P'urhépecha language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| P'urhépecha, Tarascan, Phorhé P'urhépecha |
||
|---|---|---|
| Pronunciation: | IPA: [pʰuɽˈepetʃa] | |
| Spoken in: | Michoacán, Mexico | |
| Total speakers: | ~120,000 | |
| Language family: | Language isolate | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | tsz | |
| ISO/FDIS 639-3: | pua | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
The P'urhépecha (also Tarascan, Tarasco, Phorhé, Purepecha) language is a language isolate spoken by more than 100,000 P'urhépecha people in the highlands of the Mexican state of Michoacán. Even though it is spoken within the boundaries of Mesoamerica P'urhépecha does not share many of the traits defining the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area probably due to a long adherance to an isolationist policy.
P'urhépecha was the official language of the pre-Columbian Tarascan state and became widespread in north western Mexico during the height of the Tarascan state.
Contents |
[edit] Geographical extension
The P'urhépecha language is mostly spoken in rural communities in the highlands of Michoacán. The former center of the Tarascan state was around lake Pátzcuaro and this remains an important center of the P'urhépecha community. The ethnologue counts two variants of P'urhépecha: the central dialect of spokeen by approximately 120,000 people (1990) around Pátzcuaro and the western highland variety spoken around Zamora, Los Reyes de Salgado, Paracho, and Pamatácuaro all of which are in the vicinity of the Paricutín volcano.
[edit] Classification
P'uréhepecha has been included by Greenberg (1987) in the Chibchan language family but this idea is rejected by most linguists and Campbell's (Campbell 1997) authoritative classification lists P'urhépecha as an isolate.
[edit] Phonology
This phonemic inventory is given for the Tarecuato dialect of P'urhépecha by Paul de Wolf (1989). The Tarecuato dialect is phonologically different from other dialects by having a velar nasal phoneme which the others lack. All dialects of P'urhépecha have phonemic stress (denoted by acute accent in transcriptions of P'urhépecha words).
[edit] Vowels
The central high unrounded vowel /ɨ/ is written as <ï> in the transcription below.
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close (high) |
i | ɨ | u |
| Mid | e | o | |
| Open (low) |
ɑ |
[edit] Consonants
It is interesting to note that P'urhépecha is one of only two Mesoamerican languages (the other is Huave) which does not have a phonemic glottal stop. It contrasts plain and aspirated stops and affricates and it has two r-sounds (one of them retroflex) but no lateral.
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | aspirated | plain | aspirated | plain | aspirated | plain | aspirated | ||
| Stops | p | pʰ | t | tʰ | k | kʰ | |||
| Fricatives | s | ʃ | x | ||||||
| Affricates | ʦ | ʦʰ | ʧ | ʧʰ | |||||
| Nasals | m | n | ŋ | ||||||
| Liquids | r | ɽ | |||||||
| Approximants | w | j | |||||||
[edit] Grammar
The P'urhépecha language is agglutinating and exclusively suffixing and has a large number of suffixes (160 according to Pollard 1993) and clitics. It has no noun compounding or incorporation. The verb distinguishes thirteen aspects and six modes. It has a nominal case system distinguishing nominative, accusative, genitive, and locative cases, but also a large number of nominal derivational affixes. Basic word order is SVO, but other word orders are commonly used for pragmatic purposes (Capistrán 2002).
[edit] The Noun
Plural of a noun is formed by a suffix -echa/-icha or -cha (de Wolf 1989)
kúmi-wátsï "fox" - kúmi-wátsïcha "foxes" iréta "town" - irétaacha "towns" warhíticha tepharicha maru "some fat women (lit. women fat some)"
The nominative case is not marked, but the accusative (also called objective) case, used to mark direct and sometimes indirect objects, is marked by a suffix -ni
-
- Pedrú pyásti tsúntsuni "Pedro bought the pot"
- Pedrú pyá-s-ti tsúntsu-ni
- Pedro buy-PRF-3ind pot-ACC
Genitive is expressed by a suffix -ri or -eri.
-
- imá wárhitiri wíchu "that woman's dog"
- imá wárhiti-ri wíchu
- that woman-GEN dog
A clitic -sï is used to mark emphasis or focus on a noun or noun phrase (Capistrán 2002).
-
- Ampésï arhá Pedrú? "What did Pedro eat?"
- ampé-sï arh-Ø-Ø-á Pedrú
- what-FOC eat-PRF-INT Pedro
-
- kurúchasï atí. "it was fish that he ate"
- Kurúcha-sï a-Ø-tí
- fish-FOC eat-PRF-3IND
[edit] The Verb
The P'urhépecha verb inflects for aspects and modes. There are also a number of suffixes expressing position or bodyparts affecting or affected by the verbal action. Transitivity is manipulated by suffixes forming transitive verbs with applicative or causative meaning or intransitives with passive or inchoative meanings.
[edit] References
- Campbell, Lyle (1997). American Indian languages: the historical linguistics of Native America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.
- Capistrán, Alejandra, 2002, "Variaciones de Orden de Constituyenctes en P'orhépecha" in Ed. Paulette Levy, Del Cora al Maya Yucateco: Estudios linguisticos sobre algunas lenguas indígenas Mexicanas, UNAM, Mexico
- Greenberg, Joseph 1987. Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- Pollard, Helen Perlstein, 1993, Taríacuris Legacy: the prehispanic Tarascan state, University of Oklahoma Press.
- de Wolf, Paul, 1989, Estudios Linguisticos sobre la lengua P'orhé, Colegio de Michoacan, Mexico
