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| Panare | |
|---|---|
| Eʼñapa Woromaipu | |
| Native to | Venezuela |
| Region | just south of the Orinoco River,Estado Bolívar |
| Ethnicity | 4,300Panare people (2001 census)[1] |
Native speakers | 3,500 (2001 census)[1] 2,480 monolinguals (mostly women)[1] |
Cariban
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | pbh |
| Glottolog | enap1235 |
| ELP | Panare |
Panare is aCariban language, spoken by thePanare, who number 3,000–4,000 and live inBolivar State in centralVenezuela. Their main area is South of the town of Caicara del Orinoco, south of theOrinoco River. There are several subdialects of the language. The autonym for the people ise'ñapá, which has various senses depending on context, including 'people', 'indigenous-people', and 'Panare-people'. The term for the language isEʼñapa Woromaipu. The term "Panare" itself is a Tupí word that means "friend."[2] It is unusual in havingobject–verb–agent as one of its main word orders, the other being the more commonverb–agent–object. It also displays the typologically uncommon property of an ergative–absolutive alignment in the non-perfective aspects and a nominative–accusative alignment in perfective aspect.
Panare is a member of theCariban language family, though its sub-grouping within the family is a matter of contention. The first decades of attempted classifications were largely rejected by linguists; a uniform classification of all proposed members of the Cariban family was introduced byTerrence Kaufman (1994).[3][4] This grouping, still widely used by linguists, classifies Panare as a member of the Southern Amazonian branch, with no cousin languages.
However, Spike Gildea has criticized this grouping as relying on faulty data used for earlier classifications by Durbin andLoukotka that have been since rejected for this reason. In 2012, Gildea put forth his own classification, which groups Panare as a member of the Venezuelan Carib branch, and in turn, part of the low-levelPemóng-Panare branch.[5] This classification has been considered an improvement by linguists such asLyle Campbell and Doris & Thomas Payne, but it has yet to replace the Kaufman grouping, largely due to its relative youth.[needs update]
The speakers of Panare (called E'ñepa (lit. "people") in their own language) live inBolívar, Venezuela, west of theCuchivero basin of theOrinoco River.[6] Up until the 21st century, the Panare had few contacts with non-indigenous peoples (the few being explorers and anthropologists). However, increasing interactions with Venezuelans has led to widespreadbilingualism withSpanish.[7]
Panare contains approximately 14 contrasting consonant phonemes, with variation depending on dialect and origins of certain lexical items (see: Notes).
| Labial | Alveolar | Alveo- | Velar | Glottal[8] | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | (ŋ) | |
| Plosive | p | t | t͡ɕ | k | ʔ |
| Fricative | s | h | |||
| Glide | w | j | |||
| Flap | ɾ |
Panare contains 7 contrasting vowel phonemes.
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i | ɨ | u |
| Mid | e | ə | o |
| Low | a |
Notes
/n/ = [ŋ]/_#, _C[-alveolar]/[n] elsewhere; /ɲ/ has phonemic status in loanwords from Spanish, and is an allophone in native words; Payne & Payne (2013) consider /ʔ/ and /h/ to be different allophones of an “underlying pharyngeal approximate,” that releases differently depending on environment. There are also records of these two phones occurring in free variation, which may be attributed to once-distinct dialects being merged into communities of speakers with idiolectical contrasts.[9]
Panare is best classified as a heavy-agglutinating language that verges onpolysynthesis. Many of itsmorphemes can be clearly identified byroots that remain isolated across inflectional processes, andinflection by multipleaffixes is usually light. Words can grow long and complicated, but they can usually be rooted in one firm idea, rather than something akin to a process-based sentence.[10]
However, elements of polysynthesis appear in how roots are initially inflected. Essentially, most roots (that are not complements) arebound morphemes in some way, and require at least one inflectional morpheme until they can be used as units in a sentence. For example:
Panare sentence structure does not follow a strictword order, but a flexible one. In most studies, it is classified as anobject-initial language.[12][13] However,subject-object-verb andsubject-verb-object are known to appear frequently as well.[14] This kind of "object-initial tendency" is quite common in Amazonia, where sentence structure is often more consistently arranged through clause construction type than word order.[15] As a result, Panare and its neighboring languages often usecase markings as a way of ordering howconstituents of a sentence affect each other.[16][17]
Future, desiderative, and nonspecific aspect clauses in Panare instantiate the cross-linguistically rarenominative–absolutive alignment. An example is given below.[18]: 162
Yutësejpa (këj) kën.
/j-u-tə-sehpa (kəh) kən/
s-V s.AUX S
3-SA-go-FUT 3.ANIM.COP 3.ANIM.DIST
‘S/he will go.’
Yamasejpa (këj) kën.
/j-ama-sehpa (kəh) kən/
p-V a.AUX A
3-SA-throw.away-FUT 3.ANIM.COP 3.ANIM.DIST
‘S/he will throw away it/him/her.’
In Panare nominative–absolutive clauses, thenominative andabsolutive are distinguished as follows. The unmarkednominative (pro)noun (if it occurs explicitly) always follows the predicate (kën in the example above), withnominative agreement in the auxiliary if there is one (këj in the example above). In contrast, theabsolutive arguments are indexed by means of verbal prefixes (y- in the example above) or by absolutive nouns phrases (not shown above), which are in acomplimentary distribution with the absolutive person prefixes.
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