Aymara ( IPA: [aj.ˈma.ɾa] ; also Aymar aru ) is an Aymaran language spoken by the Aymara people of the Bolivian Andes . It is one of only a handful of Native American languages with over one million speakers. Aymara, along with Spanish and Quechua , is an official language in Bolivia and Peru . It is also spoken, to a much lesser extent, by some communities in northern Chile , where it is a recognized minority language .
112-421: Some linguists have claimed that Aymara is related to its more widely spoken neighbor, Quechua . That claim, however, is disputed. Although there are indeed similarities, like the nearly identical phonologies, the majority position among linguists today is that the similarities are better explained as areal features arising from prolonged cohabitation , rather than natural genealogical changes that would stem from
224-772: A Quechua language. Although Quechua began expanding many centuries before the Incas , that previous expansion also meant that it was the primary language family within the Inca Empire. The Spanish also tolerated its use until the Peruvian struggle for independence in the 1780s. As a result, various Quechua languages are still widely spoken today, being co-official in many regions and the most spoken language lineage in Peru , after Spanish. The Quechua linguistic homeland may have been Central Peru. It has been speculated that it may have been used in
336-414: A branch of linguistics. Before the 20th century, linguists analysed language on a diachronic plane, which was historical in focus. This meant that they would compare linguistic features and try to analyse language from the point of view of how it had changed between then and later. However, with the rise of Saussurean linguistics in the 20th century, the focus shifted to a more synchronic approach, where
448-524: A common protolanguage . Aymara is an agglutinating and, to a certain extent, a polysynthetic language . It has a subject–object–verb word order. It is based on a three-valued logic system. Aymara is normally written using the Latin alphabet. The ethnonym "Aymara" may be ultimately derived from the name of some group occupying the southern part of what is now the Quechua speaking area of Apurímac . Regardless,
560-560: A comparison of different time periods in the past and present) or in a synchronic manner (by observing developments between different variations that exist within the current linguistic stage of a language). At first, historical linguistics was the cornerstone of comparative linguistics , which involves a study of the relationship between different languages. At that time, scholars of historical linguistics were only concerned with creating different categories of language families , and reconstructing prehistoric proto-languages by using both
672-993: A fourth, a northern or Peruvian branch. The latter causes complications in the classification, however, as various dialects (e.g. Cajamarca–Cañaris , Pacaraos , and Yauyos ) have features of both Quechua I and Quechua II, and so are difficult to assign to either. Torero classifies them as the following: Willem Adelaar adheres to the Quechua I / Quechua II (central/peripheral) bifurcation. But, partially following later modifications by Torero, he reassigns part of Quechua II-A to Quechua I: Ancash (Huaylas–Conchucos) Alto Pativilca–Alto Marañón–Alto Huallaga Yaru Wanka (Jauja–Huanca) Yauyos–Chincha (Huangáscar–Topará) Pacaraos Lambayeque (Cañaris) Cajamarca Lincha Laraos Kichwa ("Ecuadorian" or Highlands and Oriente) Chachapoyas (Amazonas) Lamas (San Martín) Ayacucho Cusco Puno (Collao) Northern Bolivian (Apolo) Southern Bolivia Santiago del Estero Landerman (1991) does not believe
784-434: A linguistic medium of communication in itself. Palaeography is therefore the discipline that studies the evolution of written scripts (as signs and symbols) in language. The formal study of language also led to the growth of fields like psycholinguistics , which explores the representation and function of language in the mind; neurolinguistics , which studies language processing in the brain; biolinguistics , which studies
896-416: A particular feature or usage is "good" or "bad". This is analogous to practice in other sciences: a zoologist studies the animal kingdom without making subjective judgments on whether a particular species is "better" or "worse" than another. Prescription , on the other hand, is an attempt to promote particular linguistic usages over others, often favoring a particular dialect or " acrolect ". This may have
1008-494: A particular language), and pragmatics (how the context of use contributes to meaning). Subdisciplines such as biolinguistics (the study of the biological variables and evolution of language) and psycholinguistics (the study of psychological factors in human language) bridge many of these divisions. Linguistics encompasses many branches and subfields that span both theoretical and practical applications. Theoretical linguistics (including traditional descriptive linguistics)
1120-535: A reference point, the overall degree of diversity across the family is a little less than that of the Romance or Germanic families, and more of the order of Slavic or Arabic . The greatest diversity is within Central Quechua, or Quechua I, which is believed to lie close to the homeland of the ancestral Proto-Quechua language. Alfredo Torero devised the traditional classification, the three divisions above, plus
1232-419: A second-language speaker who is attempting to acquire the language. Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken data and signed data are more fundamental than written data . This is because Nonetheless, linguists agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For research that relies on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics , written language
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#17328848193021344-574: A significant influence on other native languages of the Americas, such as Mapuche . It is difficult to measure the number of Quechua speakers. The number of speakers given varies widely according to the sources. The total in Ethnologue 16 is 10 million, primarily based on figures published 1987–2002, but with a few dating from the 1960s. The figure for Imbabura Highland Quechua in Ethnologue , for example,
1456-540: A tapped /ɾ/ , and an alveolar/palatal contrast for nasals and laterals, as well as two semivowels ( /w/ and /j/ ). Orthographic representation is the same as the IPA where not shown. Stress is usually on the second-to-last syllable, but long vowels may shift it. Although the final vowel of a word is elided except at the end of a phrase, the stress remains unchanged. The vast majority of roots are disyllabic and, with few exceptions, suffixes are monosyllabic . Roots conform to
1568-531: A true genetic classification is possible and divides Quechua II so that the family has four geographical–typological branches: Northern, North Peruvian, Central, and Southern. He includes Chachapoyas and Lamas in North Peruvian Quechua so Ecuadorian is synonymous with Northern Quechua. Quechua I (Central Quechua, Waywash ) is spoken in Peru's central highlands, from the Ancash Region to Huancayo . It
1680-419: A view towards uncovering the biological underpinnings of language. In Generative Grammar , these underpinning are understood as including innate domain-specific grammatical knowledge. Thus, one of the central concerns of the approach is to discover what aspects of linguistic knowledge are innate and which are not. Cognitive linguistics , in contrast, rejects the notion of innate grammar, and studies how
1792-424: A word. Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning and form. Any particular pairing of meaning and form is a Saussurean linguistic sign . For instance, the meaning "cat" is represented worldwide with a wide variety of different sound patterns (in oral languages), movements of the hands and face (in sign languages ), and written symbols (in written languages). Linguistic patterns have proven their importance for
1904-459: Is 300,000, an estimate from 1977. The missionary organization FEDEPI, on the other hand, estimated one million Imbabura dialect speakers (published 2006). Census figures are also problematic, due to under-reporting. The 2001 Ecuador census reports only 500,000 Quechua speakers, compared to the estimate in most linguistic sources of more than 2 million. The censuses of Peru (2007) and Bolivia (2001) are thought to be more reliable. Additionally, there
2016-458: Is a researcher within the field, or to someone who uses the tools of the discipline to describe and analyse specific languages. An early formal study of language was in India with Pāṇini , the 6th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology . Pāṇini's systematic classification of the sounds of Sanskrit into consonants and vowels, and word classes, such as nouns and verbs,
2128-637: Is a secondary division in Quechua II between the grammatically simplified northern varieties of Ecuador, Quechua II-B, known there as Kichwa , and the generally more conservative varieties of the southern highlands, Quechua II-C, which include the old Inca capital of Cusco . The closeness is at least in part because of the influence of Cusco Quechua on the Ecuadorean varieties in the Inca Empire. Because Northern nobles were required to educate their children in Cusco, this
2240-430: Is a system of rules which governs the production and use of utterances in a given language. These rules apply to sound as well as meaning, and include componential subsets of rules, such as those pertaining to phonology (the organization of phonetic sound systems), morphology (the formation and composition of words), and syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences). Modern frameworks that deal with
2352-679: Is actually the one of two extant members of a wider language family, the other surviving representative being Jaqaru . The family was established by the research of Lucy Briggs (a fluent speaker) and Martha 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, in central Peru. Terminology for this wider language family
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#17328848193022464-530: Is an indigenous language family that originated in central Peru and thereafter spread to other countries of the Andes . Derived from a common ancestral " Proto-Quechua " language, it is today the most widely spoken pre-Columbian language family of the Americas, with the number of speakers estimated at 8–10 million speakers in 2004, and just under 7 million from the most recent census data available up to 2011. Approximately 13.9% (3.7 million) of Peruvians speak
2576-455: Is an unknown number of speakers in emigrant communities. There are significant differences among the varieties of Quechua spoken in the central Peruvian highlands and the peripheral varieties of Ecuador, as well as those of southern Peru and Bolivia. They can be labeled Quechua I (or Quechua B, central) and Quechua II (or Quechua A, peripheral). Within the two groups, there are few sharp boundaries, making them dialect continua . However, there
2688-441: Is concerned with understanding the universal and fundamental nature of language and developing a general theoretical framework for describing it. Applied linguistics seeks to utilize the scientific findings of the study of language for practical purposes, such as developing methods of improving language education and literacy. Linguistic features may be studied through a variety of perspectives: synchronically (by describing
2800-440: Is conventional or "coded" in a given language, pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on the structural and linguistic knowledge (grammar, lexicon, etc.) of the speaker and listener, but also on the context of the utterance, any pre-existing knowledge about those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and other factors. Phonetics and phonology are branches of linguistics concerned with sounds (or
2912-587: Is found in the eastern half of the Tacna and Moquegua departments in southern Peru and in the northeastern tip of Chile. There are roughly two million Bolivian speakers, half a million Peruvian speakers, and perhaps a few thousand speakers in Chile. At the time of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, Aymara was the dominant language over a much larger area than today, including most of highland Peru south of Cusco . Over
3024-611: Is frequent in Aymara. Vowel deletion typically occurs due to one of three factors: (i) phonotactic, (ii) syntactic, and (iii) morphophonemic. 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 occurs in three laryngeal settings: plain or voiceless unaspirated (aka tenuis ), glottalized , and aspirated . Sounds such as [ ʃ, h, ŋ ] occur as allophones of / t͡ʃ, χ, n /. Aymara also has
3136-469: Is generally hard to find for events long ago, due to the occurrence of chance word resemblances and variations between language groups. A limit of around 10,000 years is often assumed for the functional purpose of conducting research. It is also hard to date various proto-languages. Even though several methods are available, these languages can be dated only approximately. In modern historical linguistics, we examine how languages change over time, focusing on
3248-431: 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
3360-603: Is not yet well established. Hardman has proposed the name 'Jaqi' ('human') while other widely respected Peruvian linguists have proposed alternative names for the same language family. Alfredo Torero uses the term 'Aru' ('speech'); Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino, meanwhile, has proposed that the term 'Aymara' should be used for the whole family, distinguished into two branches, Southern (or Altiplano) Aymara and Central Aymara (Jaqaru and Kawki). Each of these three proposals has its followers in Andean linguistics . In English usage, some linguists use
3472-447: Is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written. In addition, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry. The study of writing systems themselves, graphemics, is, in any case, considered
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3584-452: Is selected based on specific contexts but also, at a micro level, shapes language as text (spoken or written) down to the phonological and lexico-grammatical levels. Grammar and discourse are linked as parts of a system. A particular discourse becomes a language variety when it is used in this way for a particular purpose, and is referred to as a register . There may be certain lexical additions (new words) that are brought into play because of
3696-582: Is the most diverse branch of Quechua, to the extent that its divisions are commonly considered different languages. Quechua II (Peripheral Quechua, Wamp'una "Traveler") This is a sampling of words in several Quechuan languages: Linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language . The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages ), phonology (the abstract sound system of
3808-425: Is the one used by the lexicographer Juan Francisco Deza Galindo in his Diccionario Aymara – Castellano / Castellano – Aymara . This alphabet has five vowels ⟨a, e, i, o, u⟩, aspiration is conveyed with an ⟨h⟩ next to the consonant, and ejectives with ⟨'⟩. The most unusual characteristic is the expression of the uvular /χ/ with ⟨jh⟩. The other uvular segment, /q/, is expressed by ⟨q⟩, but transcription rules mandate that
3920-428: Is the study of how language changes over history, particularly with regard to a specific language or a group of languages. Western trends in historical linguistics date back to roughly the late 18th century, when the discipline grew out of philology , the study of ancient texts and oral traditions. Historical linguistics emerged as one of the first few sub-disciplines in the field, and was most widely practised during
4032-750: The Chavín and Wari civilizations. Quechua had already expanded across wide ranges of the central Andes long before the expansion of the Inca Empire . The Inca were one among many peoples in present-day Peru who already spoke a form of Quechua, which in the Cuzco region particularly has been heavily influenced by Aymara , hence some of the characteristics that still distinguish the Cuzco form of Quechua today. Diverse Quechua regional dialects and languages had already developed in different areas, influenced by local languages, before
4144-503: The Sanskrit language in his Aṣṭādhyāyī . Today, modern-day theories on grammar employ many of the principles that were laid down then. Before the 20th century, the term philology , first attested in 1716, was commonly used to refer to the study of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus. Since Ferdinand de Saussure 's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis , however, this focus has shifted and
4256-585: The University of San Marcos , completed and defended the first thesis in the language group in 2019; it concerned the works of poet Andrés Alencastre Gutiérrez and it was also the first non-Spanish native language thesis done at that university. Currently, there are different initiatives that promote Quechua in the Andes and across the world: many universities offer Quechua classes, a community-based organization such as Elva Ambía 's Quechua Collective of New York promote
4368-432: The agent or patient . Functional linguistics , or functional grammar, is a branch of structural linguistics. In the humanistic reference, the terms structuralism and functionalism are related to their meaning in other human sciences . The difference between formal and functional structuralism lies in the way that the two approaches explain why languages have the properties they have. Functional explanation entails
4480-626: The comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction . Internal reconstruction is the method by which an element that contains a certain meaning is re-used in different contexts or environments where there is a variation in either sound or analogy. The reason for this had been to describe well-known Indo-European languages , many of which had detailed documentation and long written histories. Scholars of historical linguistics also studied Uralic languages , another European language family for which very little written material existed back then. After that, there also followed significant work on
4592-412: The knowledge engineering field especially with the ever-increasing amount of available data. Linguists focusing on structure attempt to understand the rules regarding language use that native speakers know (not always consciously). All linguistic structures can be broken down into component parts that are combined according to (sub)conscious rules, over multiple levels of analysis. For instance, consider
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4704-504: The mind of the individual or the speech community. Construction grammar is a framework which applies the meme concept to the study of syntax. The generative versus evolutionary approach are sometimes called formalism and functionalism , respectively. This reference is however different from the use of the terms in human sciences . Modern linguistics is primarily descriptive . Linguists describe and explain features of language without making subjective judgments on whether
4816-455: The "medical discourse", and so on. The lexicon is a catalogue of words and terms that are stored in a speaker's mind. The lexicon consists of words and bound morphemes , which are parts of words that can not stand alone, like affixes . In some analyses, compound words and certain classes of idiomatic expressions and other collocations are also considered to be part of the lexicon. Dictionaries represent attempts at listing, in alphabetical order,
4928-410: The "n" sound in "tenth" is made differently from the "n" sound in "ten" spoken alone. Although most speakers of English are consciously aware of the rules governing internal structure of the word pieces of "tenth", they are less often aware of the rule governing its sound structure. Linguists focused on structure find and analyze rules such as these, which govern how native speakers use language. Grammar
5040-543: The 18th century, the first use of the comparative method by William Jones sparked the rise of comparative linguistics . Bloomfield attributes "the first great scientific linguistic work of the world" to Jacob Grimm , who wrote Deutsche Grammatik . It was soon followed by other authors writing similar comparative studies on other language groups of Europe. The study of language was broadened from Indo-European to language in general by Wilhelm von Humboldt , of whom Bloomfield asserts: This study received its foundation at
5152-518: The Alfabeto Unificado. The alphabet, later sanctioned in Bolivia by Decree 20227 on 9 May 1984 and in Peru as la Resolución Ministerial Peruana 1218ED on 18 November 1985, consists of 3 vowels, 26 consonants and an umlaut to mark vowel length. The orthography was shown in the phonological table in the previous section, and is the same where angle brackets are not shown. In 2015 a full writing system
5264-570: The Americas. As a result of Inca expansion into Central Chile , there were bilingual Quechua- Mapudungu Mapuche in Central Chile at the time of the Spanish arrival . It has been argued that Mapuche, Quechua, and Spanish coexisted in Central Chile , with significant bilingualism, during the 17th century. Alongside Mapudungun, Quechua is the indigenous language that has influenced Chilean Spanish
5376-422: The Aymara have an apparently unique (or at least very rare) understanding of time. Aymara is, with Quechua, one of very few [Núñez & Sweetser, 2006, p. 403] languages in which speakers seem to represent the past as in front of them and the future as behind them. Their argument is mainly within the framework of conceptual metaphor , which recognizes in general two subtypes of the metaphor "the passage of time
5488-511: The Aymara under the Inca empire. More than a century passed before "Aymara" entered general usage to refer to the language spoken by the Aymara people (Briggs, 1976:14). In the meantime the Aymara language was referred to as "the language of the Colla". The best account of the history of Aymara is that of Cerrón-Palomino, who shows that the ethnonym Aymara, which came from the glottonym, is likely derived from
5600-563: The East, but the grammarians of the classical languages did not use the same methods or reach the same conclusions as their contemporaries in the Indic world. Early interest in language in the West was a part of philosophy, not of grammatical description. The first insights into semantic theory were made by Plato in his Cratylus dialogue , where he argues that words denote concepts that are eternal and exist in
5712-545: The Inca Empire expanded and further promoted Quechua as the official language of the Empire. After the Spanish conquest of Peru in the 16th century, Quechua continued to be used widely by the indigenous peoples as the "common language." It was officially recognized by the Spanish administration, and many Spaniards learned it in order to communicate with local peoples. The clergy of the Catholic Church adopted Quechua to use as
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#17328848193025824-467: The Latin American nations achieved independence in the 19th century, the prestige of Quechua had decreased sharply. Gradually its use declined so that it was spoken mostly by indigenous people in the more isolated and conservative rural areas. Nevertheless, in the 21st century, Quechua language speakers number roughly 7 million people across South America, more than any other indigenous language family in
5936-649: The Northern Aymara dialect, which encompasses the department of La Paz in Bolivia and the department of Puno in Peru. The Southern Aymara dialect is spoken in the eastern half of the Iquique province in northern Chile and in most of the Bolivian department of Oruro . It is also found in northern Potosi and southwest Cochabamba but is slowly being replaced by Quechua in those regions. Intermediate Aymara shares dialectical features with both Northern and Southern Aymara and
6048-457: The Quechuaized toponym ayma-ra-y 'place of communal property'. The entire history of this term is thoroughly outlined in his book, Voces del Ande (2008:19–32) and Lingüística Aimara . The suggestion that "Aymara" comes from the Aymara words " jaya " (ancient) and " mara " (year, time) is almost certainly a mistaken folk etymology . It is often assumed that the Aymara language descends from
6160-668: The aim of establishing a linguistic standard , which can aid communication over large geographical areas. It may also, however, be an attempt by speakers of one language or dialect to exert influence over speakers of other languages or dialects (see Linguistic imperialism ). An extreme version of prescriptivism can be found among censors , who attempt to eradicate words and structures that they consider to be destructive to society. Prescription, however, may be practised appropriately in language instruction , like in ELT , where certain fundamental grammatical rules and lexical items need to be introduced to
6272-404: The biology and evolution of language; and language acquisition , which investigates how children and adults acquire the knowledge of one or more languages. The fundamental principle of humanistic linguistics, especially rational and logical grammar , is that language is an invention created by people. A semiotic tradition of linguistic research considers language a sign system which arises from
6384-596: The centuries, Aymara has gradually lost speakers both to Spanish and to Quechua; many Peruvian and Bolivian communities that were once Aymara-speaking now speak Quechua. Aymara has three phonemic vowel qualities /a i u/ , which, in most varieties of the language, occur as either long or short (i.e. /iː i aː a uː u/ ). Long vowels are indicated in the spelling with a diaeresis in writing: ä , ï , ü . The high vowels /i u/ occur as mid-high [e o] when near uvular consonants /q qʰ qʼ χ/. The three vowel sounds are heard as [ə, ɪ, ʊ] when in unstressed positions. Vowel deletion
6496-437: The claims regarding Aymara uniqueness. However, those words relate events to other events and are part of the moving-events metaphor. In fact, when before means in front of ego , it can mean only 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 they are sometimes accompanied by gestures to behind
6608-546: The corpora of other languages, such as the Austronesian languages and the Native American language families . In historical work, the uniformitarian principle is generally the underlying working hypothesis, occasionally also clearly expressed. The principle was expressed early by William Dwight Whitney , who considered it imperative, a "must", of historical linguistics to "look to find the same principle operative also in
6720-557: The country. The major obstacle to the usage and teaching of Quechua languages is the lack of written materials, such as books, newspapers, software, and magazines. The Bible has been translated into Quechua and is distributed by certain missionary groups. Quechua, along with Aymara and minor indigenous languages, remains essentially a spoken language . In recent years, Quechua has been introduced in intercultural bilingual education (IBE) in Peru , Bolivia , and Ecuador . Even in these areas,
6832-462: The development of modern standard varieties of languages, and over the development of a language from its standardized form to its varieties. For instance, some scholars also tried to establish super-families , linking, for example, Indo-European, Uralic, and other language families to Nostratic . While these attempts are still not widely accepted as credible methods, they provide necessary information to establish relatedness in language change. This
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#17328848193026944-460: The dialects is the basic criterion that defines Quechua not as a single language, but as a language family. The complex and progressive nature of how speech varies across the dialect continua makes it nearly impossible to differentiate discrete varieties; Ethnologue lists 45 varieties which are then divided into two groups; Central and Peripheral. Due to the non-intelligibility between the two groups, they are all classified as separate languages. As
7056-453: The domain of the morpheme, syllable, and phonological word/phrase. The phonological/morphophonological processes observed include syllabic reduction, epenthesis, deletion, and reduplication. Beginning with Spanish missionary efforts, there have been many attempts to create a writing system for Aymara. The colonial sources employed a variety of writing systems heavily influenced by Spanish, the most widespread one being that of Bertonio . Many of
7168-641: The early grammars employed unique alphabets as well as the one of Middendorf's Aymara-Sprache (1891). The first official alphabet to be adopted for Aymara was the Scientific Alphabet. It was approved by the III Congreso Indigenista Interamericano de la Paz in 1954, though its origins can be traced as far back as 1931. Rs. No 1593 (Deza Galindo 1989, 17). It was the first official record of an alphabet, but in 1914, Sisko Chukiwanka Ayulo and Julián Palacios Ríos had recorded what may be
7280-426: The equivalent aspects of sign languages). Phonetics is largely concerned with the physical aspects of sounds such as their articulation , acoustics, production, and perception. Phonology is concerned with the linguistic abstractions and categorizations of sounds, and it tells us what sounds are in a language, how they do and can combine into words, and explains why certain phonetic features are important to identifying
7392-430: The expertise of the community of people within a certain domain of specialization. Thus, registers and discourses distinguish themselves not only through specialized vocabulary but also, in some cases, through distinct stylistic choices. People in the medical fraternity, for example, may use some medical terminology in their communication that is specialized to the field of medicine. This is often referred to as being part of
7504-450: The field of philology , of which some branches are more qualitative and holistic in approach. Today, philology and linguistics are variably described as related fields, subdisciplines, or separate fields of language study but, by and large, linguistics can be seen as an umbrella term. Linguistics is also related to the philosophy of language , stylistics , rhetoric , semiotics , lexicography , and translation . Historical linguistics
7616-681: The first of many attempts to have one alphabet for both Quechua and Aymara, the Syentifiko Qheshwa-Aymara Alfabeto with 37 graphemes. Several other attempts followed, with varying degrees of success. Some orthographic attempts even expand further: the Alfabeto Funcional Trilingüe , made up of 40 letters (including the voiced stops necessary for Spanish) and created by the Academia de las Lenguas Aymara y Quechua in Puno in 1944
7728-458: The following vowel must be ⟨a, e, o⟩ (not ⟨i, u⟩), presumably to account for uvular lowering and to facilitate multilingual orthography. The alphabet created by the Comisión de Alfabetización y Literatura Aymara (CALA) was officially recognized in Bolivia in 1968 (co-existing with the 1954 Scientific Alphabet). Besides being the alphabet employed by Protestant missionaries, it is also the one used for
7840-808: The governments are reaching only a part of the Quechua-speaking populations. Some indigenous people in each of the countries are having their children study in Spanish for social advancement. Radio Nacional del Perú broadcasts news and agrarian programs in Quechua for periods in the mornings. Quechua and Spanish are now heavily intermixed in much of the Andean region, with many hundreds of Spanish loanwords in Quechua. Similarly, Quechua phrases and words are commonly used by Spanish speakers. In southern rural Bolivia, for instance, many Quechua words such as wawa (infant), misi (cat), waska (strap or thrashing), are as commonly used as their Spanish counterparts, even in entirely Spanish-speaking areas. Quechua has also had
7952-621: The hands of the Prussian statesman and scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), especially in the first volume of his work on Kavi, the literary language of Java, entitled Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts ( On the Variety of the Structure of Human Language and its Influence upon the Mental Development of
8064-433: The history of a language. The discipline that deals specifically with the sound changes occurring within morphemes is morphophonology . Semantics and pragmatics are branches of linguistics concerned with meaning. These subfields have traditionally been divided according to aspects of meaning: "semantics" refers to grammatical and lexical meanings, while "pragmatics" is concerned with meaning in context. Within linguistics,
8176-414: The human mind creates linguistic constructions from event schemas , and the impact of cognitive constraints and biases on human language. In cognitive linguistics, language is approached via the senses . A closely related approach is evolutionary linguistics which includes the study of linguistic units as cultural replicators . It is possible to study how language replicates and adapts to
8288-461: The idea that language is a tool for communication, or that communication is the primary function of language. Linguistic forms are consequently explained by an appeal to their functional value, or usefulness. Other structuralist approaches take the perspective that form follows from the inner mechanisms of the bilateral and multilayered language system. Approaches such as cognitive linguistics and generative grammar study linguistic cognition with
8400-498: The interaction of meaning and form. The organization of linguistic levels is considered computational. Linguistics is essentially seen as relating to social and cultural studies because different languages are shaped in social interaction by the speech community . Frameworks representing the humanistic view of language include structural linguistics , among others. Structural analysis means dissecting each linguistic level: phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and discourse, to
8512-526: The language may have first occurred in the works of the lawyer, magistrate and tax collector in Potosí and Cusco , Polo de Ondegardo . This man, who later assisted Viceroy Toledo in creating a system under which the indigenous population would be ruled for the next 200 years, wrote a report in 1559 entitled 'On the lineage of the Yncas and how they extended their conquests' in which he discusses land and taxation issues of
8624-625: The language of evangelization . The oldest written records of the language are by missionary Domingo de Santo Tomás , who arrived in Peru in 1538 and learned the language from 1540. He published his Grammatica o arte de la lengua general de los indios de los reynos del Perú (Grammar or Art of the General Language of the Indians of the Kingdoms of Peru) in 1560. Given its use by the Catholic missionaries,
8736-606: The language spoken in Tiwanaku on the grounds that it is the native language of that area today. That is very far from certain, however, and most specialists now incline to the idea that Aymara did not expand into the Tiwanaku area until rather recently, as it spread southwards from an original homeland that was more likely to have been in Central Peru. Aymara placenames are found all the way north into central Peru. Indeed, (Altiplano) Aymara
8848-439: The language, and governments are training interpreters in Quechua to serve in healthcare, justice, and bureaucratic facilities. In 1975, Peru became the first country to recognize Quechua as one of its official languages. Ecuador conferred official status on the language in its 2006 constitution, and in 2009, Bolivia adopted a new constitution that recognized Quechua and several other indigenous languages as official languages of
8960-879: The last two decades. There are even projects to offer Aymara through the internet, such as by ILCA. The following is a sample text in Ayamara, Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (by the United Nations): Taqi /ˈtaqi jaqinakaxa haqinaˈkaχa qhispiyata qʰispiˈjata yuripxi juˈɾipχi ukhamaraki ukʰamaˈɾaki jerarquía hiɾaɾˈkia ukhamaraki ukʰamaˈɾaki derechos Quechua languages Quechua ( / ˈ k ɛ tʃ u ə / , Spanish: [ˈketʃwa] ), also called Runa simi ( Quechua: [ˈɾʊna ˈsɪmɪ] , 'people's language') in Southern Quechua ,
9072-412: The late 19th century. Despite a shift in focus in the 20th century towards formalism and generative grammar , which studies the universal properties of language, historical research today still remains a significant field of linguistic inquiry. Subfields of the discipline include language change and grammaticalization . Historical linguistics studies language change either diachronically (through
9184-429: The lexicon of a given language; usually, however, bound morphemes are not included. Lexicography , closely linked with the domain of semantics, is the science of mapping the words into an encyclopedia or a dictionary. The creation and addition of new words (into the lexicon) is called coining or neologization , and the new words are called neologisms . It is often believed that a speaker's capacity for language lies in
9296-500: The most. Quechua-Aymara and mixed Quechua-Aymara- Mapudungu toponymy can be found as far south as Osorno Province in Chile (latitude 41° S). In 2017 the first thesis defense done in Quechua in Europe was done by Peruvian Carmen Escalante Gutiérrez at Pablo de Olavide University ( Sevilla ). The same year Pablo Landeo wrote the first novel in Quechua without a Spanish translation. A Peruvian student, Roxana Quispe Collantes of
9408-598: 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 exemplify the metaphor. In contrast, Aymara seems to encode the past as in front of individuals and the future behind them. That is typologically a rare phenomenon [Núñez & Sweetser, 2006, p. 416]. The fact that English has words like before and after that are (currently or archaically) polysemous between 'front/earlier' or 'back/later' may seem to refute
9520-426: The nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning. There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals. Morphology is the study of words , including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes , which are
9632-421: The other hand, focuses on an analysis that is based on the paradigms or concepts that are embedded in a given text. In this case, words of the same type or class may be replaced in the text with each other to achieve the same conceptual understanding. The earliest activities in the description of language have been attributed to the 6th-century-BC Indian grammarian Pāṇini who wrote a formal description of
9744-478: The principles of grammar include structural and functional linguistics , and generative linguistics . Sub-fields that focus on a grammatical study of language include the following: Discourse is language as social practice (Baynham, 1995) and is a multilayered concept. As a social practice, discourse embodies different ideologies through written and spoken texts. Discourse analysis can examine or expose these ideologies. Discourse not only influences genre, which
9856-416: The quantity of words stored in the lexicon. However, this is often considered a myth by linguists. The capacity for the use of language is considered by many linguists to lie primarily in the domain of grammar, and to be linked with competence , rather than with the growth of vocabulary. Even a very small lexicon is theoretically capable of producing an infinite number of sentences. Stylistics also involves
9968-485: The range of Quechua continued to expand in some areas. In the late 18th century, colonial officials ended the administrative and religious use of Quechua. They banned it from public use in Peru after the Túpac Amaru II rebellion of indigenous peoples. The Crown banned "loyal" pro-Catholic texts in Quechua, such as Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios Reales . Despite a brief revival of the language immediately after
10080-424: The relationships between dialects within a specific period. This includes studying morphological, syntactical, and phonetic shifts. Connections between dialects in the past and present are also explored. Syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences . Central concerns of syntax include word order , grammatical relations , constituency , agreement ,
10192-401: The scientific study of language, though linguistic science is sometimes used. Linguistics is a multi-disciplinary field of research that combines tools from natural sciences, social sciences, formal sciences , and the humanities. Many linguists, such as David Crystal, conceptualize the field as being primarily scientific. The term linguist applies to someone who studies language or
10304-744: The smallest units in a language with some independent meaning . Morphemes include roots that can exist as words by themselves, but also categories such as affixes that can only appear as part of a larger word. For example, in English the root catch and the suffix -ing are both morphemes; catch may appear as its own word, or it may be combined with -ing to form the new word catching . Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech , and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number , tense , and aspect . Concepts such as productivity are concerned with how speakers create words in specific contexts, which evolves over
10416-404: The smallest units. These are collected into inventories (e.g. phoneme, morpheme, lexical classes, phrase types) to study their interconnectedness within a hierarchy of structures and layers. Functional analysis adds to structural analysis the assignment of semantic and other functional roles that each unit may have. For example, a noun phrase may function as the subject or object of the sentence; or
10528-481: The speaker. The same applies to Quechua-speakers, whose expression qhipa pʼunchaw corresponds directly to Aymara qhipa uru . Possibly, the metaphor is from the fact that the past is visible (in front of one's eyes), but the future is not. There is increasing use of Aymara locally and there are increased numbers learning the language, both Bolivian and abroad. In Bolivia and Peru, intercultural bilingual education programs with Aymara and Spanish have been introduced in
10640-488: The structure of a language at a specific point in time) or diachronically (through the historical development of a language over a period of time), in monolinguals or in multilinguals , among children or among adults, in terms of how it is being learnt or how it was acquired, as abstract objects or as cognitive structures, through written texts or through oral elicitation, and finally through mechanical data collection or through practical fieldwork. Linguistics emerged from
10752-445: The structure of the word "tenth" on two different levels of analysis. On the level of internal word structure (known as morphology), the word "tenth" is made up of one linguistic form indicating a number and another form indicating ordinality. The rule governing the combination of these forms ensures that the ordinality marker "th" follows the number "ten." On the level of sound structure (known as phonology), structural analysis shows that
10864-471: The study of language in canonical works of literature, popular fiction, news, advertisements, and other forms of communication in popular culture as well. It is usually seen as a variation in communication that changes from speaker to speaker and community to community. In short, Stylistics is the interpretation of text. In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida , for instance, further distinguished between speech and writing, by proposing that written language be studied as
10976-531: The study of written, signed, or spoken discourse through varying speech communities, genres, and editorial or narrative formats in the mass media. It involves the study and interpretation of texts for aspects of their linguistic and tonal style. Stylistic analysis entails the analysis of description of particular dialects and registers used by speech communities. Stylistic features include rhetoric , diction, stress, satire, irony , dialogue, and other forms of phonetic variations. Stylistic analysis can also include
11088-436: The study was geared towards analysis and comparison between different language variations, which existed at the same given point of time. At another level, the syntagmatic plane of linguistic analysis entails the comparison between the way words are sequenced, within the syntax of a sentence. For example, the article "the" is followed by a noun, because of the syntagmatic relation between the words. The paradigmatic plane, on
11200-586: The subfield of formal semantics studies the denotations of sentences and how they are composed from the meanings of their constituent expressions. Formal semantics draws heavily on philosophy of language and uses formal tools from logic and computer science . On the other hand, cognitive semantics explains linguistic meaning via aspects of general cognition, drawing on ideas from cognitive science such as prototype theory . Pragmatics focuses on phenomena such as speech acts , implicature , and talk in interaction . Unlike semantics, which examines meaning that
11312-416: The template (C)V(C)CV, with CVCV being predominant. The majority of suffixes are CV, though there are some exceptions: CVCV, CCV, CCVCV and even VCV are possible but rare. The agglutinative nature of this predominantly suffixing language, coupled with morphophonological alternations caused by vowel deletion and phonologically conditioned constraints, gives rise to interesting surface structures that operate in
11424-462: The term Aymaran languages for the family and reserve 'Aymara' for the Altiplano branch. There is some degree of regional variation within Aymara, but all dialects are mutually intelligible. Most studies of the language focused on either the Aymara spoken on the southern Peruvian shore of Lake Titicaca or the Aymara spoken around La Paz . Lucy Therina Briggs classifies both regions as being part of
11536-475: The term philology is now generally used for the "study of a language's grammar, history, and literary tradition", especially in the United States (where philology has never been very popularly considered as the "science of language"). Although the term linguist in the sense of "a student of language" dates from 1641, the term linguistics is first attested in 1847. It is now the usual term in English for
11648-556: The translation of the Book of Mormon . Also in 1968, de Dios Yapita created his take on the Aymara alphabet at the Instituto de Lenga y Cultura Aymara (ILCA). Nearly 15 years later, the Servicio Nacional de Alfabetización y Educación Popular (SENALEP) attempted to consolidate these alphabets to create a system which could be used to write both Aymara and Quechua, creating what was known as
11760-476: The use of the word "Aymara" as a label for this people was standard practice as early as 1567, as evident from Garci Diez de San Miguel's report of his inspection of the province of Chucuito (1567, 14; cited in Lafaye 1964). In this document, he uses the term aymaraes to refer to the people. The language was then called Colla . It is believed that Colla was the name of an Aymara nation at the time of conquest, and later
11872-420: The very outset of that [language] history." The above approach of comparativism in linguistics is now, however, only a small part of the much broader discipline called historical linguistics. The comparative study of specific Indo-European languages is considered a highly specialized field today, while comparative research is carried out over the subsequent internal developments in a language: in particular, over
11984-551: The word in its original meaning as " téchnē grammatikḗ " ( Τέχνη Γραμματική ), the "art of writing", which is also the title of one of the most important works of the Alexandrine school by Dionysius Thrax . Throughout the Middle Ages , the study of language was subsumed under the topic of philology, the study of ancient languages and texts, practised by such educators as Roger Ascham , Wolfgang Ratke , and John Amos Comenius . In
12096-582: The world of ideas. This work is the first to use the word etymology to describe the history of a word's meaning. Around 280 BC, one of Alexander the Great 's successors founded a university (see Musaeum ) in Alexandria , where a school of philologists studied the ancient texts in Greek, and taught Greek to speakers of other languages. While this school was the first to use the word "grammar" in its modern sense, Plato had used
12208-658: Was developed for Aymara using the Korean script Hangeul . Aymara is a highly agglutinative, predominantly suffixing language. All suffixes can be categorized into the nominal, verbal, transpositional and those not subcategorized for lexical category (including stem-external word-level suffixes and phrase-final suffixes), as below: All verbs require at least one suffix to be grammatical. A given word can take several transpositional suffixes: There are two kinds of suffixes not subcategorized for lexical categories: Linguistic and gestural analysis by Núñez and Sweetser also asserts that
12320-585: Was maintained as the prestige dialect in the north. Speakers from different points within any of the three regions can generally understand one another reasonably well. There are nonetheless significant local-level differences across each. ( Wanka Quechua , in particular, has several very distinctive characteristics that make the variety more challenging to understand, even for other Central Quechua speakers.) Speakers from different major regions, particularly Central or Southern Quechua, are not able to communicate effectively. The lack of mutual intelligibility among
12432-507: Was the first known instance of its kind. In the Middle East, Sibawayh , a Persian, made a detailed description of Arabic in AD 760 in his monumental work, Al-kitab fii an-naħw ( الكتاب في النحو , The Book on Grammar ), the first known author to distinguish between sounds and phonemes (sounds as units of a linguistic system) . Western interest in the study of languages began somewhat later than in
12544-475: Was the southernmost region of the Inca empire Collasuyu. However, Cerrón Palomino disputes this claim and asserts that Colla were in fact Puquina speakers who were the rulers of Tiwanaku in the first and third centuries (2008:246). This hypothesis suggests that the linguistically-diverse area ruled by the Puquina came to adopt Aymara languages in their southern region. In any case, the use of "Aymara" to refer to
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