Car (language)

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Car (Pu)

Spoken in

India : Nicobar Islands
speaker 20,000, with second speakers 37,000
Linguistic
classification

Austro-Asian

Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

-

ISO 639-3

caq

Car or Pu is a Nicobarese language spoken as the mother tongue of around 20,000 people on the northern Nicobar island of Car. Car (Pu) is the most important by far of the seven local nikobaresischen languages and is on the Nicobar Islands of another 17,000 people - as - including immigrants lingua franca used.

The Latin script is used for the Car language. There is a translation of the Bible from 1969.

Location of the Nicobar Islands
Map of the Nicobar Islands

Linguistic characteristics

Although Car is an Austro-Asian language, it has typological similarities with the geographically nearby Austronesian languages Nias and Achinese , with which it forms a small linguistic area (Braine 1970).

Car is a VOS language , so the order of the parts of the sentence in the statement is usually predicate - object - subject. (Worldwide this type is very rare, only about 2% of all languages ​​belong to it.) Car is prepositional (prepositions are used, not postpositions), the typical structure of the noun phrase is noun - genitive ("the house of the father") , Adjective - noun ("the big house"), numerals - noun and demostrative - noun . Number, case and possessive relationships are not marked on the noun, there are three grammatical genders. The morphology is drinkable with an agglutinating tendency. The verb has no tense system but an aspect system. (see WALS web link.)

literature

  • Jean Critchfield Braine: Nicobarese Grammar (Car Dialect). Berkeley CA 1970 (Berkeley CA, University, phil. Dissertation, 1970).
  • Robert Parkin: A Guide to Austroasiatic Speakers and Their Languages (= Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication. Vol. 23). University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu HI 1991, ISBN 0-8248-1377-4 .
  • George van Driem: Languages ​​of the Himalayas. An ethnolinguistic Handbook of the greater Himalayan Region. Containing an Introduction to the symbiotic Theory of Language (= Handbuch der Orientalistik. Dept. 2: India. = India. Vol. 10). Volume 1. Brill, Leiden et al. 2001, ISBN 90-04-12062-9 (Zum Nicobaresischen pp. 280-289).
  • George Whitehead: Dictionary of the Car-Nicobarese language. American Baptist Mission Press, Rangoon 1925.

Web links