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Guahibo language
Guahibo, the native language of the Guahibo people, is a Guahiban language that is spoken by about 23,006 people in Colombia and additional 8,428 in Venezuela. There is a 40% rate of monolingualism, and a 45% literacy rate.
Sounds
Stress
Guahibo has a unique and complex stress system with both primary and secondary stress. The stress system shows a sensitivity to syllable weight so that heavy syllables are always stressed. Both contrasting trochaic and iambic patterns are found on morphemes in nonfinal morphemes with more than two syllables:
The binary feet are parsed from left to right within each morpheme. Morphemes with an odd number of syllables leave the final syllable unstressed (and unparsed into feet):
Morphemes that consist of two syllables and are also word-final are an exception to the above and only have the trochaic pattern:
These morphemes alternate with an iambic pattern when placed in a nonfinal context. Thus nawa keeps its trochaic pattern with the addition of a single light syllable morpheme like -ta "in":
nawa + -ta => nawata ('LL)L
However, an iambic word show its underlying iamb when it is followed by -ta:
puca + -ta => pucata (L'L)L
Affixation generally does not affect the stress pattern of each morpheme.
Heavy syllables since they are required to be stressed disrupt perfect trochaic and iambic rhythms. However, morphemes with a sequence of at least two light syllables show contrasting stress patterns:
Primary Stress. Primary stress generally falls on the rightmost nonfinal foot. For example, the following word
(LL)(LL)L (pa.lu).(pa.lu).ma"rabbit"
has primary stress on the rightmost foot (pa.lu) which is not word-final. However, the rightmost foot (qui.si) in
(LL)(LL) (tu.li).(qui.si) "bead necklace"
is word-final and cannot receive primary stress; the primary stress then falls on the next rightmost foot (tu.li). Placing a light syllable suffix -ta"with" after a four syllable root shows shifting of primary stress:
(LL)(LL) tsapanilu"species of turtle"
(LL)(LL)L tsapaniluta"with the turtle"
With the addition of the suffix, the root-final foot (ni.lu) is no longer word-final and is subsequently permitted to accept primary stress.
Bibliography
Kondo, Riena. (1984). Notas sobre la fonologia guahiba. Sistemas fonologicos de idiomas colombianos, 5, 205-211.
Kondo, Riena. (1985). Contribucion al estudio de longitud vocalica y el acento en el idioma guahiba. Articulos en linguistica y campos afines, 13, 55-82.
Kondo, Riena. (1985). El guahibo hablado: Gramatica pedagogica del guahibo(Vols. 1-2). Lomalinda, Colombia: Instituto Linguistico de Verano.
Kondo, Riena. (1985). Long vowels and stress in Guahibo: From phonology to discourse. In Language data: Amerindian series. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Kondo, Riena. (2001). Guahibo stress: Both trochaic and iambic. International Journal of American Linguistics, 67(2), 136-166.
Kondo, Victor; & Kondo, Riena. (1967). Guahibo phonemes. In Phonemic systems of Colombian languages(pp. 89-98). Norman, OK: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Kondo, Victor; & Kondo, Riena. (1972). Fonemas del guahibo. Sistemas fonologicos de idiomas colombianos, 1, 93-102.
Mosonyi, Esteban Emilio. (1964). Contribucion el estudio de la fonemica: Idioma Guajibo. Economia y Ciencias Sociales, 6, 93-103.
Queixalos, Francisco. (1985). Fonoloia Sikuani''. Bogota: Insituto Caro y Cuervo.
External links
Entry for Guahibo at Rosetta Project
Luis Angel Arango Library: Diagnostico sociolinguistico de Cumaribo, zona de contacto indigena Colono, Vichadaby Hector Ramirez Cruz
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Guahibo language
