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68-559: Yupʼik, like all Eskimo languages, is polysynthetic and uses suffixation as primary means for word formation. There are a great number of derivational suffixes (termed postbases ) that are used productively to form these polysynthetic words. Yupʼik has predominantly ergative alignment: case marking follows the ergative pattern for the most part, but verb agreement can follow an ergative or an accusative pattern, depending on grammatical mood . The language grammatically distinguishes three numbers : singular, dual , and plural . There

136-401: A morpheme boundary. The effect is that while phonetic vowel length may yield a surface contrast between words, phonetic length is predictable and thus not phonemically contrastive . The vowel qualities [e o] are allophones of /i u/ , and are found preceding uvular consonants (such as [q] or [ʁ] ) and preceding the low vowel [a] . Yup'ik does not contrast voicing in stops , but has

204-551: A defining feature of all indigenous languages of the Americas . This characterization was shown to be wrong, since many indigenous American languages are not polysynthetic, but it is a fact that polysynthetic languages are not evenly distributed throughout the world, but more frequent in the Americas , Australia , Siberia , and New Guinea ; however, there are also examples in other areas. The concept became part of linguistic typology with

272-450: A diphthong (bai), though not enough glyphs to distinguish all CV combinations (some distinctions were ignored). The modern script has been expanded to cover all moras, but at the same time reduced to exclude all other syllables. Bimoraic syllables are now written with two letters, as in Japanese: diphthongs are written with the help of V or h V glyphs, and the nasal codas will be written with

340-462: A fierce headache.' From Classical Ainu of Japan, another polysynthetic, incorporating, and agglutinating language: ウサオプㇲペ Usaopuspe アエヤィコツ゚ィマシラㇺスィパ aeyaykotuymasiramsuypa ウサオプㇲペ アエヤィコツ゚ィマシラㇺスィパ Usaopuspe aeyaykotuymasiramsuypa Syllabary In the linguistic study of written languages , a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words . A symbol in

408-584: A high degree of morphological synthesis, and which tend to form long complex words containing long strings of morphemes , including derivational and inflectional morphemes. A language then is "synthetic" or "synthesizing" if it tends to have more than one morpheme per word, and a polysynthetic language is a language that has "many" morphemes per word. The concept was originally used only to describe those languages that can form long words that correspond to an entire sentence in English or other Indo-European languages , and

476-468: A historical practice of name taboo. Speakers may be reluctant to take on the lexicon of another dialect because they "often feel proud of their own dialects". The Yupʼik dialects, sub-dialects and their locations are as follows: The last of these, the Nunivak dialect ( Cupʼig ) is distinct and highly divergent from mainland Yupʼik dialects. The only significant difference between Hooper Bay and Chevak dialects

544-449: A hybrid of the former two terms; there is, however, potential for confusion here: Central (Alaskan) Yup'ik may refer to either the language as a whole, or the geographically central dialect of the language, more commonly called General Central Yup'ik. Other endonyms are used regionally: Cup'ig in the Nunivak dialect, Cup'ik in Chevak (these terms are cognate with Yup'ik , but represent

612-435: A long vowel in the second syllable. Thus pissuqatalliniluni /pisuqataɬiniluni/ "apparently about to hunt" is pronounced [(pi.'suː)(qa.'taː)(ɬi.'niː)lu.ni] . Following standard linguistic convention, parentheses here demarcate feet, periods represent the remaining syllable boundaries, and apostrophes occur before syllables that bear stress. In this word the second, fourth, and sixth syllables are pronounced with long vowels as

680-486: A plosive when it occurs at the end of a word. For example, qayar-pak "big kayak" is pronounced [qaja χ pak] , while "kayak" alone is [qaja q ] ; the velar fricative becomes a stop word-finally. Moreover, the [k] of -pak is only a stop by virtue of it being word-final: if another suffix is added, as in qayar-pag-tun "like a big kayak" a fricative is found in place of that stop: [qajaχpa x tun] . The voiced velar consonants /ɣ ŋ/ are elided between single vowels, if

748-501: A result of iambic lengthening. Iambic lengthening does not apply to final syllables in a word. Because the vowel /ə/ cannot occur long in Yup'ik, when a syllable whose nucleus is /ə/ is in line to receive stress, iambic lengthening cannot apply. Instead, one of two things may happen. In Norton Sound dialects, the consonant following /ə/ will geminate if that consonant is not part of a cluster . This also occurs outside of Norton Sound if

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816-531: A second person singular object). Many polysynthetic languages combine these two strategies, and also have ways of inflecting verbs for concepts normally encoded by adverbs or adjectives in Indo-European languages. In this way highly complex words can be formed, for example the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq which means "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer." The word consists of

884-537: A segmental grapheme for /s/, which can be used both as a coda and in an initial /sC/ consonant cluster. The languages of India and Southeast Asia , as well as the Ethiopian Semitic languages , have a type of alphabet called an abugida or alphasyllabary . In these scripts, unlike in pure syllabaries, syllables starting with the same consonant are largely expressed with graphemes regularly based on common graphical elements. Usually each character representing

952-434: A single syllable, which is almost always closed and must bear stress.) For example, in the word pissuqatalliniluni "apparently about to hunt", every second syllable (save the last) is stressed. The most prominent of these (i.e., the syllable that has primary stress ) is the rightmost of the stressed syllables. The iambic stress system of Yup'ik results in predicable iambic lengthening , a processes that serves to increase

1020-416: A syllabary, called a syllabogram , typically represents an (optional) consonant sound (simple onset ) followed by a vowel sound ( nucleus )—that is, a CV (consonant+vowel) or V syllable—but other phonographic mappings, such as CVC, CV- tone, and C (normally nasals at the end of syllables), are also found in syllabaries. A writing system using a syllabary is complete when it covers all syllables in

1088-424: A syllable consists of several elements which designate the individual sounds of that syllable. In the 19th century these systems were called syllabics , a term which has survived in the name of Canadian Aboriginal syllabics (also an abugida). In a true syllabary there may be graphic similarity between characters that share a common consonant or vowel sound, but it is not systematic or at all regular. For example,

1156-544: A syllable where it would not otherwise be expected, given the usual iambic stress pattern. (These processes do not apply, however, in the Norton Sound dialects.) The processes by which stress retracts under prosodically-conditioned factors are said to feature regression of stress in Miyaoka's (2012) grammar. When regression occurs, the syllable to which stress regresses constitutes a monosyllabic foot. The first of these processes

1224-524: A syllable, i.e., initial onset, medial nucleus and final coda, but since onset and coda are optional in at least some languages, there are middle (nucleus), start (onset-nucleus), end (nucleus-coda) and full (onset-nucleus-coda) true syllabograms. Most syllabaries only feature one or two kinds of syllabograms and form other syllables by graphemic rules. Syllabograms, hence syllabaries, are pure , analytic or arbitrary if they do not share graphic similarities that correspond to phonic similarities, e.g.

1292-483: A total population of more than 23,000 people, more than 14,000 are speakers of the language. Children still grow up speaking Yupʼik as their first language in 17 of 68 Yupʼik villages, those mainly located on the lower Kuskokwim River , on Nelson Island , and along the coast between the Kuskokwim River and Nelson Island. The variety of Yup'ik spoken by the younger generations is being influenced strongly by English: it

1360-401: A wide range of fricatives that contrast in voicing. The phoneme /l/ is not phonetically a fricative, but behaves as one phonologically in Yup'ik (in particular with regard to voicing alternations, where it alternates with [ ɬ ] ; see below). Contrasts between /s/ and /z/ and between /f/ and /v/ are rare, and the greater part of the voicing contrasts among fricatives is between

1428-533: Is angsaq [aŋzaq] Norton Sound. Conversely, in the Hooper Bay-Chevak (HBC) dialect, there is no /z/ phoneme, and /j/ is used in its place, such that GCY qasgiq [qazɣeq] is pronounced qaygiq [qajɣeq] . HBC does not have the [w] allophone of /v/ , such that /v/ is pronounced [v] in all contexts, and there are no labialized uvular fricatives. In the Nunivak dialect, one finds /aː/ in place of GCY /ai/ , such that GCY cukaitut "they are slow"

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1496-455: Is hiatus : the occurrence of adjacent vowels. Yup'ik disallows hiatus at the boundaries between feet: any two consecutive vowels must be grouped within the same foot. If two vowels are adjacent, and the first of these would be at the right edge of a foot (and thus stressed) given the usual iambic footing, the stress retracts to a preceding syllable. Without regressive accent, Yupiaq /jupiaq/ would be pronounced * [(ju.'piː)aq] , but because of

1564-466: Is a separate glyph for every consonant-vowel-tone combination (CVT) in the language (apart from one tone which is indicated with a diacritic). Few syllabaries have glyphs for syllables that are not monomoraic, and those that once did have simplified over time to eliminate that complexity. For example, the Vai syllabary originally had separate glyphs for syllables ending in a coda (doŋ), a long vowel (soo), or

1632-399: Is an allophone of /tʃ/ before the schwa vowel. The voiced labiovelar approximant [w] is an allophone of /v/ that typically occurs between two full vowels, excepting when it occurs adjacent to an inflectional suffix. For example, /tʃali-vig-∅/ "work-place- ABS " is pronounced [tʃaliːwik] (orthographically, calivik ), since /v/ occurs between two full vowels and it not adjacent to

1700-564: Is complicated by the fact that morpheme and word boundaries are not always clear cut, and languages may be highly synthetic in one area but less synthetic in other areas (e.g., verbs and nouns in Southern Athabaskan languages or Inuit languages ). Many polysynthetic languages display complex evidentiality and/or mirativity systems in their verbs . The term was invented by Peter Stephen Du Ponceau , who considered polysynthesis, as characterized by sentence words and noun incorporation,

1768-520: Is composed of the Greek roots poly meaning "many" and synthesis meaning "placing together". In linguistics a word is defined as a unit of meaning that can stand alone in a sentence, and which can be uttered in isolation. Words may be simple, consisting of a single unit of meaning, or they can be complex, formed by combining many small units of meaning, called morphemes . In a general non-theoretical sense polysynthetic languages are those languages that have

1836-528: Is less synthetic , has a reduced inventory of spatial demonstratives, and is lexically Anglicized. Yup'ik is typically considered to have five dialects: Norton Sound , General Central Yup'ik , Nunivak , Hooper Bay-Chevak , and the extinct Egegik dialect. All extant dialects of the language are mutually intelligible , albeit with phonological and lexical differences that sometimes cause difficulty in cross-dialectal comprehension. Lexical differences exist somewhat dramatically across dialects, in part due to

1904-615: Is no marking of grammatical gender in the language, nor are there articles . The Yup'ik language goes by various names. Since it is a geographically central member of the Yupik languages and is spoken in Alaska , the language is often referred to as Central Alaskan Yupik (for example, in Miyaoka's 2012 grammar of the language). The term Yup'ik [jupːik] is a common endonym , and is derived from /juɣ-piɣ/ "person-genuine". The Alaska Native Language Center and Jacobson's (1995) learner's grammar use Central (Alaskan) Yup'ik , which can be seen as

1972-420: Is not a result of stress . Consonants may also occur long ( geminate ), but their occurrence is often predictable by regular phonological rules, and so in these cases is not marked in the orthography. Where long consonants occur unpredictably they are indicated with an apostrophe following consonant. For example, Yupiaq and Yupʼik both contain a geminate p (/pː/). In Yupiaq length is predictable and hence

2040-469: Is not marked; in Yupʼik the length is not predictable and so must be indicated with the apostrophe. An apostrophe is also used to separate n from g , to distinguish n'g /nɣ/ from the digraph ng /ŋ/. Apostrophes are also used between two consonants to indicate that voicing assimilation has not occurred (see below), and between two vowels to indicate the lack of gemination of a preceding consonant. A hyphen

2108-429: Is pronounced cukaatut , there is no word-final fortition of /x/ and /χ/ (see below), and word-initial /xʷ/ is pronounced [kʷ] . There are a variety of voicing assimilation processes (specifically, devoicing ) that apply mostly predictably to continuant consonants ( fricatives and nasals ); these processes are not represented in the orthography. Occasionally these assimilation processes do not apply, and in

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2176-442: Is related to the inability of /ə/ to occur long. Outside of Norton Sound, if the consonants before and after /ə/ are phonetically dissimilar, /ə/ will elide , and stress will retract to a syllable whose nucleus is the vowel before the elided /ə/ . For example, /nəqə-ni/ "his own fish" is not pronounced * [(nə.'qəː)ni] , which would be expected by iambic lengthening, but rather is pronounced neq'ni [('nəq)ni] , which features

2244-893: Is saying such as questioning, hoping, reporting, etc." Orthographically , enclitics are separated from the rest of the word with a hyphen . However, since hyphens are already used in glosses to separate morphemes, there is potential for confusion as to whether a morpheme is a suffix or an enclitic, so in glosses the equals sign is used instead. angyar boat angyar boat -pa AUG -li make -yu DES -kapigte INT Polysynthetic language In linguistic typology , polysynthetic languages , formerly holophrastic languages , are highly synthetic languages , i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone). They are very highly inflected languages. Polysynthetic languages typically have long "sentence-words" such as

2312-537: Is spoken to south and east, and Central Siberian Yupik is spoken to the west on St. Lawrence Island (often called St. Lawrence Island Yupik in the Alaskan context) and on the Chukotka peninsula , where Naukan Yupik is also spoken. Yup'ik is bordered to the north by the more distantly related Iñupiaq language ; the difference between Yupʼik and Iñupiaq is comparable to that of the difference between Spanish and French. Of

2380-531: Is the pronunciation of the initial y- [j] as c- [tʃ] in Chevak in some words: Yupʼik in Hooper Bay but Cupʼik in Chevak. Even sub-dialects may differ with regard to pronunciation and lexicon. The following table compares some words in two sub-dialects of General Central Yupʼik ( Yugtun ). A syllabary known as the Yugtun script was invented for the language by Uyaquq , a native speaker, in about 1900, although

2448-403: Is therefore more correctly called a moraic writing system, with syllables consisting of two moras corresponding to two kana symbols. Languages that use syllabaries today tend to have simple phonotactics , with a predominance of monomoraic (CV) syllables. For example, the modern Yi script is used to write languages that have no diphthongs or syllable codas; unusually among syllabaries, there

2516-431: Is used to separate a clitic from its host. Yup'ik contrasts four vowel qualities : /a i u ə/ . The reduced vowel /ə/ always manifests phonetically short in duration , but the other three vowel qualities may occur phonetically short or long: [a aː i iː u uː] . Phonetically long vowels come about when a full vowel ( /a i u/ ) is lengthened by stress (see below), or when two single vowels are brought together across

2584-459: Is usually only marked for agreement with the subject (e.g. Spanish hablo "I speak" where the -o ending marks agreement with the first person singular subject), but in many languages verbs also agree with the object (e.g. the Kiswahili word nakupenda "I love you" where the n- prefix marks agreement with the first person singular subject and the ku- prefix marks agreement with

2652-727: The Yi languages of eastern Asia, the English-based creole language Ndyuka , Xiangnan Tuhua , and the ancient language Mycenaean Greek ( Linear B ). In addition, the undecoded Cretan Linear A is also believed by some to be a syllabic script, though this is not proven. Chinese characters , the cuneiform script used for Sumerian , Akkadian and other languages, and the former Maya script are largely syllabic in nature, although based on logograms . They are therefore sometimes referred to as logosyllabic . The contemporary Japanese language uses two syllabaries together called kana (in addition to

2720-423: The Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq . tuntu reindeer -ssur -hunt -qatar - FUT -ni -say -ksaite - NEG -ngqiggte -again -uq - 3SG . IND tuntu -ssur -qatar -ni -ksaite -ngqiggte -uq reindeer -hunt -FUT -say -NEG -again -3SG.IND "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer." Except for the morpheme tuntu "reindeer", none of

2788-402: The category of the word or augment its meaning. (Yup'ik does not have adjectives; nominal roots and postbases are used instead.) The third section is called an ending , which carries the inflectional categories of case (on nouns), grammatical mood (on verbs), person , and number . Finally, optional enclitics may be added, which usually indicate "the speaker's attitude towards what he

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2856-470: The weight of the prominent syllable in a foot. When lengthening cannot apply, a variety of processes involving either elision or gemination apply to create a well-formed prosodic word. Iambic lengthening is the process by which the second syllable in an iambic foot is made more prominent by lengthening the duration of the vowel in that syllable. In Yup'ik, a bisyllabic foot whose syllables each contain one phonologically single vowel will be pronounced with

2924-594: The ban on hiatus at foot boundaries, stress retracts to the initial syllable, and consonant gemination occurs to increase the weight of that initial syllable, resulting in [('jup)pi.aq] . This process is termed automatic gemination in Jacobson's (1995) grammar. Yup'ik also disallows iambic feet that consist of a closed syllable followed by an open one, i.e. feet of the form CVC.'CV(ː), where C and V stand for "consonant" and "vowel" respectively. To avoid this type of foot, stress retracts: cangatenrituten /tʃaŋatənʁitutən/ has

2992-454: The characters for ka ke ko in Japanese hiragana – か け こ – have no similarity to indicate their common /k/ sound. Compare this with Devanagari script, an abugida, where the characters for ka ke ko are क के को respectively. English , along with many other Indo-European languages like German and Russian, allows for complex syllable structures, making it cumbersome to write English words with

3060-406: The consonants before and after /ə/ are phonetically similar. For example, /tuməmi/ "on the footprint" is not pronounced * [(tu.'məː)mi] , which would be expected by iambic lengthening, but rather is pronounced [(tu.'məm)mi] , with gemination of the second /m/ to increase the weight of the second syllable. There are a variety of prosodic factors that cause stress to retract (move backward) to

3128-478: The corresponding spoken language without requiring complex orthographic / graphemic rules, like implicit codas ( ⟨C 1 V⟩ ⇒ /C 1 VC 2 /), silent vowels ( ⟨C 1 V 1 +C 2 V 2 ⟩ ⇒ /C 1 V 1 C 2 /) or echo vowels ( ⟨C 1 V 1 +C 2 V 1 ⟩ ⇒ /C 1 V 1 C 2 /). This loosely corresponds to shallow orthographies in alphabetic writing systems. True syllabograms are those that encompass all parts of

3196-477: The elision of /ə/ and a monosyllabic foot. Second, if the first syllable of a word is closed (ends in a consonant), this syllable constitutes a monosyllabic foot and receives stress. Iambic footing continues left-to-right from the right edge of that foot. For example, nerciqsugnarquq "(s)he probably will eat" has the stress pattern [('nəχ)(tʃiq.'sux)naχ.qoq] , with stress on the first and third syllables. Another third prosodic factor that influences regressive

3264-448: The establishment of the state's first bilingual school programs in four Yupʼik villages in the early 1970s. Since then a wide variety of bilingual materials has been published, including Steven Jacobson's comprehensive dictionary of the language, his complete practical classroom grammar, and story collections and narratives by many others including a full novel by Anna Jacobson. While several different systems have been used to write Yupʼik,

3332-433: The first is a full vowel: /tuma-ŋi/ is pronounced tumai [tumːai] (with geminate [mː] resulting from automatic gemination; see below). Yup'ik has an iambic stress system. Starting from the leftmost syllable in a word and moving rightward, syllables usually are grouped into units (termed "feet") containing two syllables each, and the second syllable of each foot is stressed. (However, feet in Yup'ik may also consist of

3400-436: The forms of neighboring affixes. Because of the tendency to create very long verbs through suffixation, a Yupʼik verb often carries as much information as an English sentence, and word order is often quite free. Three parts of speech are identified: nouns, verbs, and particles . Because there are fewer parts of speech than in (e.g.) English, each category has a wider range of uses. For example, Yup'ik grammatical case fulfills

3468-444: The glyph for ŋ , which can form a syllable of its own in Vai. In Linear B , which was used to transcribe Mycenaean Greek , a language with complex syllables, complex consonant onsets were either written with two glyphs or simplified to one, while codas were generally ignored, e.g., ko-no-so for Κνωσός Knōsos , pe-ma for σπέρμα sperma. The Cherokee syllabary generally uses dummy vowels for coda consonants, but also has

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3536-586: The head noun with agreement morphemes. There are some dependent-marking languages that may be considered to be polysynthetic because they use case stacking to achieve similar effects, and very long words. An example from Chukchi , a polysynthetic, incorporating , and agglutinating language of Russia which also has grammatical cases unlike the majority of incorporating polysynthetic languages: t- 1S . SUBJ meyŋ- great levt- head pəγt- hurt rkən 1S . PRES t- meyŋ- levt- pəγt- rkən 1S.SUBJ great head hurt 1S.PRES 'I have

3604-407: The inflectional suffix. With /tʃav-utə/ "oar" by contrast, since /-utə/ is an inflectional suffix, /v/ does not undergo the allophonic alternation: [tʃavun] ( cavun ). In Norton Sound, as well as some villages on the lower Yukon, /j/ tends to be pronounced as [z] when following a consonant, and geminate /jː/ as [zː] . For example, the word angyaq "boat" of General Central Yup'ik (GCY)

3672-579: The language is now mostly written using the Latin script . Early linguistic work in Central Yupʼik was done primarily by Russian Orthodox , then Jesuit and Moravian Church missionaries, leading to a modest tradition of literacy used in letter writing. In the 1960s, Irene Reed and others at the Alaska Native Language Center developed a modern writing system for the language. Their work led to

3740-555: The laterals /l/ and /ɬ/ , the velars /x/ and /ɣ/ , and the uvulars /χ/ and /ʁ/ . For some speakers, there is also a voicing contrast among the nasal consonants, which is typologically somewhat rare. Any consonant may occur as a geminate word-medially, and consonant length is contrastive. The table above includes the allophones [χʷ] , [ts] , and [w] . The voiceless labialized uvular fricative [χʷ] occurs only in some speech variants and does not contrast with its voiced counterpart /ʁʷ/ . The voiceless alveolar affricate [ts]

3808-428: The morphemes tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq with the meanings, reindeer-hunt-future-say-negation-again-third.person.singular.indicative, and except for the morpheme tuntu "reindeer", none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation. Another way to achieve a high degree of synthesis is when languages can form compound words by incorporation of nouns, so that entire words can be incorporated into

3876-606: The most widely used orthography today is that adopted by the Alaska Native Language Center and exemplified in Jacobson's (1984) dictionary, Jacobson's (1995) learner's grammar, and Miyaoka's (2012) grammar. The orthography is a Latin-script alphabet ; the letters and digraphs used in alphabetical order are listed below, along with an indication of their associated phonemes in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The vowel qualities /a, i, u/ may occur long ; these are written aa , ii , uu when vowel length

3944-422: The non-syllabic systems kanji and romaji ), namely hiragana and katakana , which were developed around 700. Because Japanese uses mainly CV (consonant + vowel) syllables, a syllabary is well suited to write the language. As in many syllabaries, vowel sequences and final consonants are written with separate glyphs, so that both atta and kaita are written with three kana: あった ( a-t-ta ) and かいた ( ka-i-ta ). It

4012-463: The orthography an apostrophe is written in the middle of the consonant cluster to indicate this: at'nguq is pronounced [atŋoq] , not [atŋ̊oq] . Fricatives are devoiced word-initially and word-finally. Another common phonological alternation of Yup'ik is word-final fortition . Among consonants, only the stops /t k q/ , the nasals /m n ŋ/ , and the fricative /χ/ may occur word-finally. Any other fricative (and in many cases also /χ/ ) will become

4080-435: The other morphemes can appear in isolation. Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have a very high ratio. There is no generally agreed upon definition of polysynthesis. Generally polysynthetic languages have polypersonal agreement , although some agglutinative languages that are not polysynthetic, such as Basque , Hungarian and Georgian , also have it. Some authors apply

4148-576: The pronunciation of the word in the respective dialect), and Yugtun in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region . Yupʼik is spoken primarily in southwestern Alaska, from Norton Sound in the north to the Alaska Peninsula in the south, and from Lake Iliamna in the east to Nunivak Island in the west. Yup'ik lies geographically central relative to the other members of the Yupik language family: Alutiiq ~ Sugpiaq

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4216-471: The role that English prepositions do, and nominal derivational affixes or roots fulfill the role that English adjectives do. In descriptive work on Yup'ik, there are four regions within nouns and verbs that are commonly identified. The first of these is often called the stem (equivalent to the notion of a root ), which carries the core meaning of the word. Following the stem come zero or more postbases , which are derivational modifiers that change

4284-403: The stress pattern [(tʃa.'ŋaː)('tən)(ʁi.'tuː)tən] to avoid the iambic foot *(tən.'ʁiː) that would otherwise be expected. Yup'ik has highly synthetic morphology: the number of morphemes within a word is very high. The language is moreover agglutinative , meaning that affixation is the primary strategy for word formation, and that an affix, when added to a word, does not unpredictably affect

4352-502: The symbol for ka does not resemble in any predictable way the symbol for ki , nor the symbol for a . Otherwise, they are synthetic , if they vary by onset, rime, nucleus or coda, or systematic , if they vary by all of them. Some scholars, e.g., Daniels, reserve the general term for analytic syllabaries and invent other terms ( abugida , abjad ) as necessary. Some systems provide katakana language conversion. Languages that use syllabic writing include Japanese , Cherokee , Vai ,

4420-422: The term polysynthetic to languages with high morpheme-to-word ratios, but others use it for languages that are highly head-marking , or those that frequently use noun incorporation . Polysynthetic languages can be agglutinative or fusional depending on whether they encode one or multiple grammatical categories per affix . At the same time, the question of whether to call a particular language polysynthetic

4488-441: The verb word, as baby is incorporated in the English verb babysit . Another common feature of polysynthetic languages is a tendency to use head marking as a means of syntactic cohesion. This means that many polysynthetic languages mark grammatical relations between verbs and their constituents by indexing the constituents on the verb with agreement morphemes, and the relation between noun phrases and their constituents by marking

4556-406: The word is still most frequently used to refer to such "sentence words". Often polysynthesis is achieved when languages have extensive agreement between elements verbs and their arguments so that the verb is marked for agreement with the grammatical subject and object. In this way a single word can encode information about all the elements in a transitive clause. In Indo-European languages the verb

4624-483: The work of Edward Sapir , who used it as one of his basic typological categories. Recently, Mark C. Baker has suggested formally defining polysynthesis as a macro-parameter within Noam Chomsky 's principles and parameters theory of grammar. Other linguists question the basic utility of the concept for typology since it covers many separate morphological types that have little else in common. The word "polysynthesis"

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