Karo (language in Brazil)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Diamonds

Spoken in

Rondônia ( Brazil )
speaker approx. 200
Linguistic
classification
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

-

ISO 639-3

arr

Karo is the only one still living language to be the family of the Tupi languages in South America counting language group Ramarama . It is spoken by the Karo indigenous people . The language used to be called Arara . In order to distinguish it from the languages ​​of other groups, which are also called Arara , it has been known as Karo since 1987 .

Linguistic characteristics

Language has a system of nominal classifiers within which nouns are classified according to the form in which they occur (real or imagined). A practical example is the expression for "eye": icagá 'a' . The first word means “eye” and the second “round object”. The language has ten different classifiers that refer to the different appearances of objects.

It also has a system of ideophones , onomatopoeic words with generally very specific meanings that are used to make stories and conversations more “colorful”. An example of an ideophone in diamonds is oturum , which means "to fall to the ground with a very loud noise". Another example is the word ngârâgn , which means "turn your head backwards". In diamonds, ideophones are an open class, that is, they can be formed according to the imagination and creativity of their speakers, and their number is therefore very large.

The language also has a system of evidential words which are used to identify the source or reliability of reported information. For example, when a Karo speaker utters the word to'wa after a statement, he wants to say that what is being told comes from hearsay, that is, he was neither a witness nor does he accept it as fact, he is simply passing on the information. The diamond has ten different types of evidential words.

annotation

Karo is also the name of an omotic language spoken by the Kara ethnic group in Ethiopia .

literature

  • GABAS JÚNIOR, Nilson. Estudo fonológico da língua Karo (Arara de Rondônia). Campinas: Unicamp, 1989. (Dissertação de Mestrado)
  • GABAS JÚNIOR, Nilson; ARARA, Sebastião Kara'ya Pew. Cartilha de alfabetização na língua Karo: Ak wen wen 'ya !. Belém: MPEG, 2002. 54 p.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ethnologue, Languages ​​of the World: Karo, a language of Ethiopia

Web links