Movima language

Movima
Chosineɬ di' mowi:maj [1]
Native to Bolivia
Region Beni Department
Native speakers
 ca. 1,400 (2006)[1]
Official status
Official language in
 Bolivia[2]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 mzp
Glottolog movi1243[3]

Movima is a language that is spoken by about 1,400 (nearly half) of the Movima, a group of Native Americans that resides in the LLanos de Moxos region of the Bolivian Amazon, in northeastern Bolivia. It is considered a language isolate, as it has not been proven to be related to any other language.

Phonology

Movima has five vowels:

The vowels of Movima
  Front Central Back
Close i u
Mid e o
Open a

/e/ and /o/ more closely resemble [ɛ] and [ɔ], respectively, than the close-mid vowels [e] and [o]. Vowels have a phonemic length distinction, although some prosodic processes can lengthen otherwise short vowels. Movima does not have tone.[4]

The consonants of Movima
  Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
central lateral plain lab.
Nasal m n          
Stop pulmonic p t   tʃ k (ɡ) kʷ  
implosive ɓ ɗ          
Fricative (f) β s ɬ       h
Approximant     ɬ j w   jˀ
Trill   r          

The plosive /p/ is realized as [p] in the syllable onset but as [pʔᵐ] (which contrasts with the simple nasal phoneme /m/) in the coda. Similarly, /t/ and /k/ are realized as [tʔⁿ] and [ʔɤ] (i.e., as a glottal stop with a vocalic release), respectively, in the syllable coda.[5] In vowel-initial words and between adjacent vowels, an epenthetic glottal stop appears.

The phonemes /f/ and /ɡ/ are only present in Spanish loanwords.

Morphology

In Movima, compounding and incorporation are productive derivational processes. Reduplication and affixation, including some processes (such as the irrealis marker (k)a') that resemble infixation, are also common. Typical examples of inflection, such as number, case, tense, mood, and aspect, are not obligatorily marked in Movima.[6] Many derivational processes can be applied to a single Movima word. The same morpheme may appear multiple times in one word this way, for instance, tikoy-na-poj-na "I make X kill Y."

References

  1. 1 2 Katharina Haude (2006). "A grammar of Movima" (PDF). Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. Retrieved 2008-10-22.
  2. ↑ "Constitution of Bolivia, Article 5. I." (PDF).
  3. ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Movima". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  4. ↑ "WALS – Movima". World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Retrieved 2008-10-24.
  5. ↑ Katharina Haude (2006). "A Grammar of Movima" (PDF). Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. Retrieved 2008-10-23.
  6. ↑ Katharina Haude (2006). "A grammar of Movima" (PDF). Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. Retrieved 2009-10-16.

External links


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