Pano languages
Pano or Paño (English Panoan ) is a language family that is distributed in two separate areas on this side and on the other side of the Brazilian-Peruvian border. It comprises 28 individual languages with a total of 47,000 speakers (for further classification see Indigenous American Languages ).
Pano languages are spoken by the Kaxinawá (Cashinahua), the Shipibo-Conibo (largest group with approx. 30,000 speakers) and the Yaminawá , among the smaller groups of speakers are the Kaxarari and Marubo . Smaller groups of a few hundred people in the Bolivian Amazon region also speak pano-languages. B. Chácobo around Alto Ivon .
The pano-speaking groups were dispersed and relocated during the rubber boom, so that they themselves know little about their origins and identity. Different self-names of their languages can also be found in the not closely related neighboring peoples and often lead to confusion.
Supplemented by the Tacana languages, the superordinate language family of the Pano-Tacana languages results .
morphology
Characteristic of the agglutinating pano-languages is the unique use of around 30 different monosyllabic body part-related prefixes for "mouth" to "fingernail", which are placed in front of the noun, verb or adjective stems and define them in more detail, but also by analogy can be applied to flora and fauna, artifacts or landscapes. So më -kiad-o-bi ( hand -learning-PAST-1st PERSONAL SINGULAR) means: "I learned (something) with the hand" (to do, e.g. weaving). In the structure of language there are parallels to mythology e.g. B. to recognize the Marubo, which explains the creation of new beings by combining body parts of the deceased.
Overall, however, the morphology of the pano-languages is characterized by the predominant use of suffixes . The chaining of up to 10 suffixes to determine temporal or logical relationships and to refer to subject, objects, etc. is unique.
literature
- André-Marcel d'Ans: Materiales para el estudio del grupo lingüístico pano. Lima 1970.
- Eugene E. Loos: Pano . In: RMW Dixon & Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (Eds.): The Amazonian languages. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999, ISBN 0-521-57021-2 , pp. 227-250.
- Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald: The languages of the Amazon. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-959356-9 , pp. 43–45, distribution map: p. 44. ( limited preview in Google book search).