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Regular version of the site

F. de Carvalho on the Relationship between the Arawakan and Arawan Languages of South America

Event ended

On June 11, at the regular meeting of the Nostratic Seminar Fernando O. de Carvalho (Universidade Federal do Amapá, Brazil) will present his talk “On the relationship between the Arawakan and Arawan families of South America: A (so far) unwritten chapter in Western Amazonian language history”

Hypothesized long-range relationships, no matter how contentious or controversial, are usually anchored to an established set of core data, in the form of proposed etymologies or other presumed evidence, whose existence is accepted by all sides in the debate, with most of the controversy concerning the best interpretation of these patterns (that is, whether diffusion, shared ancestry or sheer accidental similarity accounts for these data; see e.g., Evans 2005 on Pama-Nyungan; and Georg et al. 1999 on Altaic). In South America, however, this is seldom the case. In recent history, many hypothesized relationships have been dismissed based only on the selective criticism of the weakest comparisons found in pioneering proposals, the strength of opinion of a few influential linguists being arguably another significant factor. An undesirable consequence of these evaluations - which are often brief and perfunctory - is that research on the claimed relationships is often stalled, as if the attested similarities had been successfully explained away as either accidental convergences or the result of historically late loanword diffusion.

This presentation reports on the preliminary results of ongoing investigations on the historical relationships between the Arawakan and Arawan language families (Ehrenreich 1897; Dixon 2004). The first goal of the project is to offer a more general and systematically construed database of potentially informative and historically significant matches involving languages from both families. An initial interesting finding is that lexical and grammatical similarities relate Arawan languages not to the local Arawakan groups of the Juruá-Purus river, but to groups further north and, more strikingly, to Arawakan languages of the Bolívia-Paraná branch. Although these similarities are likely due to contact, they suggest the operation of diffusion and convergence of a much older and more significant magnitude than usually accepted. These findings also resonate with independent claims in the ethnohistorical literature, such as the assumption that the Juruá-Purus region of western Amazon furnished a corridor for the dispersion of Arawakan-speaking peoples to the southern fringes of the Amazon basin. Finally, we also assess Arawan-Arawakan similarities within closed, basic meaning wordlists. Overall, preliminary results suggest that the role played by contact with Arawan groups in the genesis of southern Arawakan languages has been more important than so far recognized, and that there is no really strong evidence for a hypothesis of a long-range kinship relation between the two families, although adequate reconstructions of both Proto-Arawan and Proto-Arawakan are needed for a more definite stand on the matter to be taken.

REFERENCES

Dixon, R. M. W. 2004. Proto-Arawá phonology. Anthropological Linguistics 46 (1): 1-83.

Ehrenreich, Paul. 1897. Materialen zur Sprachenkunde zumals Brasiliens: Vokabulare von Purus Stämme. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 29: 59-71.

Evans, Nicholas. 2005. Australian languages reconsidered: A review of Dixon (2002). Oceanic Linguistics 44 (1): 216-260.

Georg, Stefan, Peter Michalove, Alexis Manaster Ramer and Paul Sidwell. 1999. Telling general linguists about Altaic. Journal of Linguistics 35 (1): 65-99.

 

The seminar will take place online on June 11, 2021, at 8.30pm (Moscow time)

 

Ностратический семинар

ВАО: Языковое родство