| Macro-Arawakan | |
|---|---|
| Arawakan | |
| Geographic distribution: |
Widest geographical area of any language group in Latin America, see Geographic distribution. |
| Linguistic classification: | Macro-Arawakan |
| Subdivisions: |
Arawakan (Maipurean)
|
| ISO 639-5: | awd |
Arawakan languages (blue dots), Guajiboan languages (violet dots), and Arauan languages (green dots). Paler areas represent probable extension at the time of contact.
|
|
Macro-Arawakan is a proposed language family of South America and the Caribbean based on the Arawakan languages. Sometimes the proposal is called Arawakan, in which case the central family is called Maipurean.
Originally the name "Arawak" was used exclusively for a powerful tribe in Netherlands Antilles, Guyana and Suriname. The tribe became allies of the Spanish because they traditionally were enemies of the Carib groups with whom the Spanish were at war. Forms of the Arawak language are still spoken in Suriname.
Contents |
Filippo Gilii recognized the unity of the Maipure language of the Orinoco and Moxos of Bolivia in 1783, and named their family Maipure. It was renamed Arawak by Von den Steinen (1886) and Brinten (1891) after one of the most important languages of the family, Arawak in the Guianas. The modern equivalents are Maipurean or Maipuran and Arawak or Arawakan. The term Arawakan is now used in two senses. In South America, Aruák is generally used for the family demonstrated by Gilij and subsequent linguists. In North America, however, it has been extended to a hypothetical proposal that includes that adds the Guajiboan and Arawan families. The name Maipurean was then resurrected to distinguish the core family, though this is sometimes called core Arawak(an) or Arawak(an) proper instead.[1]
Kaufman (1990: 40) relates the following:
[The Arawakan] name is the one normally applied to what is here called Maipurean. Maipurean used to be thought to be a major subgroup of Arawakan, but all the living Arawakan languages, at least, seem to need to be subgrouped with languages already found within Maipurean as commonly defined. The sorting out of the labels Maipurean and Arawkan will have to await a more sophisticated classification of the languages in question than is possible at the present state of comparative studies.
The languages called Arawakan or Maipuran were originally recognized as a separate group in the late nineteenth century. Almost all the languages now called Arawakan share a first-person singular prefix nu-, but Arawak proper has ta-. Other commonalities include a second-person singular pi-, relative ka-, and negative ma-.
The Arawak language family, as constituted by L. Adam, at first by the name of Maypure, has been called by Von den Steinen "Nu-Arawak" from the prenominal prefix " nu " for the first person, common to all the Arawak tribes scattered along the coasts from Dutch Guiana to British Guiana.
In upper Paraguay, are also found tribes speaking the Arawak tongue; the Quinquinaos, the Layanas, etc. (This is the Moho-Mbaure group of L. Quevedo). In the islands of Marajos, in the middle of the estuary of the Amazon, there dwelt a few decades ago the Aruan people, who spoke an Arawak dialect, and in the peninsula of Goajira (north of Venezeula) is the Goajires tribe, which also belongs to the same language family. In 1890–95 De Brette estimated there to be 3,000 individuals.[2]
C. H. de Goeje's published vocabulary of 1928 outlines the Lokono/Arawak (Dutch and Guiana) 1400 items, mostly morphemes (stems, affixes) and morpheme partials (single sounds) – rarely compounded, derived, or otherwise complex sequences; and from Nancy P. Hickerson's British Guiana manuscript vocabulary of 500 items. However, most entries which reflect acculturation are direct borrowings from one or another of three model languages (Spanish, Dutch, English). Of the 1400 entries in de Goeje, 106 reflect European contact; 98 of these are loans. Nouns which occur with the verbalizing suffix described above number 9 out of the 98 loans.[3]
The Arawak word for maize is marisi, and various forms of this word are found among the other tribes:-
The Caribs clearly borrowed their word for maize from the Arawaks, for the Arawak radical is used by the females of that tribe, the males using an entirely different noun.[4]
The German pilgrim, Henry Beutel had established the village Pilgerhut by Fort Nassau on the Berbice River in 1739 and six years later a gentleman presented them with a Mulatto boy, who assisted them in acquiring a more correct knowledge of the Arawak language. The pilgrims found him of great use as an interpreter and he helped greatly in the translation of their bible. [5][6]
The Arawakan languages are spoken over a large swath of territory, from the eastern slopes of the central Andes Mountains in Peru and Bolivia, across the Amazon basin of Brazil, southward into Paraguay and northward into to Suriname, Guyana, Venezuela, and Colombia on the northern coast of South America, and even as far north as Belize and Guatemala. It is the largest family in the Americas with the respect to number of languages (also including much internal branching) and covers the widest geographical area of any language group in Latin America.
Taíno, commonly called Island Arawak, was spoken on the Caribbean islands of Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and the Bahamas. Many of the Taino descendants today speak English or Spanish peppered with a few Taino words. The Taíno language was very scantily attested; however, its classification within the Arawakan family is uncontroversial. Its closest relative among the better attested Arawakan languages seems to be the Goajiro language, spoken in Colombia. It has been suggested that the Goajiro are descended from Taíno refugees, but the theory seems impossible to prove or disprove.
The Carib people (after whom the Caribbean was named) formerly lived throughout the Lesser Antilles. In the seventeenth century, the language of the Island Carib was described by European missionaries as two separate unrelated languages—one spoken by the men of the society and the other by the women. The language spoken by the men was a language of the Carib family very similar to the Galibi language spoken in what later became French Guyana. The language spoken by the woman belonged to the Arawakan language family. One might conclude, though there is a minimum of supporting evidence, that the Carib language was first spoken in eastern Venezuela and the Guyanas. Also, because this peculiar dual gender-specific language arrangement was unstable and dynamic and cannot have been very old, the Carib speakers had only recently migrated north into the Lesser Antilles at the time of European contact, displacing or assimilating the Arawaks in the process.
The Island Carib language is now extinct, although Caribs still live on Dominica, Trinidad, St. Lucia and St. Vincent. Despite its name, Island Carib was an Arawak language, as is its derived modern language Garífuna (or Black Carib), which is thought to have about 590,000 speakers in Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Belize. The Garifuna are the descendants of Caribs and black escaped slaves of African origin, transferred by the British from Saint Vincent to islands in the Bay of Honduras in 1796. The Garifuna language continues the women's Arawak-based Island Carib language and only a few traces remain of the men's Carib speech.