Difference between revisions of "User:Pcruz1/Language selection"

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Nheengatú

About the language

Nheengatu (ISO: yrl) is an indigenous language of the Tupi-Guarani family, is then derived from the Tupi trunk, and originated from the ancient Amazonian tupinambá, an ancient Tupi dialectal branch of the Amazon, which extended throughout the region from the Brazilian state of Maranhão. The language name derives from the words nhẽẽga (meaning "language" or "word") and katu (meaning "good")

Currently, it continues to be spoken by approximately 19,060 people, in three linguistic variants in Brazil: that of the Rio Negro region, called Yẽgatu, that of the Baixo Amazonas, known as traditional nheengatú and that of the Baixo Rio Tapajós or Nheengatu Tapajoawara, in addition of the foreign variants: Nheengatu from Venezuela (Ñeengatu) and Nheengatu from Colombia (Nyengatu). It is written in the Latin alphabet and used as an official language in the Brazilian state of Amazonas.

In terms of users, less than half of the community speaks the language, and the number of speakers is decreasing at an accelerated pace. Furthermore, most adults in the community are speakers, but children are not. This is good evidence that Nheengatu is an endangered language and that developing computational resources to it might contribute to its preservation.

Morphology

There are eight word classes in Nheengatu: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, postpositions, pronouns, demonstratives, and particles. A very used book source for Nheengatu morphology is Cruz’s (2011) Fonologia e Gramática do Nheengatú, written in Portuguese.

Pronouns

There are two types of pronouns in Nheengatu: personal or interrogative. Nheengatu follows the same pattern as Tupinambá - another indigenous language in Brazil - in that the same set of personal pronouns is adopted for the subject and object of a verb.

Verbal Affixes

Apart from pronominal prefixes, Nheengatu also has verbal prefixes. Verbs in Nheengatu fall into three mutually exclusive categories: intransitive, transitive, and stative. To conjugate verbs in Nheengatu, users attach a prefix that agrees with the subject of the sentence.

Reduplication

This is a morphological process that tends to be used to indicate a repeated action.

U-tuka~tuka ukena

3sg-knock (reduplication) Door

"He is (repeatedly) knocking on the door."

Availability of Resources

In spite of the fact that only 20,000 people speak the language nowadays, there is a good amount of resources about the language available. After a quick dig on the internet, I was able to find an 18-track LP with melodies sung in Nheengatú, a 112-page textbook dedicated to language learners, a language-learning app similar to Duolingo to learn Nheengatu, and a magazine with poems and lyrics written in the target language. Therefore, it is fair to say that there is a significant number of materials to make this language a good choice for the project.

Sources

• Wikimedia Foundation. (2022, January 2). Nheengatu. Wikipedia. Retrieved January 20, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nheengatu
• Did you know Nheengatú is endangered? Endangered Languages. (n.d.). Retrieved January 20, 2022, from https://www.endangeredlanguages.com/lang/2971

Aymaran

About the language

Aymara (ISO: aym) 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 1.7 million speakers. Aymara, along with Spanish, 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.

Some linguists have claimed that Aymara is related to its more widely spoken neighbor, Quechua, due to, among other factors, existing phonological similitaries. That claim, however, is disputed. Most linguists explain such similarities as areal features rising from prolonged cohabitation, rather than natural genealogical changes that would stem from a common protolanguage.

In spite of a large number of speakers, the community of users is decreasing significantly. Linguists from the University of El Alto (UPEA) and the University Mayor of San Andrés (UMSA) have acknowledged that two percent more stop speaking the language each year and that parents have already stopped teaching it to their children. As a result, it is considered potentially endangered.

Morphology

Aymara is a highly agglutinating and, to a certain extent, polysynthetic language. All suffixes can be categorized into nominal, verbal, transpositional, and those not subcategorized for the lexical category. Additionally, it has a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order.

Furthermore, an interesting feature - which is unique to this language - is the ternary logic (yes, maybe, no), in contrast to other languages, which follow the binary logic (yes, no). In Aymara, this uncertainty is expressed through prefixes and suffixes attached to the verbs.

Availability of resources

Searching for resources in English didn’t yield many successful results. However, switching languages to Spanish allowed me to access a good amount of text-written resources through blogs and virtual libraries. In general, the online presence of Aymaran literature and art makes the language a good candidate.

Sources

• teleSUR, R. W.-. (2014, July 24). Aymara language threatened with extinction. News | teleSUR English. Retrieved January 20, 2022, from https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Aymara-Language-Threatened-with-Extinction-20140724-0035.html
• Aymara (Aymar Aru). Aymara language, alphabet and pronunciation. (n.d.). Retrieved January 20, 2022, from https://omniglot.com/writing/aymara.htm
• Wikimedia Foundation. (2022, January 16). Aymara language. Wikipedia. Retrieved January 20, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aymara_language,,