Ixtenco Otomí

Yolandra Lastra
Universidad Autónoma de Mexico

Ixtenco is a small town in the State of Tlaxcala where Otomí is still spoken by people over 60 years old. It is surrounded by formerly Nahuatl-speaking towns. The Ixtenco dialect can be grouped with Estern Otomí, but it differs from the Sierra dialects in several important respects, for instance the absence of the dual number and the contrast between close-mid and open-mid rounded back vowels.

The sketch will contain chapters on phonology, morphology and syntax as well as a text with interlinear translation. Emphasis will be given to morphology which is quite complex. There are, for instance, 10 tense aspects not counting the imperative. These are signalled by prefixes one for each of the three persons; number of the first and second persons is marked by suffixes. Distinction is made between exclusive and inclusive. The favorite word order seems to be SVO at the present time.

ISBN 9783929075151. Languages of the World/Materials 19. 44pp. 1998.

Maori

Ray Harlow
University of Waikato

Maori, a member of the Eastern Polynesian subgroup of the Austronesian language family, is the indigenous language of New Zealand. It is spoken by some 30,000 people, though a much greater number of people, perhaps as many as 200,000 have some knowledge of the language. Recently, Maori has been the subject of intense efforts to ensure its survival and development. In its phonology, morphology and syntax, it is very representative of its subgroup. It has little in the way of inflexional morphology, most morphosyntactic categories such as case, tense, even number being expressed at the level of phrase, not the word. Like other Polynesian languages, its pronoun system distinguishes three numbers, singular, dual and plural, and exclusive vs. inclusive first person.
This sketch of grammar of Maori provides an account of the basic VSX sentence type and of the variants of this which express discourse-related emphases. The sample text is drawn from the writings of a 19th-century elder, who has left voluminous manuscripts in Maori on a variety of areas of traditional knowledge and thought.

ISBN 9783895851208. Languages of the World/Materials 20. 60pp. 1996.

Chadian  Arabic

Samir Abu-Absi University of Toledo

This sketch deals with an unwritten dialect of Arabic which is spoken in parts of northern and central Chad (French Tchad) and which has received serious attention only in the last three decades. The description and materials used is of potential interest to nonspecialists as well as to students of Arabic linguistics and dialectology. A variety of what may be labeled Sudanic Arabic, the Chadian dialect manifests certain linguistic features which pose a challenge to its classification in terms of the traditional Eastern/Western or nomadic/ sedentary dichotomies.

Included in this study are brief phonological, morphological and syntactic outlines of the dialect followed by sample texts in phonemic transcription. It is hoped that enough information is given to be of help to those who do not know Arabic as well as to those who are familiar with other varieties of Arabic. A number of characteristic features of Chadian Arabic, especially in the area of phonology, are contrasted with equivalent structures in Modern Standard Arabic since the latter is one variety of Arabic which is more likely to be familiar to most readers.

The materials in this sketch is based mainly on data collected in the late sixties from a native speaker of Chadian Arabic to be used in the preparation of teaching material for the Peace Corps. Other materials collected by other researchers and published since are also taken into consideration.

ISBN 9783895860058. Languages of the World/Materials 21. 47 pp. 1995.

Modern Eastern Armenian

Natalia Kozintseva

Modern Eastern Armenian (MEA) is spoken in Armenia by about 2.7 million people, where it is the standard language. It belongs to the Indo-European stock, within which it constitutes an isolated branch.

The present sketch deals mainly with the grammatical description of MEA.  Nouns have a singular/plural number distinction, a postpositive definite article, a prepositive indefinite article, five cases (nominative=accusative, genitive=dative, instrumental, ablative, locative). The word order is relatively free (non-rigid SOV). The subject is usually placed before or after the predicate, the complements and adverbial modifiers may be placed before or after the predicate, depending on the functional sentence perspective. In the noun phrase, the attribute always precedes the noun. Postpositions prevail over prepositions. Especial attention is paid to verbal categories (voice, aspect, tense, and mood in their relation to the syntactic structure of the sentence).

The sketch is supplemented with an original MEA text and an extensive bibliography.

ISBN 9783895860355. Languages of the World/Materials 22. 1995.

Passamaquoddy-Maliseet

Robert Leavitt
Micmac-Maliseet Institute, University of New Brunswick


Passamaquoddy-Maliseet is an eastern Algonquian language, with about 500 speakers today in Maine (USA) and New Brunswick (Canada). This sketch outlines the fundamental features of the language. Passamaquoddy-Maliseet has five vowel sounds and twelve consonants, with pitch and stress also distinctive. Words are composed of roots; a typical verb, for example, contains verbal, nominal, adjectival, and adverbial roots, as well as number, tense, and other grammatical markings. The stems and inflections of transitive verbs are differentiated by grammatical gender, animate or inanimate, according to that of the direct object, while intransitive verbs agree in gender with the subject. Other words include nouns, pronouns and uninflected particles. Particular features of the language include the regular syncope of syllables containing unstressed schwa, the use of absentative forms of nouns and verbs, the division of third persons into two grammatical categories to indicate narrative focus, the reanalysis of many participles as nouns, the marking of intransitive verbs for use with direct objects, and speaker-centred construction of space and time.

ISBN 9783895861062. Languages of the World/Materials 27. 60pp. 1 map.1996.

 Northern Sotho

Louis J. Louwrens, Ingeborg M. Kosch andAlbert E. Kotzé
University of South Africa

Amongst the immense diversity of the languages of Africa one finds the Bantu languages which number close to a thousand including dialects. Within the South­eastern zone of the Bantu language family, sub­groups such as the Sotho and Nguni groups, Tsonga and Venda are distinguished, Northern Sotho belongs to the Sotho group together with Tswana and Southern Sotho. Geographically speakers of Northern Sotho are mostly concentrated in the Northern and North­eastern parts of the Transvaal. There are about 3,5 million mother­tongue speakers.

Typologically Northern Sotho is an agglutinative language. It is characterised by a system of noun classes and concordial agreement. Concordance is established by means of prefixal elements. Tone plays an important role in distinguishing the lexical meaning of words, but is also used to determine the grammatical character of words.

The present volume presents among others, interesting sociolinguistic data, salient phonemic and orthographic facts, an outline of the nominal and verbal morphology, syntactic and discourse related phenomena, as well as sample texts with interlinear transcription and translation.

ISBN 9783929075434. Languages of the World/Materials 30. 62pp. 1995.

Saliba

Ulrike Mosel
University of Kiel

Saliba is an Austronesian, Western Oceanic language which is spoken by fewer than one thousand people on the island of Saliba in Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. Genetically it belongs to the Suaic languages of the Papuan Tip Cluster. It seems to be closely related to Suau which functions as a mission language of the area. Whether Saliba and Suau have to be classified as dialects or as different languages is unlcear, as this is the first grammatical description of any Suauic language.

Saliba is a verb final head marking language of the nominative­accusative type which shows some interesting typological features such as internal relative clauses, verb serialisation, clause chaining, and a clitic particle which can mark noun phrases, verb phrases, clauses and even clause chains as topics.

After a sketchy phonology, the present monograph describes various types of verbal and non­verbal clauses, the word classes, the noun phrase and so­called possessive constructions, the verb phrase, transitivity, nominalisation, subordinate clauses and clause chaining. In order to provide a good illustration of the Saliba discourse structure, the grammatical sketch concludes with the analysis of three short texts.

ISBN 9783929075335. Languages of the World/Materials 31. 48pp. 1994.

Sinhala

James W. Gair and John Paolillo
Cornell University & University of Texas at Arlington

Sinhala is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Sri Lanka, where it has developed largeley independently of the other Modern Indo-Aryan languages, which are spoken primilary in northern India. As a result of this development, it exhibits grammatical and phonological characteristics not found in other Indo-Aryan languages. Some of these developments may be traces to the influence of the neighboring Dravidian languages, principally Tamil and Malayalam, but many developments include the loss of the aspirate series of stops, the innovation of a series of prenasalized stops in contrast with nasal-stop clusters, and a new low-front vowel /æ/ phonemically distinct from /a/. Morphologically, Sinhala posesses an unusual four-way deictic system, a system of volitivity marking of verbal forms, definiteness marking on nominals, and both causative and plural formation systems involving gemination. Sinhala has basic SOV word order like most languages of the region. Nevertheless some of its most remarkable properties concern its syntax. Non-verb predicates do not use a copula verb, and fail to participate in subordination constructions that employ special verbal morphology. There is a cleft-like construction that uses a postverbal position for focusing, but with variants with the focused element in different positions, in accord with the high degree of constituent freedom of the language. This construction is extremely common in discourse, and it is grammatically required in certain circumstances (e.g. constituent and most WH-questioning).

Sinhala is a strongly diglossic language, with Spoken Sinhala being used for everyday purposes and Literary Sinhala for most written or scripted forms of communication. Available descriptions of Sinhala tend to address Literary Sinhala primilary, so the present volume will focus on Spoken Sinhala. The volume will include a sample of oral narrative collected by one of the authors, complete with interlinear translation.

ISBN 9783895860249. Languages of the World/Materials 34. 60pp. 1997.