Aymara language
Aymara is an
Aymaran language spoken by the
Aymara of the
Andes. It is one of only a handful of
Native American languages with over a million speakers, and it is one of the
official languages of
Bolivia and
Peru. It is also spoken in
Chile and
Argentina.
Many linguists believe that Aymara is related to its more widely-spoken neighbour,
Quechua. This claim, however, is disputed — although there are indeed similarities, critics say that these may simply be
areal features resulting from prolonged interaction between the two languages.
The Aymara language is an
inflected language, and has a
subject-object-verb word order.
The word "aymara" come from three aymara words: 1.- "jaya", ancient; 2.- "mara", year; 3.- "aru", language, talk.
Thus, "jaya mara aru", or simply "aimara", signifies "ancient language".
Aymara has three
phoneme vowels (, which distinguish two degrees of length. The high vowels are lowered to mid height before uvular consonants ( â†' , â†' ).
As for the
consonants, Aymara has phonemic stops at the labial, alveolar, palatal, velar and uvular points of articulation. Stops show no distinction of voice (e.g. there is no phonemic contrast between and ), but each stop has three forms: plain (unaspirated), glottalized, and aspirated. Aymara also has a trilled , and an alveolar/palatal contrast for nasals and laterals, as well as two semivowels ( and ).
Stress is usually on the penult (the syllable before the last one), but long vowels may shift it.
Some believe that the Aymara language descends from the language spoken in
Tiwanaku. This cannot be proven, but it is known that the language was spoken by the rich Aymara kingdoms, who were later conquered by the
Inca. Aymara is one of three extant languages of the Jaqi language family along with
Jaqaru and
Kawki. This family was established by the research of Martha James Hardman de Bautista of the Program in Linguistics at the University of Florida. Jaqaru [jaqi aru = human language] and Kawki communities are in the district of Tupe, Yauyos Valley, in the Dept. of Lima, Peru. Jaqaru has approximately 5,000 native speakers, nearly all Spanish bilinguals. Kawki is spoken in a neighboring community by a very small number of mostly elderly individuals and is a dying language.
There are 1.2 million Bolivian speakers, 300 thousand Peruvian speakers, 50 thousand Chilean speakers and about 10,000 Argentinean speakers.
While the Aymara language is basically the same wherever it is spoken, there are regional differences. The Aymara spoken in
La Paz, Bolivia is considered the purest form of the language. Of the regional variations, the 200,000 Aymara speakers from the border of Peru to Puno use the form most similar to the Aymara spoken in La Paz. There are also about 90,000 Aymara speakers in the provinces of
Huancane and
Moho in the department of
Puno in Peru. While understood by Aymaristas from other regions, the Aymara spoken in Huancane and Moho seems to contain the most regional differences.
The language has attracted interest because it is based on a
three value logic system, and thus supposedly has better expressiveness than many other languages based on
binary logic.
It is cited by the author
Umberto Eco in
The Search for the Perfect Language as a language of immense flexibility, capable of accommodating many
neologisms.
Ludovico Bertonio published
Arte de la lengua aymara in
1603. He remarked that the language was particularly useful for expressing abstract concepts. In
1860 Emeterio Villamil de Rada suggested it was "the language of Adam" (
la lengua de Adán).
Guzmán de Rojas has suggested that it be used as an intermediary language for
computerised translation.
Linguistic and gestural analysis by
Núñez and
Sweetser also assert that the Aymara have an apparently unique, or at least very rare, understanding of time, and is also the only language found so far where speakers seem to represent the past as in front of them and the future as behind them. Their argument is situated mainly within the framework of
conceptual metaphor, which recognizes in general two subtypes of the metaphor THE PASSAGE OF TIME IS MOTION: one is TIME PASSING IS MOTION OVER A LANDSCAPE (or "moving-ego"), and the other is TIME PASSING IS A MOVING OBJECT ("moving-events"). The latter metaphor does not explicitly involve the individual/speaker; events are in a queue, with prior events towards the front of the line. The individual may be facing the queue, or it may be moving from left to right in front of him/her.
The claims regarding Aymara involve the moving-ego metaphor. Most languages conceptualize the ego as moving forward into the future, with ego's back to the past. The
English sentences
prepare for what lies before us and
we are facing a prosperous future, and possibly the
Chinese word
未來 (lit. not yet come, meaning
future) exemplify this metaphor. In contrast, Aymara seems to encode the past as in front of individuals, and the future in back; this is
typologically a rare phenomenon.
It should be noted that many languages, including English and Chinese, have words like
before/
å‰ and
after/
後 that are (currently or archaically)
polysemous between 'front/earlier' or 'back/later'. This seemingly refutes the claims regarding Aymara uniqueness. However, these words relate events to other events, i.e., are part of the moving-events metaphor. In fact, when
before means
in front of ego, it can only mean
future. For instance,
our future is laid out before us while
our past is behind us. Parallel Aymara examples describe future days as
qhipa uru, literally 'back days', and these are sometimes accompanied by gestures to behind the speaker.
*
Núñez, R., &
Sweetser, E. With the Future Behind Them : Convergent Evidence From Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time. Cognitive Science, 30(3), 1-49.
*
List of Spanish words of Indigenous American Indian origin*
www.aymara.org An extensive website about the language in English, Spanish and Aymara.
*
The Sounds of the Andean Languages listen online to pronunciations of Aymara words, see photos of speakers and their home regions, learn about the origins and varieties of Aymara.
*
Ethnologue reports for Aymara*
Aymara.org*
Encyclopedy in Aymara*
Aymara - English Dictionary: from
Webster's Online Dictionary, the Rosetta Edition.
*
The Dream of a Perfect Language (PDF) A lecture by Umberto Eco where he mentions Aymara.
*
Andean language looks back to the future - article on Aymara's reversed concept of time, with the past ahead and the future behind
*
JACH'AK'ACHI. Patpatankiri markana kont'awipa An aymara page dedicated to this city in aymara laguage.
