Ventureño language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Ventureño | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Southern Californian coastal areas | |
| Language extinction: | early 20th century | |
| Language family: | Chumashan Southern Central Ventureño |
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | nai | |
| ISO 639-3: | veo | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Ventureño is one of the extinct Chumash languages, a group of Native American languages previously spoken along the coastal areas of Southern California from as far north as San Luis Obispo to as far south as Malibu. Ventureño was spoken from as far north as present-day Ventura to as far south as present-day Malibu.
Ventureño, like its sister languages, is a polysynthetic language, having larger words composed of a number of morphemes. Ventureño has separate word classes of verb, noun, and oblique adjunct (Wash 2001); with no separate word class of adjective or adposition. Nouns and verbs are often heavily affixed (prefixed mostly) in Ventureño, affixing being a way to denote those meanings often conveyed by separate words in more analytic languages. Verbs play a primary role in Ventureño with utterances often composed only of a verb with clitics. Chumash word order is VSO/VOS, or VS&VO (as per Dryer 1997).
Contents |
[edit] Sounds
Ventureño has a similar phonemic inventory to its sister language, Barbareño. Ventureño consists of 30 consonants and 6 vowels.
[edit] Vowels
Ventureño conists of a regular 5-vowel inventory with a sixth vowel that Harrington transcribes as <ə>. In Barbareño transcriptions,<ɨ> is used. It is not known whether these two phones are the same in both languages (and the difference in transcription is merely one of convention), or whether the sounds were in fact different enough for Harrington to use different symbols.
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | ə | u |
| Mid | e | o | |
| Open | a |
[edit] Consonants
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Postalveolar/ Palatal |
Velar | Uvular | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | |||||
| Plosive | plain | p | t | k | q | ʔ | |
| ejective | pʼ | tʼ | kʼ | qʼ | |||
| aspirated | pʰ | tʰ | kʰ | qʰ | |||
| Affricate | plain | ts | tʃ | ||||
| ejective | tsʼ | tʃʼ | |||||
| aspirated | tsʰ | tʃʰ | |||||
| Fricative | plain | s | ʃ | x | h | ||
| aspirated | sʰ | ʃʰ | |||||
| Approximant | l (ɬ)1 | j | w | ||||
- Ventureño has only one lateral, /l/. However, /l/ has a distinct allophone [ɬ] that Harrington includes in his transcriptions.
[edit] Sample Vocabulary
(see citation below for Harrington)
'aɬhašə'əš;: n. language; word
kuku'u: n. people
k'uwe: conj. but
[edit] References
- Dryer, Matthew S. 1997. "On the Six-Way Word Order Typology," Studies in Language 21(1): 69-103.
- Harrington, John Peabody. 1981. The Papers of John Peabody Harrington in the Smithsonian 1907-1957: A Guide to the Field Notes: Native American History, Language, and Culture of Southern California/Basin, vol. 3. Elaine L. Mills and Ann J. Brockfield, eds. Microfilm reels 69, 89, and 94 on Ventureño.
- Wash, Suzanne. 2001. Adverbial Clauses in Barbareño Chumash Narrative Discourse. PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara.
