Andean Aymara

It’s been a while since there’s been any update on this website, mainly because the description of Muylaq’ Aymara is rapidly coming to a close and I’m spending most of my time measuring vowel formants.
That being said, one can measure only so many formants before going crazy. That’s where the Internet comes in as [...]

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Most people interested in Andean languages know of the parallels between Aymara and Quechua grammar. However, rarely do we think about those same parallels in Chipaya. This is probably due, in large part, to the lack of any complete grammar or dictionary on any Uru-Chipayan language — to the best of my knowledge, our understanding [...]

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Readers may be interested to read that from 12-14 Jan 2011 there will be a conference on the phonology of endangered languages at CUNY.
There is a call for papers (deadline 1 Sept 2010).
Read more about it here. Note that this event is also scheduled in the event agenda.

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Congratulations to Daniel Montesinos (a botany student at U. Wageningen), Mr Alvarez, and of course, Edwin Banegas Flores (the Chief Linguistic Consultant on the Aymara documentation project) in their big news — the rare Aristeguietia ballii (of the Asteraceae family) has now been officially registered in Ubinas (Moquegua) at 3500m thanks to their fieldwork.

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Tomorrow Edwin Banegas Flores (Chief Linguistic Consultant, Aymara documentation project), here for his final week in Europe, will be speaking at the eighth AIN conference (Americanists In the Netherlands). Edwin will talk about the nature of his work at the LPP lab in Paris and will touch on the phonetics and phonology of his variety [...]

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Yesterday Edwin Banegas Flores, a native speaker of Moqueguan Aymara (and one of the primary consultants in this documentation project), arrived in Paris from Lima (after a brief afternoon in Amsterdam).
The phonetic testing began with an ePGG analysis using technology developed by Honda, Maeda, & Kitamura. Basically, the ePGG sensor they created detects glottal transillumination [...]

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Research into the phonology of Aymara continues productively thanks to the guidance of Antonia Colazo Simon at the phonetics lab at Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris 3. Stage 1 is well underway — so we are hard at work going through hundreds of elicited words and annotating them on a text grid in Praat. Results are [...]

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Here are some photos sent to me by my good friend Fredy Quinonez-Nina, a very talented musician who I met in Ichuña in late 2009. Fredy and some of his friends have a band called Waynas (’The young guys’) and they produces very nice songs in Aymara, some of which I’ve been able to record. [...]

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I’ve been meanig to post an update on the Muylaq’ Aymara documentation project for some time now, but things have been so busy that it’s only now that I’m getting to it. Here’s a summary of some of the latest developments:

Thanks to the help of Edwin Banegas and his family, the book of Aymara stories [...]

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Leo Wetzel’s AmazonianLinguistics website has recently posted news of Amazonicas III scheduled for 19-24 April in Bogotá. The main topics include the phonetics/phonology of laryngeal features, the expression of spatial notions, valency increasing devices in Arawakan languages, and lexical categorization. More information can be found on the site.

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