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Kuna language
The Kuna language, spoken by the Kuna people of Panama and Colombia, belongs to the Chibchan language family.
Phonemes
Kuna recognises has 5 vowel phonemes and 17 consonantal phonemes.
Vowels
Vowels may be short or long.
Consonants
Most consonants may appear either as short (lax) or long (tense). The long consonants only appear intervocalically/ However, they are not always a result of morpheme concatenation, and they often differ phonetically from the short analogue. For example, the long stop consonants p, t, and k are pronounced as voiceless, usually with longer duration than in English. The short counterparts are pronounced as voiced b, d, and g when they are between vowels or beside sonorant consonants m, n, l, r, y, or w . At the beginnings of words, the stops may be pronounced either as voiced or voiceless; and are usually pronounced as voiceless word-finally (Long consonants do not appear word-initially or word-finally). In an even more extreme case, the long s is pronounced [t]. Underlyingly long consonants become short before another consonant.
Other phonological rules
The alveolar s becomes the palatal after n or t.
Both long and short [k] become [j] before another consonant.
Morphology
Kuna is an agglutinative language which contains words of up to about 9 morphemes, although words of two or three morphemes are more common. Most of the morphological complexity is found in the verb, which contains suffixes of tense and aspect, plurals, negatives, position and various adverbials. The verb is not marked for person.
References
Llerena Villalobos, Rito (1987) Relacion y determinacion en el predicado de la lengua Kuna. Bogota: CCELA - Universidad de los Andes. ISSN 0120-9507
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Kuna language
