Maricopa language
Encyclopedia
The Maricopa language is spoken by the Native American
Maricopa tribe, on two reservations in Arizona: the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community
and the Gila River Indian Community
.
s. It makes no grammatical gender
distinction.
David Gil reports that the Maricopa have no equivalent for and, but that they are managing quite well. The various relevant relations are solved using different linguistic structures. However, whether the absence of a lexeme
constitutes a lexical gap
depends not on some theory but on the shared verbal habits of the people employing the relevant conceptualization. Accordingly, it is not valid to say that speakers of Maricopa are lacking the lexeme and. Rather, it is speakers of, for example, English who would experience the lack.
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
Maricopa tribe, on two reservations in Arizona: the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community
Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community
The Salt River Pima–Maricopa Indian Community comprises two distinct Native American tribes—the Pima and the Maricopa —many of whom were originally of the Halchidhoma tribe. The community was officially created by an Executive Order of US President Rutherford B. Hayes on June 14, 1879...
and the Gila River Indian Community
Gila River Indian Community
The Gila River Indian Community is an Indian reservation in the U.S. state of Arizona, lying adjacent to the south side of the city of Phoenix, within the Phoenix Metropolitan Area in Pinal and Maricopa Counties. It was established in 1859, and formally established by Congress in 1939...
.
Grammar
Maricopa is a subject–object–verb language, with six or seven caseDeclension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
s. It makes no grammatical gender
Grammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
distinction.
David Gil reports that the Maricopa have no equivalent for and, but that they are managing quite well. The various relevant relations are solved using different linguistic structures. However, whether the absence of a lexeme
Lexeme
A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as RUN...
constitutes a lexical gap
Lexical gap
A lexical gap or lacuna is an absence of a word in a particular language. Types of lexical gaps include untranslatability and missing inflections.-Untranslatability:...
depends not on some theory but on the shared verbal habits of the people employing the relevant conceptualization. Accordingly, it is not valid to say that speakers of Maricopa are lacking the lexeme and. Rather, it is speakers of, for example, English who would experience the lack.
External links
- Ethnologue entry for Maricopa
- Rosetta Project entry for Maricopa
- Maricopa language overview at the Survey of California and Other Indian LanguagesSurvey of California and Other Indian LanguagesThe Survey of California and Other Indian Languages at the University of California at Berkeley documents, catalogs, and archives the indigenous languages of the Americas...