Huave language
Encyclopedia
Huave is a language isolate
spoken by the indigenous Huave people
on the Pacific coast of the Mexican
state
of Oaxaca
. The language is spoken in four villages on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec
, in the southeast of the state, by around 18,000 people (see table below). The Huave people of San Mateo del Mar – who call themselves Ikoots, meaning "us" – refer to their language as ombeayiiüts, meaning "our language". In San Francisco del Mar, the corresponding terms are Kunajts ("us") and umbeyajts ("our language"). The term "Huave" is thought to come from the Zapotec languages, meaning "people who rot in the humidity", according to the 17th century Spanish historian Burgoa. However, Martínez Gracida (1888) claims the meaning of the term means 'many people' in Isthmus Zapotec, interpreting hua as "abundant" and be as a shortened form of binni ("people"). The etymology of the term will require further investigation. Neither of the above etymologies are judged plausible by Isthmus Zapotec speakers.
Although genetic relationships between the Huave language and several language families have been proposed, none have been substantiated and Huave remains considered an isolate (Campbell 1997 pg. 161). Paul Radin proposed a relationship between Huave and the Mayan
and Mixe–Zoquean languages, and Morris Swadesh
proposed a connection to the Oto-Manguean languages
which has been further investigated by Rensch (1976), but all proposals have been inconclusive.
While still in use in most domains of the social life in at least one of the four villages where Huave is spoken, it is an endangered language
and recently, fieldwork and revitalization projects have been carried out in the Huave communities by universities in different countries.
not to have a phonemic glottal stop
(the other is P'urhépecha
).
The phonemic inventory, reconstructed for the common ancestor of the four existing Huave varieties as presented in Campbell 1997, is as follows:
Consonants – [p, t, ts, k, kʷ, ᵐb, ⁿd, ᵑɡ, ɡʷ, s, l, r, w, h] (and [ɾ, j, ð] as marginal phonemes)
Vowels – [i, e, a, ɨ, o, u] (+ vowel length, low and high tone).
in being both morphologically and syntactically ergative and consistently head-marking
. It is less morphologically complex than Mayan languages, however, and usually each word has only a few affix
es. There are obligatory categories on the verb
of absolutive
person
and present
, past
or future
tense
, plus additional categories of transitive subject, indefinite subject and reflexive
.
Complex sentences in Huave often juxtapose multiple verbs each inflected for the appropriate person. An interesting feature of Huave is that verbs meaning "give" can be used to produce causative
meaning, whilst a verb meaning "come" is used to produce purpose clauses (ie. meaning "in order to" in English). There are other purpose clauses introduced by more ordinary particles in which the verb is inflected for a special subordinate mode.
Word order, like verb morphology, in Huave follows a fully ergative pattern. The basic word order can be expressed very simply as Ergative Verb Absolutive. This means that whilst in transitive
clauses the word order is AVO, in intransitive clauses the word order is verb–subject (VS). Adjective
s and demonstrative
s can be placed either before or after the noun to which they refer, whilst numeral
s obligatorily precede their nouns.
Reduplication
is a very productive phonological process in Huave.
are the main reasons for the endangerment of Huave.
The following text-sample is a passage from: Olivares S., Juan & Stairs K., G. Alberto & Scharfe de Stairs, Emilia. 2006. Cuentos Huaves III (electronic version). México DF: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano http://www.sil.org/mexico/huave/mateodelmar/L070c-CuentosHuaves3_Leer-huv.pdf
Tambüw chüc ambiyaw chüc xicuüw,
'Two compadres went to kill deer'
ambiyaw chüc coy, ngwaj. Apiüng chüc nop:
'and they went to kill rabbits. One (of them) said:'
—Tabar combül, ambiyar coya, ambiyar xicuüwa, ambiyar püecha —aw chüc.
'Let's go, compadre, to kill rabbits, deer and chachalacas.
—Ngo namb —aw chüc.
'I won't go', he said'.
Language isolate
A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. They are in effect language families consisting of a single...
spoken by the indigenous Huave people
Huave people
The Huave are an indigenous people of Mexico. The autodenomination term used by the Huave themselves is Ikoots/Kunajts , or Mareños . They have inhabited the Isthmus of Tehuantepec for more than 3000 years, preceding the Zapotec people in settling the area...
on the Pacific coast of the Mexican
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
state
States of Mexico
The United Mexican States is a federal republic formed by 32 federal entities .According to the Constitution of 1917, the states of the federation are free and sovereign. Each state has their own congress and constitution, while the Federal District has only limited autonomy with a local Congress...
of Oaxaca
Oaxaca
Oaxaca , , officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Oaxaca is one of the 31 states which, along with the Federal District, comprise the 32 federative entities of Mexico. It is divided into 571 municipalities; of which 418 are governed by the system of customs and traditions...
. The language is spoken in four villages on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec
Isthmus of Tehuantepec
The Isthmus of Tehuantepec is an isthmus in Mexico. It represents the shortest distance between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, and prior to the opening of the Panama Canal was a major shipping route known simply as the Tehuantepec Route...
, in the southeast of the state, by around 18,000 people (see table below). The Huave people of San Mateo del Mar – who call themselves Ikoots, meaning "us" – refer to their language as ombeayiiüts, meaning "our language". In San Francisco del Mar, the corresponding terms are Kunajts ("us") and umbeyajts ("our language"). The term "Huave" is thought to come from the Zapotec languages, meaning "people who rot in the humidity", according to the 17th century Spanish historian Burgoa. However, Martínez Gracida (1888) claims the meaning of the term means 'many people' in Isthmus Zapotec, interpreting hua as "abundant" and be as a shortened form of binni ("people"). The etymology of the term will require further investigation. Neither of the above etymologies are judged plausible by Isthmus Zapotec speakers.
Although genetic relationships between the Huave language and several language families have been proposed, none have been substantiated and Huave remains considered an isolate (Campbell 1997 pg. 161). Paul Radin proposed a relationship between Huave and the Mayan
Mayan languages
The Mayan languages form a language family spoken in Mesoamerica and northern Central America. Mayan languages are spoken by at least 6 million indigenous Maya, primarily in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Honduras...
and Mixe–Zoquean languages, and Morris Swadesh
Morris Swadesh
Morris Swadesh was an influential and controversial American linguist. In his work, he applied basic concepts in historical linguistics to the Indigenous languages of the Americas...
proposed a connection to the Oto-Manguean languages
Oto-Manguean languages
Oto-Manguean languages are a large family comprising several families of Native American languages. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the family, which is now extinct, was spoken as far south as Nicaragua and Costa Rica.The...
which has been further investigated by Rensch (1976), but all proposals have been inconclusive.
While still in use in most domains of the social life in at least one of the four villages where Huave is spoken, it is an endangered language
Endangered language
An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use. If it loses all its native speakers, it becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all it becomes an "extinct language"....
and recently, fieldwork and revitalization projects have been carried out in the Huave communities by universities in different countries.
Phonology
Huave of San Mateo del Mar is partly tonal, distinguishing between high and low tone in penultimate syllables only. Huave is one of only two Mesoamerican languagesMesoamerican languages
Mesoamerican 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...
not to have a phonemic glottal stop
Glottal stop
The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...
(the other is P'urhépecha
P'urhépecha language
P'urhépecha is a language isolate or small language family spoken by more than 100,000 P'urhépecha people in the highlands of the Mexican state of Michoacán...
).
The phonemic inventory, reconstructed for the common ancestor of the four existing Huave varieties as presented in Campbell 1997, is as follows:
Consonants – [p, t, ts, k, kʷ, ᵐb, ⁿd, ᵑɡ, ɡʷ, s, l, r, w, h] (and [ɾ, j, ð] as marginal phonemes)
Vowels – [i, e, a, ɨ, o, u] (+ vowel length, low and high tone).
Basic grammar
Huave is similar to the Mayan languagesMayan languages
The Mayan languages form a language family spoken in Mesoamerica and northern Central America. Mayan languages are spoken by at least 6 million indigenous Maya, primarily in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Honduras...
in being both morphologically and syntactically ergative and consistently head-marking
Head-marking language
A head-marking language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads of the phrase in question, rather than the modifiers or dependents. In a noun phrase, the head is the main noun and the dependents are the...
. It is less morphologically complex than Mayan languages, however, and usually each word has only a few affix
Affix
An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...
es. There are obligatory categories on the verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
of absolutive
Absolutive case
The absolutive case is the unmarked grammatical case of a core argument of a verb which is used as the citation form of a noun.-In ergative languages:...
person
Grammatical person
Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
and present
Present tense
The present tense is a grammatical tense that locates a situation or event in present time. This linguistic definition refers to a concept that indicates a feature of the meaning of a verb...
, past
Past tense
The past tense is a grammatical tense that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment , or prior to some specified time that may be in the speaker's past, present, or future...
or future
Future tense
In grammar, a future tense is a verb form that marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future , or to happen subsequent to some other event, whether that is past, present, or future .-Expressions of future tense:The concept of the future,...
tense
Grammatical tense
A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...
, plus additional categories of transitive subject, indefinite subject and reflexive
Reflexive
Reflexive may refer to:In fiction:*MetafictionIn grammar:*Reflexive pronoun, a pronoun with a reflexive relationship with its self-identical antecedent*Reflexive verb, where a semantic agent and patient are the same...
.
Complex sentences in Huave often juxtapose multiple verbs each inflected for the appropriate person. An interesting feature of Huave is that verbs meaning "give" can be used to produce causative
Causative
In linguistics, a causative is a form that indicates that a subject causes someone or something else to do or be something, or causes a change in state of a non-volitional event....
meaning, whilst a verb meaning "come" is used to produce purpose clauses (ie. meaning "in order to" in English). There are other purpose clauses introduced by more ordinary particles in which the verb is inflected for a special subordinate mode.
Word order, like verb morphology, in Huave follows a fully ergative pattern. The basic word order can be expressed very simply as Ergative Verb Absolutive. This means that whilst in transitive
Transitivity (grammatical category)
In linguistics, transitivity is a property of verbs that relates to whether a verb can take direct objects and how many such objects a verb can take...
clauses the word order is AVO, in intransitive clauses the word order is verb–subject (VS). Adjective
Adjective
In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
s and demonstrative
Demonstrative
In linguistics, demonstratives are deictic words that indicate which entities a speaker refers to and distinguishes those entities from others...
s can be placed either before or after the noun to which they refer, whilst numeral
Number names
In linguistics, number names are specific words in a natural language that represent numbers.In writing, numerals are symbols also representing numbers...
s obligatorily precede their nouns.
Reduplication
Reduplication
Reduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word is repeated exactly or with a slight change....
is a very productive phonological process in Huave.
Dialects
Huave is spoken in the four coastal towns of San Francisco del Mar, San Dionisio del Mar, San Mateo del Mar and Santa Catarina del Mar. The most vibrant speech community is in San Mateo del Mar which was fairly isolated until recently. Negative speakers' attitudes towards their language and a strong social pressure from the dominant Spanish languageSpanish 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...
are the main reasons for the endangerment of Huave.
| Dialect and place | Number of Speakers (ca.) | ISO 639-3 (SIL) |
|---|---|---|
| San Dionisio del Mar San Dionisio del Mar San Dionisio del Mar is a town and municipality in Oaxaca in south-western Mexico. It is part of the Juchitán District in the east of the Istmo de Tehuantepec region.The town is named after its patron saint.... |
5.000 | hve |
| San Francisco del Mar San Francisco del Mar San Francisco del Mar is a town and municipality in Oaxaca in south-western Mexico. It is part of the Juchitán District in the west of the Istmo de Tehuantepec region.... |
900 | hue |
| San Mateo del Mar San Mateo del Mar San Mateo del Mar is a coastal town and municipality in Oaxaca in south-western Mexico. It is part of the Tehuantepec District in the west of the Istmo Region... |
12.000 | huv |
| Santa María del Mar | 500 | hvv |
Sample of written Huave
Practical orthographies are currently in use by literate speakers in San Mateo, San Francisco, San Dionisio and Santa María del Mar. There is an effort going on by the Mexican INALI (National Institute for Indigenous Languages) to standardize the orthography together with speakers from all four communities.The following text-sample is a passage from: Olivares S., Juan & Stairs K., G. Alberto & Scharfe de Stairs, Emilia. 2006. Cuentos Huaves III (electronic version). México DF: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano http://www.sil.org/mexico/huave/mateodelmar/L070c-CuentosHuaves3_Leer-huv.pdf
Tambüw chüc ambiyaw chüc xicuüw,
'Two compadres went to kill deer'
ambiyaw chüc coy, ngwaj. Apiüng chüc nop:
'and they went to kill rabbits. One (of them) said:'
—Tabar combül, ambiyar coya, ambiyar xicuüwa, ambiyar püecha —aw chüc.
'Let's go, compadre, to kill rabbits, deer and chachalacas.
—Ngo namb —aw chüc.
'I won't go', he said'.
External links
- Comparative Huave Swadesh vocabulary list from Wiktionary)
- soundsample from the New testament read aloud in Huave at the Bible League website
- Information from the University of Pennsylvania about Huave
- A .pdf file with sociolinguistic information about Huave from UC Berkeley
- A practical description of Huave of San Mateo del Mar can be read online at the Archivo de Lenguas indigenás
- Ethnographical description of the Huave people at the INI homepage (Spanish)