Cavineño language
| Cavineña | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Bolivia |
|
Native speakers
|
1,700 (2006) |
|
Pano–Tacanan
|
|
| Official status | |
|
Official language in
|
Bolivia |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | cavi1250 |
Cavineña is an indigenous language spoken on the Amazonian plains of northern Bolivia by over 1,000 Cavineño people. Although Cavineña is still spoken (and still learnt by some children), it is an endangered language. Guillaume (2004) states that about 1200 people speak the language, out of a population of around 1700. Nearly all Cavineña are bilingual in Spanish.
The Caviñeno people live in several communities near the Beni River, which flows north from the Andes. The nearest towns are Reyes (to the south) and Riberalta (to the north).
Caviñena has the following consonants (Guillaume 2004:27). Where the practical orthography is different from IPA, it is shown between angled brackets:
It has the following vowels
Examples in the morphology and syntax sections are written in the practical orthography.
Verbs do not show agreement with their arguments, but are inflected for tense, aspect, mood, negation, and aktionsart, among other categories. There are six tense/aspect/mood affixes (Guillaume 2004):
The following examples show the remote past and perfective affixes:
Aktionsart suffixes include:
The following examples show the completive and reiterative suffixes:
This is the only language in the Amazon that has an antipassive voice.
There are three subtypes of nouns in Cavineña (Guillaume 2004:71-73).
obligatorily inflected for their possessor.
not take any e- prefix nor any possessor inflections.
Case marking on noun phrases is shown through a set of clitic postpositions, including the following:
The dative and genitive cases are homophonous.
Pronouns (independent or bound) also show these case distinctions.
The following example (Guillame 2004:526) shows several of the case markers in context:
(Guillaume 2004:599)
Noun phrases show the order (Relative Clause)-(Quantifier)-(Possessor)-Noun-(Adjective)-(Plural marker)-(Relative clause) (Guillaume 2004:69). The following examples show some of these orders.
(The clitic =ke 'ligature' appears at the end of a relative clause.)
Pronouns in Caviñena can appear in either independent or bound forms. The two kinds of pronouns are pronounced almost exactly the same, but the bound pronouns appear in second position, after the first word of the sentence. Independent pronouns tend to be contrastive, and usually appear first in the sentence.
The following pronouns are found:
Guillaume (2004:597) notes that the formative suffix -ke (of singular absolutive bound pronouns) and the ergative suffix -ra (in ergative bound pronouns) do not show up when absolutive or ergative pronouns occur last among the second position clitics.
Caviñena has ergative case marking on the subject of a transitive verb (Guillaume 2004:527). For sentences with a non-pronominal subject, this is shown with an ergative case clitic /=ra/:
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