
, on the grounds that it is the native language of that area today. This is very far from certain, however, and most specialists now incline to the idea that Aymara only expanded into the Tiwanaku area rather late, as it spread southwards from an original homeland more likely to have been in Central Peru. Aymara placenames are found all the way north into central Peru, and indeed (Altiplano) Aymara is actually but one of the two extant languages of a wider language family, the other surviving representative being Jaqaru/Kawki.
This family was established by the research of Martha James Hardman de Bautista of the Program in Linguistics at the University of Florida. Jaqaru [jaqi aru = human language] and Kawki communities are in the district of Tupe, Yauyos Valley, in the Dept. of Lima, in central Peru. Jaqaru has approximately 2,000 native speakers, nearly all Spanish bilinguals. Kawki is spoken in a neighboring community by a very small number of mostly elderly individuals and is a dying language. It was originally proposed by Dr Hardman that Jaqaru and Kawki should be classified as languages quite distinct from each other, but other more recent research classifies them as two very closely related varieties of the same mutually intelligible language.
Terminology for this wider language family is not yet well established. Dr Hardman has proposed the name 'Jaqi' ('human'), while other widely respected Peruvian linguists have proposed alternative names for the same language family. Alfredo Torero uses the term 'Aru' ('speech'); Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino, meanwhile, has proposed that the term 'Aymara' should be used for the whole family, distinguished into two branches, Southern (or Altiplano) Aymara and Central Aymara (i.e. Jaqaru and Kawki). Each of these three proposals has its followers in Andean linguistics. In English usage, some linguists use the term Aymaran for the family, reserving 'Aymara' for the Altiplano branch.
Unique features
Linguistic and gestural analysis by NúñezRafael E. Núñez
Rafael E. Núñez is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego and a proponent of embodied cognition. He co-authored Where Mathematics Comes From with George Lakoff.-External links:*...
and Sweetser
Eve Sweetser
Eve Sweetser is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from UC Berkeley in 1984, and has been a member of the Berkeley faculty since that time...
also asserts that the Aymara have an apparently unique, or at least very rare, understanding of time, and Aymara is, with Quechua, one of very few languages where speakers seem to represent the past as in front of them and the future as behind them. Their argument is situated mainly within the framework of conceptual metaphor
Conceptual metaphor
In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another, for example, understanding quantity in terms of directionality . A conceptual domain can be any coherent organization of human experience...
, which recognizes in general two subtypes of the metaphor "the passage of time is motion": one is "time passing is motion over a landscape" (or "moving-ego"), and the other is "time passing is a moving object" ("moving-events"). The latter metaphor does not explicitly involve the individual/speaker; events are in a queue, with prior events towards the front of the line. The individual may be facing the queue, or it may be moving from left to right in front of him/her.
The claims regarding Aymara involve the moving-ego metaphor. Most languages conceptualize the ego as moving forward into the future, with ego's back to the past. The English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
sentences prepare for what lies before us and we are facing a prosperous future exemplify this metaphor. In contrast, Aymara seems to encode the past as in front of individuals, and the future in back; this is typologically
Linguistic typology
Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the common properties and the structural diversity of the world's languages...
a rare phenomenon.
The fact that English has words like before/前 and after/後 that are (currently or archaically) polysemous
Polysemy
Polysemy is the capacity for a sign or signs to have multiple meanings , i.e., a large semantic field.Charles Fillmore and Beryl Atkins’ definition stipulates three elements: the various senses of a polysemous word have a central origin, the links between these senses form a network, and ...
between 'front/earlier' or 'back/later' may seem to refute the claims regarding Aymara uniqueness. However, these words relate events to other events, i.e., are part of the moving-events metaphor. In fact, when before means in front of ego, it can only mean future. For instance, our future is laid out before us while our past is behind us. Parallel Aymara examples describe future days as qhipa uru, literally 'back days', and these are sometimes accompanied by gestures to behind the speaker. The same applies to Quechua speakers, whose expression qhipa p'unchaw corresponds directly to Aymara qhipa uru. Possibly, the metaphor is that the past is visible to us (in front of our eyes), while the future is not.
Pedagogy
There is increasing use of Aymara locally and there are increased numbers learning the language, both Bolivian and abroad. In Boliva and Peru, intercultural bilingual educationIntercultural bilingual education
Intercultural bilingual education or bilingual intercultural education is an intercultural and bilingual model of education designed for contexts with two cultures and languages in contact, in the typical case a dominant and an underprivileged culture...
programs with Aymara and Spanish have been introduced in the last two decades. There are even projects to offer Aymara through the internet, such as by ILCA.
Declension
As Aymara is an inflected language, its nouns must be declined for any utterance in this language to be considered grammatical.Syntactic relations in Aymara
Aymara language
Aymara is an Aymaran language spoken by the Aymara people of the Andes. It is one of only a handful of Native American languages with over three million speakers. Aymara, along with Quechua and Spanish, is an official language of Peru and Bolivia...
are generally case-marked, with the exception of the unmarked subject. Case is affixed to the last element of a noun phrase
Noun phrase
In grammar, a noun phrase, nominal phrase, or nominal group is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like word optionally accompanied by modifiers such as adjectives....
, usually corresponding to the head. Aymara has 14 cases.
- ablative -ta
- accusative (indicated by vowel suppression)
- allative -ru
- benefactive -taki
- comparativeComparativeIn grammar, the comparative is the form of an adjective or adverb which denotes the degree or grade by which a person, thing, or other entity has a property or quality greater or less in extent than that of another, and is used in this context with a subordinating conjunction, such as than,...
-jama - genitive -na
- instrumental/comitativeInstrumental caseThe instrumental case is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action...
-mpi - interactive -pura
- locative -na
- limitative -kama
- nominativeNominative caseThe nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments...
(zero) - perlativePerlative casePerlative case "expresses that something moved 'through', 'across', or 'along' the referent of the noun that is marked". The case is found in the West Australian Kuku-Yalanji language, Aymara and in Tocharian....
-kata - purposive -layku
Allative
The allative -ru denotes direction towards a certain goal:- ¿Mukiwarut sarajatast?
- {Mukiwa-ru-t(i) sara-jata-st(i)}
- Moquegua-ALL-NEG go-2FUT-IR
- ‘Is it to Moquegua that you’ll go?’
- ¿Mukiwarut sarajatast Sankristarucha?
- {Mukiwa-ru-t(i) sara-jata-st(i) Sankrista-ru-cha}
- Moquegua-ALL-NEG go-2FUT-IR San.Cristobál-AlL-BC
- ‘Will you go to Moquegua or San Cristóbal?’
Note that in many contexts the nucleus of this morpheme is suppressed.
Instrumental / comitative
This declension is marked with the –mpi suffix which functions as the conjoiner and as a marker of the instrumental case.When functioning as a conjoiner, it may be affixed to one or both of the declined words.
In the first, it is affixed only to the word tutu 'toasted corn:
- Tutump lich jucht’asim.
- {tutu-mp(i)-cØ lich(i)-cØ juch(a)-t’a-si-m(a)}
- toasted.corn-COM-ACC milk-ACC drink-M-REFL-2IMP
- ‘Drink your milk with toasted corn.’
Next, it is attached to both juma 'you' and na 'I':
- ¡Jumamp nampix nuwasiskapunitanw!
- {juma-mp(i) na-mpi-x(a) nuwa-si-s.ka-puni-tan(a)-w(a)}
- you-COM I-COM-TOP fight-REFL-PROG-EM-4AOR-AFF
- ‘You and I really must fight!’
Purposive
The –layku morpheme expresses ‘for the purpose of’:- Jumalaykuw kutiniskix.
- {juma-layku-w(a) kuti-ni-s.k(a)-i-x(a)}
- you-purpose-AFF return-H-PROG-3AOR-TOP
- ‘She is returning for you.’
See also
- Indigenous languages of the AmericasIndigenous languages of the AmericasIndigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language...
- Classification schemes for indigenous languages of the AmericasClassification schemes for indigenous languages of the AmericasThis article is a list of different language classification proposals developed for indigenous languages of the Americas. The article is divided into North, Central, and South America sections; however, the classifications do not always neatly correspond to these continent divisions.-Gallatin...
- Mesoamerican languagesMesoamerican languagesMesoamerican languages are the languages indigenous to the Mesoamerican cultural area, which covers southern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. The area is characterized by extensive linguistic diversity containing several hundred different languages and...
- Language families and languages
- Classification of indigenous peoples of the AmericasClassification of indigenous peoples of the AmericasClassification of indigenous peoples of the Americas is based upon cultural regions, geography, and linguistics. Anthropologists have named various cultural regions, with fluid boundaries, that are generally agreed upon with some variation...
- Indigenous peoples of the AmericasIndigenous peoples of the AmericasThe indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
:Category:Indigenous languages of the Americas (division into geocultural areas)
- Languages of PeruLanguages of PeruPeru is a multilingual nation. Its official language is Spanish and, in the zones where they are predominant, Quechua, Aymara, and other aboriginal languages. Peru is a multilingual nation. Its official language is Spanish and, in the zones where they are predominant, Quechua, Aymara, and other...
- List of Spanish words of Indigenous American Indian origin
External links
- Aymara Swadesh vocabulary lists (from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix)
- http://clas.uchicago.edu/language_teaching/aymara.shtml
- www.aymara.org An extensive website about the language in English, Spanish and Aymara.
- The Sounds of the Andean Languages listen online to pronunciations of Aymara words, see photos of speakers and their home regions, learn about the origins and varieties of Aymara.
- Ethnologue reports for Aymara
- Encyclopedy in Aymara
- Aymara - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - The Rosetta Edition.
- Andean language looks back to the future - article on Aymara's reversed concept of time, with the past ahead and the future behind
- JACH'AK'ACHI. Patpatankiri markana kont’awipa An aymara page dedicated to this city in aymara language.
Spanish
- Aymara - Compendio de Estrutura Fonológica y Gramatical, 20 downloadable PDF files