Matter borrowing, pattern borrowing and typological rarities in the Gran Chaco of South America

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This article shows how the unearthing of new historical data on a language can contribute to diachronic studies and language reconstruction. †Old Zamuco is an extinct Zamucoan language, for which the only extant dictionary was recently rediscovered. This dictionary is the main source on the language and is very rich in morphological information. In particular, it contains many new verb paradigms with previously undescribed or only conjectured characteristics. These features were analyzed in order to compare them with the present-day Zamucoan languages, Ayoreo and Chamacoco. This gave us the opportunity to formulate hypotheses on the historical development of Zamucoan verb morphology and to improve the already available reconstruction of Proto-Zamucoan verb inflection.

Section: The Verb Structure: Basic Features and Proto-zamucoan Reconstructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Historical Data Complement Fieldwork: New Diachronic Perspectives on Zamucoan Verb Inflection*

Ciucci

2021

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“…The Zamucoan family, also spoken in the Chaco, shows traces of past contact with Mataguayan (Ciucci 2014(Ciucci , 2020. Zamucoan consists of two endangered languages, Ayoreo and Chamacoco, plus the extinct Old Zamuco.…”

Section: About This Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

From Fieldwork to Reconstruction: Historical Issues in Hotspots of Linguistic Diversity*

Ciucci

2021

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This special issue aims to explore the advances in historical linguistics that are made possible by the ongoing documentation of underdescribed and endangered languages. Indeed, apart from its contribution to typology, any linguistic description offers data to be analyzed from a diachronic perspective. It hardly needs to be noted that both documentation and historical linguistics significantly contribute to the culture of the communities involved.The most urgent task of linguistics today is perhaps the description and preservation of the amazing linguistic diversity that is still present on the planet. UNESCO reaffirmed this priority with the proclamation of 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages. The awareness of the need for more efforts to protect minority languages led to the declaration of an entire decade, 2022-2032, as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages. Already since 1999, on February 21 of each year, UNESCO has been celebrating the International Mother Language Day, with particular attention to the promotion and protection of those linguistic varieties that are currently threatened.

“…Language contact might have played a role (Ciucci 2014(Ciucci , 2020). (vii) The multifarious morphology of the 3rd person can be used, for classificatory purposes, to distinguish the different verb classes (see Table 5 in Section 2.3).…”

Section: The Paper In a Nutshellmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The various prefixes presumably stemmed from attrition with different root‐initial phonemes, but since this is buried in history, we have no hint at what the initial material might have been. Language contact might have played a role (Ciucci 2014, 2020). (vii)The multifarious morphology of the 3rd person can be used, for classificatory purposes, to distinguish the different verb classes (see Table 5 in Section 2.3).…”

Section: Four (Not Linearly Ordered) Diachronic Stepsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Zamucoan Person Marking as a Perturbed System*

Bertinetto

2021

This paper analyzes the Zamucoan system of Person markers: personal pronouns, verbal and possessive inflection. Comparing the three documented languages (Ayoreo and Chamacoco, currently spoken, and extinct Old Zamuco), one can reconstruct for a very ancient stage of this language family an agglutinating structure for both personal pronouns and verbal inflection, with Person and Number dealt with by, respectively, prefixes and suffixes. However, possessive inflection could not be accommodated within this system, since the noun suffix can only express possessum Number, while possessor Number has to be expressed by a dedicated prefix. This structural conflict forced the Zamucoan languages to attempt various solutions, departing from the original agglutinating logic.