Ayoreo language

Ayoreo
Native to Paraguay, Bolivia
Region Chaco, Alto Paraguay departments (Paraguay), Santa Cruz department (Bolivia)
Ethnicity Ayoreo people
Native speakers
 4,300 (2006–2009)[1]
Zamucoan
  • Ayoreo
Dialects
Tsiracua
Language codes
ISO 639-3 ayo
Linguist list
 qro Guarañoca
Glottolog ayor1240  (Ayoreo)[2]
zamu1245  (Zamuco)[3]

Ayoreo is a Zamucoan language spoken in both Paraguay and Bolivia. It is also known as Morotoco, Moro, Ayoweo, Ayoré, and Pyeta Yovai. However, the name "Ayoreo" is more common in Bolivia, and "Morotoco" in Paraguay. It is spoken by Ayoreo, an indigenous ethnic group traditionally living on a combined hunter-gatherer and farming lifestyle.

Classification

Ayoreo is classified as a Zamucoan language, along with Chamacoco. Extinct Guarañoca may have been a dialect.

Geographic distribution

Ayoreo is spoken in both Paraguay and Bolivia, with 3,771 speakers total, 3000 of those in Paraguay and 771 in Bolivia. Within Paraguay, Ayoreo is spoken in the Chaco Department and the northern parts of the Alto Paraguay Department. In Bolivia, it is spoken in the Gran Chaco Province, in the Santa Cruz Department.

Phonology

Bertinetto (2009) reports that Ayoreo has the following vowels, which appear both as oral and nasal:

Front Central Back
High i u
Mid e o
Low a

Grammar

The prototypical constituent order is subject-verb-object, as seen in the following examples (Bertinetto 2009:45-46):

Sérgio ch-ingo caratai aroi tome Ramon.
Sérgio 3-show jaguar skin to Ramon
‘Sérgio showed the jaguar’s skin to Ramon’.
Enga ore ch-ijnoque Víctor aja señóra Emília i-guijnai.
COORD 3P 3-carry Víctor towards señora Emíliahouse
‘And they carried Víctor to Señora Emília’s house’.

Ayoreo is a fusional language.[4]

Verbs agree with their subjects, but there is no tense-inflection.[5] Consider the following paradigm, which has prefixes marking person and suffixes marking number (Bertinetto 2009:29):

y-aca I plant
b-aca you plant
ch-aca he, she, they plant
y-aca-go we plant
uac-aca-y you (pl) plant

When the verb root contains a nasal, there are nasalized variants of the agreement affixes:

ñ-ojne I spread
m-ojne you spread
ch-ojne he, she, they spread
ñ-ojne-ngo we spread
uac-ojne-ño you (pl) spread

Ayoreo is a mood-prominent language.[4] Nouns can be divided into possessable and non-possessable; possessor agreement is expressed through a prefixation.[6] The syntaxis of Ayoreo is characterized by the presence of para-hypotactical structures.[7]

Notes

  1. ↑ Ayoreo at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Ayoreo". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  3. ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Zamuco". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  4. 1 2 Bertinetto, Pier Marco 2009. Ayoreo (Zamuco). A grammatical sketch. Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. 8 n.s.
  5. ↑ Ciucci, Luca 2007/08. Indagini sulla morfologia verbale nella lingua ayoreo. Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, n.s. 7.
  6. ↑ Ciucci, Luca 2010. La flessione possessiva dell'ayoreo. Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, n.s. 9,2.
  7. ↑ Bertinetto, Pier Marco & Luca Ciucci 2012. Parataxis, Hypotaxis and Para-Hypotaxis in the Zamucoan Languages. In: Linguistic Discovery 10.1: 89-111.

References

External links

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