Tuscarora (language)
Tuscarora (own name: Skarùrę ) is an Iroquois language spoken in the US state of New York and the Canadian province of Ontario . It is almost extinct with about 50 speakers in Canada and only three speakers in the US, all of whom are of advanced age. (As of: mid-2017) In the recent past, however, a revitalization program for the language has been started, as part of which children learn the language in school.
Phonology
Like other Iroquois languages, Tuscarora has a relatively small phoneme inventory :
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Orally | nasal | Orally | |
| Closed | / i / / iː / | / u / / uː / | |
| Half open | / ɛ / / ɛː / | / ə̃ / / ə̃ː / | |
| Open | / a / / aː / |
Consonants
| Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive | / t / | / ʧ / | / k / | / ʔ / | |
| Fricative | / θ / | / s / | /H/ | ||
| nasal | / n / | ||||
| Approximant | / y / | / w / | |||
| Liquid | / r / |
[g] and [d] only exist asallophonicvariants of / k / or / t / in front of vowels. Compared to the manageable phoneme inventory itself, however, there are complex morphophonological processes at the morpheme boundaries.
The emphasis generally falls on the paenultima, i.e. H. the penultimate syllable of the word form.
orthography
/ ə̃ / and / ə̃ː / are represented orthographically by <ę> or <ę ·>, / ʧ / by <č>.
morphology
Tuscarora is - typical of North American languages - a polysynthetic language. Such languages are characterized by a high number of morphemes per word . Therefore, a word in Tuscarora sometimes corresponds to a whole sentence in non-polysynthetic languages such as German , e.g. B. Tuscarora ęhskwanęhkwaʔčrę · tyęʔ = 'You have to make me a medicine' In the area of pronominal prefixes, the language also shows partially fusional features. In the above example, for example, B. the prefix -hsk- a 2nd person singular agentiv with a 1st person singular patientiv (cf. polypersonality ).
"Syntax"
Due to the polysynthetic character of language, it is very difficult to identify phrasal units that would constitute syntactic structures and thus sentences in the sense of European languages. The word order is v. a. controlled by pragmatic factors.
literature
- Mithun Williams, Marianne (1976): A Grammar of Tuscarora . New York: Garland Publications.
- Rudes, Blair A. (1999): Tuscarora / English - English / Tuscarora Dictionary . Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
- Rudes, Blair A. & Dorothy Crouse (1987). The Tuscarora Legacy of JNB Hewitt: Materials for the Study of Tuscarora Language and Culture . Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization.
Web links
- Site of the Tuscarora School . You can u. a. Hear the names of some of the birds on Tuscarora spoken by schoolchildren.
- Ethnologue entry for Tuscarora
Individual evidence
- ↑ According to UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, version of July 4, 2017 , accessed on August 17, 2020.
- ^ An example can be found in Rudes & Crouse (1987: 134).