Word of the Day: Kanikima

Language: Jarawara

Location: The Amazon Rainforest, Amazonas, Brazil

In this article, we will explore the modifier kanikima, which means that the described action happened in lots of different places at once. Here are three examples:

aba mee mee warekanikimakeni = they cooked the fishes in many different pans here

mee kaa tisera soo narekanikima narake = the latex cups were scattered all across the floor

tafakanikima onahara oke = I had a bite to each in many different houses

We will now dissect each of these sentences individually.

Sentence 1:

aba mee mee ware-kanikima-ke-ni

they cooked the fishes in many different pans here

aba means fish.

aba mee means fishes. More literally it means them fish, or fish them word-for-word.

mee is the 3rd Person Non-Singular Pronoun. In English it can mean both they and them. It is referred to as the Non-Singular as oppose to the Plural because in some contexts, Jarawara has a Singular-Dual-Plural distinction, whereas on others it has a Singular-Non-Singular distinction.

ware is the infinitive to cook.

In this context, kanikima refers to the many different pans in which the fishes were cooked. In addition, it could refer to the fish being cooked on on different skewers, or to the fish being cooked over different fires.

Of course, these three possibilities imply that the speaker exists inside the traditional Jarawara lifestyle. In a modern kitchen, it could mean that some fish are in the oven, others on the hob and others in the microwave.

-ke is the Feminine Declarative Suffix, which is used to mark the most salient information in a clause. In this case, it is used to describe a new activity, i.e. the act of eating. Jarawara gender will be discussed in greater detail later.

-ni (full form -hani) is the Feminine Immediate Past Non-Eyewitness Suffix.

In Jarawara, there are three forms of the Past Tense: Immediate, Recent and Far. There are no hard and fast rules as to when to use each of these Tenses, except for their order relative to each other.

As a rule of thumb, the Immediate Past typically refers to any time from a few moments to a few months ago; the Recent Past from a few months to a few years ago; and the Far Past for anything further ago than the previous two.

The Non-Eyewitness part indicates that the speaker did not see the the event with his own eyes.

Like many European languages, Jarawara has two genders called Masculine and Feminine. That said, the two are not used equally. When the Subject or Agent of a sentence is not explicitly Masculine, i.e. the word for he or a Man’s name, the Feminine forms of the Suffix are used.

Our second sentence will use a number of words we have already seen.

Sentence 2:

mee kaa tisera soo na-re-kanikima na-ra-ke

the latex cups were scattered all across the floor

mee kaa tisera means the latex cups. This doesn’t refer to cups made out of latex, but instead cups which are used to collect rubber from trees.

mee makes a comeback from the previous sentence.

kaa is a possessive marker, meaning something close to of.

tisera means cup for collecting rubber, and is a loan from Portuguese. Now, you may think that this is a derivation of the word xicara, which means cup, but is actually derived from the word tigela, which means bowl.

For the purposes of brevity, mee kaa tisera is a set phrase. I could dissect it in greater detail but that would probably take too long.

soo means to lie, but can only be used by plural subjects. The verb soo is non-inflecting, which means that it does not accept any suffixes or prefixes, and remains always in its infinitive form.

In both its appearances, na is an Auxiliary Stem. This means that it does not have an independent meaning. Instead, it carries the prefixes and suffixes which would otherwise be attached to the main verb.

-re is a locative (location) suffix. This one means that the event took place on a raised surface, a floor.

In this context, kanikima refers to the floor, and thus means that the latex cups are spread across the floor.

-ra (full form -hara) is the Feminine Immediate Past Eyewitness suffix. Long story short, this is the Eyewitness equivalent to -ni/-hani, whom we met in the previous sentence.

-ke is the Feminine Declarative Suffix, another old friend at this point.

Our third and final sentence is built mainly from components that we have already encountered.

Sentence 3:

tafa-kanikima o-na-hara o-ke

I had a bite to each in many different houses

tafa is the infinitive form of to eat.

-kanikima refers to where the eating took place. In a traditional Jarawara setting, it describes eating in multiple people’s houses. At a Jamboree it could refer to eating roasted marshmallows at multiple campfires, or possibly even to visiting different tables at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

o- is, in both instances, the First Person Singular Prefix. In English, this is translated as the pronoun I. In the abscence of -kanikima, this would be attached to the verb -tafa, but the rules surrounding where to place Jarawara suffixes and prefixes would take us far outside the scope of this article.

The other three components, namely -na-, -hara, and -ke, have all been discussed already.

Naturally, these are not the only ways wherein one can use kanikima, but I felt that three sentences was enough. I do not wish to confuse you more than I already have. One notable omission included kanikima as an independent word, attached to nothing.

Glossary (in order of appearance):

aba = a fish

mee = they / them

ware = to cook

kanikima = in multiple locations / spread over a single location

-ke = this is a real event which took place

-ni = this event happened very recently but the speaker did not see it personally (Feminine variant)

kaa = of / belongs to

tisera = a cup

soo = for more than one thing to lie down

-na- = to do something, e.g. do eating

-re = on a raised surface

-ra = this event happened very recently and the speaker did see it personally (Feminine variant)

-tafa = to eat

o- = I

I hope that this was an interesting and informative, albeit short, exploration into the grammar of Jarawara. This is a new format with which I am currently experimenting. So far I appreciate the pared down, more ascetic style and tone.

I look forward to our next exploration.

Yours sincerely,

Languages with Wilf

Source:

R. M. W. Dixon, The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004)

 

An Introduction to Jarawara: A Language of the Amazon

On the north-west side of the Purús River, in the foothills of the Andean mountains, around 170 people speak the Jarawara language. They are typically spread among seven villages, though this can change relatively frequently due as old settlements are regularly abandoned and new ones erected following the death of an elder.

For full disclosure, it is worth pointing that Jarawara is not so much a single language, but an extant dialect of the Madi language.

The other two dialects of Madi are Jamamadi and Banawa, which have 250 and 120 speakers respectively. The difference between all 3 of these dialects is comparable to the difference between Standard British, Australian and American English.

The name Jarawara itself comes from Classical Tupi, and is composed of two parts. The first, jara, means white person, and wara, which means to eat.

ee jokana, us the people, is how the Jarawara refer to themselves.

Going into this article, I do not have a particular direction in mind. Thus, we shall simply dissect a number of sentences that will give us an idea as to how this language works.

Section 1:

Jarawara: jomee tinakomehara amati?

English: Aren’t you afraid of jaguars?

jomee is the word for jaguar, though it can also mean dog. It is a Masculine Noun, though in this sentence it does not matter.

tinakomehara is composed of three parts. ti- is the 2nd Person Singular Prefix, though it can also be a Suffix.

nakomera is a verb which means to be afraid of or to fear.

-ra is the Negation Suffix, though it can also act as its own independent word.

Thus, taken altogether, tinakomehara means you are not afraid of or you do not fear.

amati is built from two components. The second of these is ti, which is the 2nd Person Singular Suffix.

is a Secondary Verb, and it means something along the lines of to be extended in time, and it can refer to an extended action or an extended state of being.

Thus, you can translate the sentence as this:

jomee tinakomehara amati? = Don’t you have a long term fear of jaguars?

or

jomee tinakomehara amati? = Aren’t you afraid of jaguars in general?

In Jarawara, there is only one other Secondary Verb, and this is awine/awa which means to see.

While I cannot comment on the etymology of the English word seem, it is worth noting that the Jarawara word awine/awa has „certainly developed“ from the Jarawara verb awa, which means to see or to look at.

In addition, the word ama can also function as a main verb, where it means to be. It is almost, if not, definitely from this word that the meaning of the secondary verb evolved.

In our next section we will discuss a number of words related to travelling along the river. As you can probably expect, the Jarawara are a lot more specific than their English counterparts.

(A particularly picturesque view of the Peruvian section of the Purús River. The Purús begins in the Peruvian Andes and is a tributary of the Amazon River main.)

Section 2:

In this section, we will discuss the words for up- and downstream, which are completely separate words.

Jarawara: okobise winaka bato jaa / okakoko winaka bato jaa

English: My uncle lives downstream

okobise and okakoko both mean my uncle. The former refers to one’s father’s brother, and the latter refers to one’s mother’s brother.

In further contrast to English, kinship nouns in Jarawara are highly (though not always) inalienably possessed. If a noun is inalienably possessed, this means that it cannot not be possessed, i.e. it is always possessed by someone. For example, an uncle must always be someone’s uncle.

In addition, okakoko, which has the alternate form okokoko, also means father-in-law.

winaka is made up of two parts. The first is wina, which means to live, and -ka, which is the Masculine Declarative Suffix. The Declarative Suffix is used to indicate that the sentence is, indeed, a normal indicative sentence.

bato means downstream, and it does not seem to take any prefixes or suffixes. There is also a verb kisa, which means to move downstream.

jaa is a Peripheral Marker and a general Postposition. For the purposes of this article, we can translate it as meaning on or at, though we would not include these in the English sentence.

(This picture depicts a Jarawara girl and boy. It comes from a Portuguese-language blog, a link to which I have included in the Source List. As I cannot read Portuguese, I cannot verify the degree to which this article is accurate, or even informative.)

Jarawara: tikoto winake nakani jaa

English: Your daughter lives upstream

tikoto means your daughter, and refers to the 2nd Person Singular form, i.e. the daughter of a single person.

winake is composed of two parts. The first, wina, appeared earlier, and it means to live. –ke, meanwhile, is the Feminine Declarative Suffix, which is used to turn a sentence into a normal indicative sentence. It is indeed the feminine equivalent of -ka, which appears in the previous sentence.

nakani means upstream, but it only refers to a current location. If you wish to refer to a direction of travel, then you add the Suffix -tima to the verb. For example:

kobo otima oke = I arrive (at a place) upstream

The word kobo, means to arrive, and it does not take any suffixes or prefixes.

otima is a combination of o- and -tima. The first part is the 1st Person Singular Prefix, which takes place of the English pronoun I.

oke is formed from o- and -ke, both of which we have already mentioned.

In this sentence, jaa serves the same function as it does in the previous sentence.

In our next sentence, we shall discuss further how the Jarawara grammar allows for more specificity than is possible in English.

(Woolly monkeys are found across large swathes of the Amazon, including the areas wherein the jokana reside. Interestingly, the Jarawara word for woolly monkey is wafa, while the word wafe means cotton.

Whether this is a simple coincidence or if one word influenced the other is a mystery that I feel no compunction to unravel today.)

Section 3:

In this section, we will explore how one talks about the past; in particular how far in the past an event took place, and whether it an eye-witness was present.

Here we have two sentences which can have the same English translation, but with quite different implications:

sinama mee ati omitara oke = I heard the noise of the large agoutis, for which I was listening

sinama mee ati omitenoka = I heard the noise of the large agoutis unexpectedly

sinama means large agouti, which is a type of rodent found across much of northern and central South America, a picture of which shall be featured at the end of this section. It is a Masculine Noun, a piece of information we will discuss in further detail later.

mee is the 3rd Person Non-Singular Agent Pronoun, i.e. it means they. In this sentence, it is used to emphasise that the speaker wishes to reference more than one agouti.

(It is called the Non-Singular, as oppose to the Plural, in order to differentiate it from nouns which have a Singular-Dual-Plural paradigm.)

ati simply means noise.

oke has the same meaning as its appearance in the previous section.

omitara, meanwhile, is assembled from three parts. The first piece of the puzzle, o-, we have explored already.

In this context, the verb stem -mita- means to hear, though the definition provided by the grammar reads: sense by hearing, taste, smell, or touch.

Last but not least is -ra, a Suffix whose full name is the Immediate Past Eyewitness Feminine, which goes by the acronym IPef.

The Eyewitness Suffix simply indicates that the event was witnessed by someone, it isn’t as specific as having actually seen it.

The second sentence:

sinama mee ati omitenoka = I heard the noise of the large agoutis unexpectedly

omitenoka is composed of four parts.

o-, once again, is the 1st Person Suffix.

-mite- is a variation of -mita-, which we saw earlier.

-no is the Immediate Past Non-Eyewitness Masculine Suffix, which also goes by the acronym IPnm.

-ka, as we saw earlier, is the Masculine Declarative Suffix.

Here are the two sentences under scrutiny:

sinama mee ati omitara oke = I heard the noise of the large agoutis, for which I was listening

sinama mee ati omitenoka = I heard the noise of the large agoutis, which I had not been expecting

In the first sentence, we have the FEMININE Immediate Past Eyewitness Suffix and the FEMININE Declarative Suffix. This is the norm when the sentence has a 1st Person Singular Subject.

In the second sentence, on the other hand, we have the MASCULINE Immediate Past Non-Eyewitness Suffix and the MASCULINE Declarative Suffix.

While we do not have the time to discuss the Jarawara evidentiality system in full, it seems that when an Eyewitness Suffix is used, then the other Suffixes are based on the Gender of the Subject of the sentence; but when the Non-Eyewitness Suffix is used, then the other Suffixes are based on the Gender of what the object.

Concerning the past tense, there are no hard-and-fast rules as to when you have to use each one.

The one exception are stories which one has learnt from an older relative. These are always told in the Far Past Non-Eyewitness.

I can, however, provide a rough guideline. The grammar contains at least four stories, each of which uses a different tense:

A few days before: The Immediate Past

Four months before: The Recent Past

Several years earlier: The Far Past

50 years ago: The Far Past

Jarawara is not the only language whose grammar is more specific in how it demarcates the past tense. Another is the Australian language Diyari, which divides the Past Tense into 5 sections, and which I have explored in a previous article.

(The agouti, which are indeed related to guinea pigs, except they are larger with longer legs. This name comes from either Guarani or Tupi, both of which are also languages native to South America.)

Section 4:

In this section, we will take a step back from the grammar in order to discuss the Jarawara vocabulary, in particular in relation to pineapples.

In Jarawara, we have the word sami, which refers to pineapples in general. In addition to this, we have a number of words which refer to specific species of pineapples. Sadly, the dictionary at the end of the grammar does not give the Latin name for each species, though many of these also have interesting literal translations:

samijao = sloth pineapple

samijokana = real pineapple or prototypical pineapple

samimajawari = dusky titi monkey pineapple

saminokihowe = clean eyelid pineapple

samitatijabo = large face pineapple

Naturally, these are not the only words that refer to specific species of pineapples, but the only ones for which I could create literal translations.

(The Dusky Titi Monkey, or Callicebus moloch. Their range extends as far south as Paraguay, but in the west they are hindered by the Andes mountain range.)

In conclusion, I hope that you enjoyed this exploration of one of the many languages still spoken within the Amazon jungle. Of course, this was only a small glance into this language, and there was much that I left uncovered.

The Evidentiality System, in particular, would no doubt make an interesting post, once I understand the system in greater detail.

If you would like to learn more about the languages spoken within the Amazon Jungle, one book that could be worth your time is The Amazonian Languages edited by R. M. W. Dixon and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald.  It will not

In our next exploration, we will travel to the Dark Continent, and hopefully shed on how the many enigmatic languages of this continent operate. As we did with America, we shall analyse features from certain languages which I happen to find interesting. Until then,

Same Wilf-time!

Same Wilf-channel!

Sources:

R. M. W. Dixon, The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia (New York: Oxford University Press 2004)

Google Images

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad%C3%AD_language

https://historiaparao6ano.wordpress.com/tag/jarawara/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agouti

http://pin.primate.wisc.edu/factsheets/entry/dusky_titi

5 English Words that don’t exist in Other Languages

In previous articles, we have discussed a number of simple English words that don’t exist in foreign languages. Typically, and especially in this exploration, these are words that form the core of our basic everyday vocabulary.

Here, we shall not only introduce these words, we will also see these words at work in a sample sentence. As always, I have made effort to find languages from all across the world. Now let’s begin:

1. To Read (Tzutujil)

In the previous article, we explored a number of interesting features present in Tzutujil, a Mayan language spoken by approximately 60,000 people in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. Here is how they formulate the infinitive to read:

chee sik’in rwach wuuj = to call the face of the paper / to call in front of the paper

chee is the equivalent of the English preposition to.

sik’in means to call, rwach means its face, though it can also mean her face or his face, and wuuj means paper.

rwach wuuj has the literal meaning of the faces of the paper, though the grammar of Tzutujil allows it to also mean in front of the paper.

Now we will use this in a sentence:

Ja aatijiooneelaa7 xixrtijoj chee sik’in rwach wuuj = Your teachers taught all of you how to read

Ja aatijiooneelaa7 means your teachers, or more literally the your teachers. Ja is the Definite Article, i.e. the word the, and aatijiooneelaa7 means (all of) your teachers.

To build this monster of a word, we start with tijiooneel, which means teacher. First, we add the Plural Suffix aa7, and the 2nd Person Plural Ergative aa, which in this context acts as the plural version of the English Possessive Pronoun your.

xixrtijoj means they taught all of you, and is comprised of four components. The first is tijoj, which is the verb stem for to teach, and it is preceded by three separate Prefixes.

The first is the Completive Prefix x-, which refers, as one can imply, to an action that has already been completed. This is not necessarily the same as the English Past Tense, but very often they work in the same manner.

After this we have the 2nd Person Plural Absolute Prefix ix-, which in this case refers to the object of the verb, i.e. the plural version of you.

Last, but not least, we have r-, which is the 3rd Person Plural Ergative Prefix, and refers in this context to the English pronoun they.

Lastly we have the phrase chee sik’in rwach wuuj, which means to read, with the word chee in this context meaning how to.

If you would like to translate the sentence more literally, one gets something along the lines of:

Ja aatijiooneelaa7 xixrtijoj chee sik’in rwach wuuj = The all of your teachers taught all of you how to call in front of the paper

or

Ja aatijiooneelaa7 xixrtijoj chee sik’in rwach wuuj = The all of your teachers taught all of you how to call the face of the paper

If you would like to learn about another language which uses body parts as a way of expressing location markers, I would recommend that you read my article concerning the Manambu language of Papua New Guinea. It may surprise you.

Furthermore, in my research I found a Spanish-language website that explains a number of Tzutujil words and phrases, which will be linked in the Source llist.

(A young Tzutujil girl wearing traditional clothes and headdress. According to the description of the picture on Google Images, this headdress is called a tocoyal. Though this word does not appear in Dayley’s Grammar, a brief Google search implies that the origins of the word are nonetheless Mayan.)

2. The He/She Distinction (Yindjibarndi)

Through the course my own research, I have come to the conclusion that most languages lack this distinction. My reason for this is that languages with this distinction either have Grammatical Gender (e.g. Spanish or German), or used to have it (e.g. English), and most languages DON’T possess Gender.

Other languages that lack use the same word for He and She (and by extension him, her and his) include Tzutujil, Turkish and Tümpisa, the language of Death Valley and explored in previous articles.

Of course, there are languages that begin with other letters of the alphabet wherein this feature is also present.

However, the one that we shall explore today is Yindjobarndi language of north-west Australia, whose speaker count is 377 as of the 2016 Australian Census. But why have I singled out this language in particular?

The reason is that, unlike the three languages named specifically, Yindjibarndi has four versions of the 3rd Person Singular Pronoun, compared to English’s two. These are:

nhaa = he/she (near)

wala = he/she (mid-distant)

ngunhu or ngunhaa = he/she (far away) These two terms can be used interchangeably, although in some contexts the latter expresses greater emphasis.

Furthermore, all these words can also mean this or that.

In Yindjibarndi, only the 3rd Person pronouns differentiate based on the relative distance between the speaker and the person reference, though the Yindjibarndi pronoun paradigm as a whole will be the subject of a future blog post for the simple reason that it is insanely specific in its non-singular forms.

Here are a number of sentences:

nhaa punhthakayi tyarnkuu = She will wash herself or He will wash himself

punhthakayi is composed of two parts.

punhtha means to wash or to bathe, and -kayi is the Potential Mood Marker, which has several uses, the relevant one here referring to an event which is likely to happen in the future.

tyarnkuu is the Objective Case declension of tyarnku, wich means self or oneself. The Objective Case, as implied by the name, is used to show that something is the object upon which the verb acts.

(Yindjibarndi hails from the Pilbara region of Western Australia. This region is quite probably the most remote in all Australia, and thus the aboriginal languages here are better protected from the inevitable advance of English.)

Our second sentence:

wala nyinku kartaatyaala = The man or woman over there may spear you

I have translated wala as the man or woman over there because he or she over there is not a valid English construction.

nyinku is the Objective Case Declension of nyinta, which is the 2nd Person Singular Pronoun, or the English you but referring to one person only.

kartaatyaala means may spear, and is composed of three parts.

kartaa means to pierce or to poke, particularly with an instrument. This same verb can also mean to write.

-tyaa is the Optative Mood Suffix (for L-Stem verbs). In many languages, the Optative Mood is used to indicate a wish or hope. In Yindjibarndi, however, it is used to indicate a 50/50 chance that something will happen.

-la, meanwhile, is the Locative Suffix, which can be used with both nouns and verbs.

In either of the two sentences above, you can replace the words nhaa or wala with their far-away counterparts ngunhu or ngunhaa.

ngunhu I would translate as the man or woman over yonder and ngunhaa as that one over yonder.

In case you’re wondering, yonder is an old-fashioned English word which means something further away than over there. Nowadays it is mostly used by people who wish to make themselves sound more antiquated or medieval, e.g. in High Fantasy.

(The logo for the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corportation, which takes care of the interests of the interests of the Yindjibarndi people in their native lands. Their Facebook page will be included in the Source list.)

3-5: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow (Jarawara)

The Jarawara language is spoken by around 4,000 people, who call themselves the Jamamadi, in the western Amazon jungle, not far from the Peruvian border.

According to the grammar, it lacks any „native lexemes“ (i.e. individual words) for the English Temporal Nouns yesterday, today and tomorrow, among many others. This implies that the Jamamadi people have adopted their Portuguese equivalents.

However, in order to express these ideas in Jarawara, one must rely on a combination of various verbal suffixes and other grammatical features. Due to the complexity of this particular area of Jarawara grammar, for the purposes of time we shall focus on a single word hibajata, which is rather rare.

The meaning of hibajata is highly dependent on other grammatical aspects present in the sentence. It means something along the lines of close in time, and can refer to the past or future.

Also, it only ever appears alongside either kaa or jaa. For example:

hibajata kaa bahi tokaka = Later on today the sun will set / Lit. Later on today, the sun is in motion away

In this sentence, hibajata means later on today. kaa is what is known as a Peripheral Marker, and it would take far too long to explain how it works.

bahi means sun or the sun, and is a Masculine Noun. (Jarawara has two grammatical genders, Masculine and Feminine)

tokaka is comprised of three parts. The first to–, is the Away Prefix (yes, really), and is used to indicate movement away from something.

The first ka- is a Verbal Modifier which is used to show that something is in motion. To some extent it is a direct equivalent to the English Gerundive -ing.

The second ka-, meanwhile, is the Masculine Declarative Suffix. In Jarawara, the Declarative Suffix is used to show that the sentence is a normal indicative sentence, i.e. no complicated moods to understand.

(A Jarawara man at work in his hut. A few generations ago the Jarawara lived an exclusively hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but have since adopted slash-and-burn agriculture. They also keep dogs, and many Jarawara families also keep a monkey as a pet).

Our second sentence is thus:

mee afi tonamarake hibajata jaa = They just went to take a bath

In this case, hibajataa now means something along the lines of just now. jaa is another Peripheral Marker, which is different to kaa, and would also take too long to explain.

Here, mee is the equivalent to English they.

afi is the Infinitive form of to bathe.

tonamarake is a word formed of 5 components.

to is the Away Prefix which we saw earlier.

na is the Auxiliary Prefix. In this sentence, it combines with afi in order to mean something along the lines of take a bath.

ma means something along the lines of back to a place. When combined with the in-motion suffix ka (which we see in the previous sentence), forming kama, we have something approaching the English verb to return.

The suffix ra, despite being very small, encodes a lot of information. First of all, it encodes the Immediate Past (as oppose to Recent or Far Past). Secondly, it indicates that an eyewitness was present to confirm that the event took place. Finally, it is also Feminine.

Last, but not least, we have ke, which is the Feminine Declarative Suffix, which is the Feminine equivalent of the ka, which we see above.

If you are interested in learning more about the Jarawara language of Brazil, I have discussed other aspects of the language in a previous blog post, wherein I compared it to the similar-sounding Jarawa language of India.

(The Purus River, along which the Jamamadi and other tribes live. Although the Jamamadi rely heavily on trade with the neighbouring brancos, they prefer to keep a distance, being about a days travel away.

Also, branco refers to a Brazilian resident of European descent. It is derived from the Portuguese word for white, and is the white-person equivalent of the word negro, albeit without certain connotations).

In conclusion, these are just 5 English words that are not found in other languages. Personally, I feel that there should be more lists like these online, maybe ones designed for an audience with less of a linguistic background.

I assume that most of you have come across at least one online list or video titled something along the lines of Foreign Words that don’t exist in English.

While I enjoy consuming such content myself, I feel that the reverse, such as this article, are more interesting since these words challenge the current vocabulary of English, while those in the other sort of list could be added to the language without too much, if any, difficulty.

Typically, in my next post I would talk about another language. However, I have decided that it could be a good idea to instead explore the languages mentioned above in greater detail.

Since we explored Tzutujil in the previous post, we’ll wait a while before we do so in future. Thus, in our next article we will travel to Australia in order to discuss the many, and I really do mean many, pronouns in Yindjibarndi. Until then,

Same Wilf-time!

Same Wilf-channel!

Sources:

Google Images

Jon P. Dayley, Tzutujil Grammar (California: University of California Press 1985)

https://aprende.guatemala.com/cultura-guatemalteca/etnias/palabras-idioma-tzutujil-guatemala/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinjibarndi_language

F. J. F. Wordick The Yindjibarndi Language (Canberra: Australian National University 1982)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optative_mood

https://www.facebook.com/Yindjibarndi/

R. M. W. Dixon The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004)

Comparison: Jarawa vs Jarawara

Today, we shall be exploring a number of the similarities and differences present between two languages with similar names, namely the Jarawa language of India and the Jarawara language of Brazil. Before we can get to this, however, our two languages must first introduce themselves.

Jarawa, also spelt Järawa or Jarwa, boasts approximately 260 speakers scattered across a number of the Andaman Islands, which belong to the nation of India, though geographically they lie far closer to the nation of Myanmar. The name Jarawa does not exist in the language itself. Rather, it means foreigner in the language of the Aka-Bea, the Jarawa’s main nemesis.

The Jarawa refer to themselves as əng, which simply means people.

This language is one of two members of the Ongan family, which occupy the Jarawa and Onge islands that comprise the main bulk of the Andaman Islands.

(If you wish to learn about the demographic make-up of the Andaman Islands, I would highly recommend that you watch the YouTube video that is included in the source list.)

Jarawara, meanwhile, enjoys a nudge over 1,000 speakers in the western part of Amazonas State in Brazil, hidden deep within the Amazon jungle. It has three distinct dialects, all of which are mutually intelligible with each other, although their speakers refer to them as separate languages in order to differentiate the separate tribes which speak them.

Jarawara is a member of the Arawan language family, which consists of around a half dozen members scattered throughout the western edge of the Amazon jungle, with a few creeping over the border into Peru.

(The location of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Andaman Islands, where Jarawa can be found, are those visible within the red rectangle, whereas the Nicobar Islands are simply too small to be visible at this scale.)

Sentence 1:

In order to ease ourselves into this comparison, we will start with a very simple sentence.

English: I am eating

Jarawa: mi tita

Jarawara: otafa oke

At first, the Jarawa language looks very simple, and in truth it is.

The first word, mi, is the 1st Person Pronoun, and it does not change depending on number. Thus, it means both I and we. 

In fact, Jarawa has the simplest pronoun paradigm I have ever seen, with only three pronouns, though there are few potential variations of the 2nd and 3rd Person.

tita, meanwhile, is composed of two parts. The first, t-, is a variant of -ɖi, which sometimes denotes either Referentiality, which refers to an event within sight of the speaker &/or hearer, or Definiteness, which refers to a non-visual object whose reference is derived from preceding context.

ita, meanwhile, is simply the root for the verb to eat.

The Jarawara sentence, meanwhile, works quite differently to its Jarawa counterpart, with one notable similarity.

Both words begin with the Prefix o-, which indicates the 1st Person Singular. In both of the words above, it acts as a Conjugation marker, though it possesses other functions.

The first word otafa, is built from the above explained prefix and -tafa, which is the root for the verb meaning to eat.

The second component of the second word is -ke, also known as the Feminine Declarative Suffix, whose purpose is to indicate that the action described is a statement of fact.

The Masculine equivalent, -ka, also serves a number of other purposes, which we shall explore below. As a Declarative Suffix, however, it is only used when the subject of the sentence is referred to as a man in the 3rd person, whether this comes in the form of a male name or 3rd person pronoun.

Thus, for the above statement, it does not matter whether the speaker is a man or a woman. 

(The approximate location of the Jarawara peoples and their languages. The state of Amazonas is the largest in the country, and is larger than the combined area of Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile.)

Section 2:

In this section, we will explore several different meanings for the Jarawara Affix ka, which appears as both a suffix and a prefix.

English: My brother-in-law is coming

Jarawa:  mawela allema

Jarawara: owabori kakeka

First, we will discuss the Jarawa sentence, which is the simpler of the two grammatically.

mawela means my brother-in-law, referring specifically to the brother of the speaker’s wife, and is comprised of the noun awela and the 1st Possessive Pronoun ma or mi, but because this is an Inalienably Possessed Noun, it is prefixed to the noun.

In Jarawa, most body parts and kinship terms are Inalienably Possessed. Put simply, this means that they are inseparable from the humans who possess them. Thus, if you did not whose brother-in-law was on the way, you would be obliged to use the term wawela, which means his/her brother-in-law.

allema, meanwhile, simply means come, though depending on context it can also mean came.

The Jarawara sentence, meanwhile, begins much the same as the Jarawa, with the word owabori, which means brother-in-law, though it can also refer to someone’s male cross-cousin (i.e. the son of either your mother’s brother or father’s sister).

The first part, o- is the 1st Person Singular Prefix to which we gave considerable attention in the previous section. When attached to a noun, it acts as a Possessive.

kakeka is comprised of three components.

First, we begin with the Applicative Prefix ka-, which has a number of effects. In this context it refers to something being in motion.

Our second component is the Suffix -ke, which refers to motion towards the place where the speaker is located. Depending on a number of phonological (sound) rules, however, it can also take the form -ki, though we will not discuss these rules here. (To add to that, there are a number of further variations which encode additional information)

Last, but not least, we have the Masculine Declarative Suffix -ka, which is used to convey that this sentence is a statement of fact.

(Within the Andaman archipelago lies North Sentinel Island, whose inhabitants are notoriously hostile to outsiders. Based on information collected via satellite, it is possible that following the tribe may have recently initiated its iron age following the washing ashore of a containment tanker.)

Section 3:

In the first two sentences, we focused on the Present Tense, which resulted in sentences that seemed to have a greater number of similarities than differences.

In this section, we will discuss the Future Tense, and how this manifests quite differently between these two enigmatic languages.

English: I will cut down the tree tomorrow

Jarawa: kahiunen mi tang odehehə

Jarawara: awa kaa onaminahabanake

The word kahiunen means tomorrow, though like in German, the same word can also mean morning, or in the morning.

The second word mi, is the 1st Person Pronoun which we discussed earlier, and can also mean we.

The third word tang, means tree. Like English, Jarawa nouns have both singular and plural forms. To build a plural, you add the Suffix -le, which gives us tangle. However, Plural Marking is not obligatory, and the above sentence could easily refer to more than one tree.

odehehə, meanwhile, is built from odehe, which is the verb stem meaning to cut, and the Hypothetical Mood Suffix -hə.

The Hypothetical Mood is used to indicate that it is doubtful whether or not the action described will occur, or a past event whose authenticity is in question. Both of these shades of meaning are indicated via the Suffix -hə.

Aside from a Word Order which tends to place the Object before the Verb, the Jarawara sentence is built very differently.

The word awa is the generic word for tree, and is a Feminine Noun. As expected for a language located deep within a rainforest, there are a number of words for specific species of tree.

(On a side tangent, the words ama and atari have several related meanings which refer to both humans and trees. ama means blood, menstruation and tree sap; while the word atari means skin, fish scales and tree bark.)

Secondly, we have kaa, which is the Infinitive of the Verb for to chop, and it does not conjugate, i.e. it remains forever unchanged.

onaminahabanake, meanwhile, is indeed the monster of a word that it appears to be. Naturally, we will slice this word into sections and examine each in turn.

To start, I will briefly mention the first and last segments, these being o- and -ke, which are the 1st Person Singular Prefix and the Feminine Declarative Marker respectively.

This leaves us with the middle -naminahabana-, which is a magic middle, in the sense that it can be divided by three.

Immediately following the 15th letter of the Latin Alphabet is the Applicative Suffix -na. This is a necessary addition to a sentence whose main verb does not conjugate.

Or in plainer English, you can think of it as meaning something like do or make. Thus, if you put kaa and -na(-) together, you get something akin to do the chopping or make the chopping, though hopefully not as clunky.

Following on we meet the suffix -mina, which means tomorrow.

In contrast to English and Jarawa, the Jarawara language has no individual words for tomorrow, today, yesterday and a number of other time markers. These all manifest themselves as Verbal Suffixes.

Our final suffix, -habana, is the Feminine Future Suffix. (The masculine equivalent is the confusingly similar -hibana.)

(The Purus river, along which the Jarawara live. On the whole they are a sedentary people who derive most of their livelihood through hunting, gathering and fishing.)

Section 4:

In this section, we explore another significant difference between these two languages. Namely, that the latter has a separate mood for Reported Speech, while the former does not.

English: The pig is reported to have eaten a banana

Jarawa: hi atyiba h^wəwə čonel ita

Jarawara: boroko jifari tafahimonaha

This time around, we will begin by analysing the Jarawara sentence.

We start with the word boroko, which is a variation of the Portuguese word porco, which means pig, and is a Masculine Noun.

Preceding this we have jifari, which means banana.

tafahimonaha is composed of two moving parts. The first part, which we have seen before, is tafa, which means to eat.

The second part, himonaha, is the Masculine Reported Speech Suffix. This means that the speaker has, at best, second-hand evidence that the event described took place. The Feminine equivalent of this is hamonehe, though with this being said, they each have a number of reduced variants depending on other grammatical factors.

Reported Speech does not exist as a separate mood in English. Instead, you use a construct along the lines of is said to have or is supposed to have.

Now we move to the Jarawa sentence.

Our first clause is the simple phrase hi atyiba, which is formed from hi, which is the 3rd person pronoun, and atyiba, which means say or said.

Word for word it means s/he said, though one could instead it is said, which sounds more natural in this context.

h^wəwə means pig, while čonel means banana.

ita, meanwhile, is formed from ita, which means either eat or ate.

Taken altogether, the Jarawa sentence translates roughly as: it is said, (that) the pig ate the banana.

(In 2017, a new species of wild banana was found within the dense jungle of the Andaman Islands. It has been named Musa paramjitiana in honour of Paramjit Singh, the director of the Botanical Survey of India.)

In conclusion, I hope that this has been an interesting comparison between two languages who are little heard of even within their own home countries, let alone outside of them.

I would also like to mention that there is another language known as Jarawa, which is spoken in Nigeria. I was unable to find any grammatical resources for this language, so for the time being there won’t be a comparison between two languages with the exact same (English) name.

This has no doubt left many people heartbroken.

Our next exploration will take us north to Alaska, where we will discuss the Eyak language of Prince William Sound. Until then,

Same Wilf-time!

Same Wilf-channel!

Sources:

Pramod Kumar, Descriptive and Typological Study of Jarawa (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University 2012)

R. M. W. Dixon, The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004)

Google Images

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andaman_Islands

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad%C3%AD_language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arawan_languages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazonas_(Brazilian_state)

https://currentaffairs.gktoday.in/musa-paramjitiana-species-wild-banana-discovered-andaman-nicobar-11201749745.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarawa_language_(Andaman_Islands)