Aymara language

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Aymara is an Aymaran language spoken by the Aymara of the Andes. It is one of only a handful of Native American languages with over a million speakers, and it is one of the official languages of Bolivia and Peru. It is also spoken in Chile and Argentina.

Many linguists believe that Aymara is related to its more widely-spoken neighbour, Quechua. This claim, however, is disputed — although there are indeed similarities, critics say that these may simply be areal features resulting from prolonged interaction between the two languages.

The Aymara language is an inflected language, and has a subject-object-verb word order.

Etymology

Thus, "jaya mara aru", or simply "aimara", signifies "ancient language".

Phonology

Aymara has three phoneme vowels (/a i u/, which distinguish two degrees of length. The high vowels are lowered to mid height before uvular consonants (/i/ → [e], /u/ → [o]).

As for the consonants, Aymara has phonemic stops at the labial, alveolar, palatal, velar and uvular points of articulation. Stops show no distinction of voice (e.g. there is no phonemic contrast between [p] and [b]), but each stop has three forms: plain (unaspirated), glottalized, and aspirated. Aymara also has a trilled /r/, and an alveolar/palatal contrast for nasals and laterals, as well as two semivowels (/w/ and /j/).

Stress is usually on the penult (the syllable before the last one), but long vowels may shift it.

History

Some believe that the Aymara language descends from the language spoken in Tiwanaku. This cannot be proven, but it is known that the language was spoken by the rich Aymara kingdoms, who were later conquered by the Inca. Aymara is one of three extant languages of the Jaqi language family along with Jaqaru and Kawki. This family was established by the research of Martha James Hardman de Bautista of the Program in Linguistics at the University of Florida. Jaqaru [jaqi aru = human language] and Kawki communities are in the district of Tupe, Yauyos Valley, in the Dept. of Lima, Peru. Jaqaru has approximately 5,000 native speakers, nearly all Spanish bilinguals. Kawki is spoken in a neighboring community by a very small number of mostly elderly individuals and is a dying language.

Geographical distribution

There are 1.2 million Bolivian speakers, 300 thousand Peruvian speakers, 50 thousand Chilean speakers and about 10,000 Argentinean speakers.

While the Aymara language is basically the same wherever it is spoken, there are regional differences. The Aymara spoken in La Paz, Bolivia is considered the purest form of the language. Of the regional variations, the 200,000 Aymara speakers from the border of Peru to Puno use the form most similar to the Aymara spoken in La Paz. There are also about 90,000 Aymara speakers in the provinces of Huancane and Moho in the department of Puno in Peru. While understood by Aymaristas from other regions, the Aymara spoken in Huancane and Moho seems to contain the most regional differences.

Unique features

The language has attracted interest because it is based on a three value logic system, and thus supposedly has better expressiveness than many other languages based on binary logic.

It is cited by the author Umberto Eco in The Search for the Perfect Language as a language of immense flexibility, capable of accommodating many neologisms. Ludovico Bertonio published Arte de la lengua aymara in 1603. He remarked that the language was particularly useful for expressing abstract concepts. In 1860 Emeterio Villamil de Rada suggested it was "the language of Adam" (la lengua de Adán). Guzmán de Rojas has suggested that it be used as an intermediary language for computerised translation.

Linguistic and gestural analysis by Núñez and Sweetser also assert that the Aymara have an apparently unique, or at least very rare, understanding of time, and is also the only language found so far where speakers seem to represent the past as in front of them and the future as behind them. Their argument is situated mainly within the framework of conceptual metaphor, which recognizes in general two subtypes of the metaphor THE PASSAGE OF TIME IS MOTION: one is TIME PASSING IS MOTION OVER A LANDSCAPE (or "moving-ego"), and the other is TIME PASSING IS A MOVING OBJECT ("moving-events"). The latter metaphor does not explicitly involve the individual/speaker; events are in a queue, with prior events towards the front of the line. The individual may be facing the queue, or it may be moving from left to right in front of him/her.

The claims regarding Aymara involve the moving-ego metaphor. Most languages conceptualize the ego as moving forward into the future, with ego's back to the past. The English sentences prepare for what lies before us and we are facing a prosperous future, and possibly the Chinese word [[wiktionary:未來|未來]] (lit. not yet come, meaning future) exemplify this metaphor. In contrast, Aymara seems to encode the past as in front of individuals, and the future in back; this is typologically a rare phenomenon.

It should be noted that many languages, including English and Chinese, have words like before/[[wiktionary:前|前]] and after/[[wiktionary:後|後]] that are (currently or archaically) polysemous between 'front/earlier' or 'back/later'. This seemingly refutes the claims regarding Aymara uniqueness. However, these words relate events to other events, i.e., are part of the moving-events metaphor. In fact, when before means in front of ego, it can only mean future. For instance, our future is laid out before us while our past is behind us. Parallel Aymara examples describe future days as qhipa uru, literally 'back days', and these are sometimes accompanied by gestures to behind the speaker.

References

• Núñez, R., & Sweetser, E. [With the Future Behind Them : Convergent Evidence From Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time.] Cognitive Science, 30(3), 1-49.

See also

• List of Spanish words of Indigenous American Indian origin

External links