Battle of Honey Springs

Itonama is a moribund or extinct language isolate once spoken by the Itonama people in the Amazonian lowlands of north-eastern Bolivia. It was spoken on the Itonomas River and Lake[2] in Beni Department.

In Magdalena town on the western bank of the Itonama River (a tributary of the Iténez River), located in Iténez Province, only a few elderly people remember a few words and phrases.[3]: 483 

Language contact

Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Nambikwaran languages due to contact.[4]

An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)[5] found lexical similarities between Itonama and Movima, likely due to contact.

Phonology

Vowels

Front Central Back
High i ɨ u
Mid e o
Low a

Diphthongs: /ai au/.

Consonants

Bilabial Alveolar Post-
alveolar
Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal m n
Plosive/
Affricate
plain p t k ʔ
ejective tʃʼ
voiced b d
Fricative s h
Liquid lateral l
rhotic ɾ
Semivowel w j

The postalveolar affricates /tʃ tʃʼ/ have alveolar allophones [ts tsʼ]. Variation occurs between speakers, and even within the speech of a single person.

The semivowel /w/ is realized as a bilabial fricative [β] when preceded and followed by identical vowels.

Morphology

Itonama is a polysynthetic, head-marking, verb-initial language with an accusative alignment system along with an inverse subsystem in independent clauses, and straightforward accusative alignment in dependent clauses.

Nominal morphology lacks case declension and adpositions and so is simpler than verbal morphology (which has body-part and location incorporation, directionals, evidentials, verbal classifiers, among others).[6]

Vocabulary

Loukotka (1968) lists the following basic vocabulary items for Itonama.[2]

gloss Itonama
one chash-káni
two chash-chupa
tooth huomóte
tongue páchosníla
hand mapára
woman ubíka
water huanúhue
fire ubári
moon chakakáshka
maize udáme
jaguar ótgu
house úku

See also

Further reading

  • Camp, E. L.; Liccardi, M. R. (1967). Itonama, castellano e inglés. (Vocabularios Bolivianos, 6.) Riberalta: Summer Institute of Linguistics.

References

  1. ^ a b Itonama at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed access icon
  2. ^ a b Loukotka, Čestmír (1968). Classification of South American Indian languages. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center.
  3. ^ Epps, Patience; Michael, Lev, eds. (2023). Amazonian Languages: Language Isolates. Volume I: Aikanã to Kandozi-Chapra. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-041940-5.
  4. ^ Jolkesky, Marcelo Pinho de Valhery (2016). Estudo arqueo-ecolinguístico das terras tropicais sul-americanas (Ph.D. dissertation) (2 ed.). Brasília: University of Brasília.
  5. ^ Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013).
  6. ^ Crevels, M. Who did what to whom in Magdalena. p. 3.

External links