User:Kbecker2/Language selection

Who I may want to work with

• Chung Sze Kwok
• Panhavoan Reth

Languages in order of preference

1. Unami
2. Mon
3. Ute

Unami

Morphological Typology

• Agglutinative
• Polysynthetic
• Other notable characteristics of the language
  • Algonquian
  • Prefixes and suffixes are utilized, and suffixes are grouped into eight positional classes
  • More phonological innovation and morphological regularization than it's close relatives
  • ISO 639 unm
  • Orthography: Not traditionally written, but has been aligned mostly with the latin alphabet
  • Four long vowels (*i·, *o·, *e·, *a·) and two short vowels (*a and ə)
  • Two types of consonants: Germinate and non-geminate consonants
  • Complex phonology
  • Third person nouns have gender, obviation, and presence
  • Verbs are marked for person and number and other subtle details. Most information is encoded in the verbs

Basic Information

Unami was spoken by the Lenape people who initially settled in what is now southern New Jersey, southeastern Pennsylvania, and northern Delaware. The last fluent speaker of Unami, Edward Thompson, passed in 2001, though the language is still studied and many speak some Unami as a second language. Like other Eastern Algonquian languages, Unami likely descended from Proto-Eastern Algonquian (PEA). Attempts have been made by the Lenape Language Preservation Project to preserve Unami.

Availability of Text

Lexical resources and language descriptions are available on Joshua Project's website, though I could not find any pages of original text.

Mon

Morphological Typology

• Isolating: primarily relies on word order and separate function words to convey meaning, minimal morphology
• ISO 639 mnw
• Other notable characteristics of the language
  • Not a tonal language like many of its geographic neighbors
  • Uses a vowel-phonation system (two voice qualities: clear and breathy)
  • No inflection for person
  • Tense given in particles
  • Nouns do not give information about number (no difference for singular and plural)
  • Yes/No questions are marked by a ha in the final position of the sentence.
  • Prepositions are used
  • Classifiers are used to related nouns and numericals
  • Adjectives appear after nouns
  • Orthography: Has its own alphabet which is a Brahmic abugida derived from the Pallava Grantha script of southern India. The script is similar to modern Burmese.

Basic Information

Mon is spoken by the Mon people who primarily live in Southern Myanmar, and it's recognized as an indigenous language of Myanmar and Thailand. In 2007, the Austroasiatic language was estimated to have between 1,800,000 and 2 million speakers. The history of the Mon language is rich, and a noteable recent development is that in 2013, the Thanlwin Times began to publish the news in the Mon language, becoming Myanmar's first Mon language publication since 1962. Mon has three dialects separated by region (Central, Bago, and Ye).

Availability of Text

Language samples are readily available.

Ute

Morphological Typology

• Polysynthetic
• Affixes are mostly suffixes, but there are three major types of prefixes for verbs and one for nouns.