Andean Aymara

Just returned from my final stay in Muylaque last night and in Moquegua now: one grilled chicken, a cold beer and a cool shower later.   This was by far the most productive fieldwork trip so far, not only because my methodology has improved, but also because I’ve become more well-known and trusted in the community. I think that I have enough data for the bulk of the dissertation, much of which is encoded in examples of the oral literature which Edwin Banegas Flores and I have recorded, transcribed, and translated.

Many of these stories are really fascinating examples of local folklore and Aymara worldview, some resembling Aesop’s Fables and others Kiplings Just-So Stories. In the later categories is the story of Waych’u Bird and Partridge (entitled Waych’ump P’isalamp) in which the fact that partridges lack a tail is explained. These stories, of course, are also a goldmine of interesting linguistic data, especially, as is often the case with narratives, in terms of the evidentials. Consider the verb in the utterance below, ch’uku-ña ‘‘to sew’:

Uka-t waych’u-x ch’uku-w-chi-x laka-p.

One can see that the conjectural morpheme (also marking the third person with zero) is affixed to this root, thus functioning to express the speaker’s lack of certainty about the proposition, as, since it is a fable, was not personally witnessed (NB. also the lack of the affirmative -wa sentence suffix, though the presence of the conjectural and the affirmative on the same sentence are not mutually exclusive, more on this in another, more detailed, post).

Confusingly, the conjectural is usually translated into Andean Spanish as “seguro”, at least in the region under investigation — I’m not sure to what degree this is a specific Andean feature or a general one. This is something to investigate back home. In any case, the sentence is glossed locally as ‘Después el waych’u seguro que le cosió su boca’.

As an aside, note also how there are no final vowels in this sentence. Muylaq’ Aymara tends to delete such vowels across the board, with a few exceptions, though those exceptions presently lack a linguistic explanation.

Lastly, as a quick non-Aymara plug, my adviser Leo Wetzels, together with a friend and colleague at the VU, Daniele Torck, have completed editing the proceeds to Going Romance 2006 (appearing in Current Issues in Linguistics Theory #303). I’ve had the good fortune of being able to take a look at it some time back and there are some great articles. Garrapa has an article called “Vowel elision in spoken Italian”, which although having little in common with Aymara vowel elision, may still be worthwhile for those interested in this mysterious process.