Andean Aymara

Anyone who has looked at agglutinative languages like Aymara or Quechua has noticed that oftentimes a single word in such a language corresponds to an entire sentence in a Germanic or Romance one. Usually that agglutinative word is pretty big, containing a handful of both nominal and verbal morphemes – but sometimes even [...]

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French-speaking readers can check out what is likely an interesting show on French Culture Radio entitled La longue marche du peuple Aymara et des Indiens de Bolivie. Even if you don´t speak French, it is worthwhile to check out the site to see some of the photos of Pierre de Vallombreuse who also [...]

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Here are two online sources for works relating to evidentiality in Aymara:
Nuñez & Sweetser. 2006. ‘With the future behind them’ Cognitive Science 30:501-450 [link]
Hardman, MJ.  1982.  ’The Mutual influence of Spanish and the Andean languages’ Word 33:143-157. [link] (see section 5.4.1 for a brief overview of data source marking)

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Let’s take a look at some a little play-on-words in Muylaq Aymara (though it likely exists in other variants as well). I’ll keep this as non-technical as possible. The play hinges on the two synonyms for the word ‘cat’, phisi and misi. Although the former is much more popular in everyday language in the Moqueguan [...]

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I’ve been meaning to introduce more linguistics to this blog, so let’s jump right into it. First things first though, sorry for the disorganization. I’m not going to start by analyzing morphemes, words, declarative phrases, interrogatives, etc etc… Actually, this blog will sort of dive into the topic, full speed ahead. OK, now for a [...]

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Just last week, a researcher from Prometheus Entertainment wrote me asking for permission to use photos from this the website in a documentary which he claimed involved an examination of South American indigenous cultures. Naturally, I was intrigued; I thought that this may be a good forum for these pictures. Fortunately, before signing on, I [...]

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Just for fun: Here’s a visualization of the “Enchanted Spring” story as a frequency-weighted word-cloud (though morphemes are not taken into account).

Interesting online software available for free at Wordle

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Elizabeth Lowe (LAS) and M.J. Hardman (Linguistics) received a $156,992 three–year grant from NSF’s Documenting Endangered Language program to preserve the Jaqaru and Kawki languages of Peru.

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Miguel Huanca, the author of an excellent Aymara textbook Aymar arux akhamawa gives a maxim on a site called RedePapa in a brief article entitled El Espiritu Aymara. Protector de los Productos. 
Janiw jaqex qolwempex kuns kamachkaspati; kunatex qolqerox janiw yapuchapksnati, janirakiw qolqx nq’apkaraksnati, t’urkaraksnasa
He glosses this in Spanish: ‘el hombre no puede hacer nada con el dinero, porque [...]

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Translation added to website

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