A diachronic view of Zamucoan verb inflection

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This special issue aims to explore the advances in historical linguistics that are made possible by the ongoing documentation of underdescribed and endangered languages. Indeed, apart from its contribution to typology, any linguistic description offers data to be analyzed from a diachronic perspective. It hardly needs to be noted that both documentation and historical linguistics significantly contribute to the culture of the communities involved.The most urgent task of linguistics today is perhaps the description and preservation of the amazing linguistic diversity that is still present on the planet. UNESCO reaffirmed this priority with the proclamation of 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages. The awareness of the need for more efforts to protect minority languages led to the declaration of an entire decade, 2022-2032, as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages. Already since 1999, on February 21 of each year, UNESCO has been celebrating the International Mother Language Day, with particular attention to the promotion and protection of those linguistic varieties that are currently threatened.

Section: About This Special Issuementioning

confidence: 74%

From Fieldwork to Reconstruction: Historical Issues in Hotspots of Linguistic Diversity*

Ciucci

2021

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“…This section outlines the Zamucoan verb and its reconstruction in the proto-language. The verb structure is described in Ciucci (2016) and Ciucci & Bertinetto (2015), from which I summarize the main points. Zamucoan makes use of prefixes and suffixes.…”

Section: The Verb Structure: Basic Features and Proto-zamucoan Reconstructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed the 3PL is derived from the 3rd person (unmarked for number), and the 1PL.EXCL stems from the 1PL.INCL, which also has a greater plural. Since they are innovations of no use for the present study, I will omit these persons in the examples: the interested reader can consult Ciucci & Bertinetto (2015) and Ciucci (2020Ciucci ( , forthcoming 2021a.…”

Section: The Verb Structure: Basic Features and Proto-zamucoan Reconstructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The object of this study is the Zamucoan verb inflection. The previous reconstruction of Proto-Zamucoan verb morphology (Ciucci & Bertinetto 2015) was based on modern documentation of the living languages (Ayoreo and Chamacoco) and on the scarce historical data available for Old Zamuco verbs at the time of publication. The present author has rediscovered an unpublished dictionary of extinct †Old Zamuco (Ciucci 2018), the earliest documented language of the Zamucoan family.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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How Historical Data Complement Fieldwork: New Diachronic Perspectives on Zamucoan Verb Inflection*

Ciucci

2021

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This article shows how the unearthing of new historical data on a language can contribute to diachronic studies and language reconstruction. †Old Zamuco is an extinct Zamucoan language, for which the only extant dictionary was recently rediscovered. This dictionary is the main source on the language and is very rich in morphological information. In particular, it contains many new verb paradigms with previously undescribed or only conjectured characteristics. These features were analyzed in order to compare them with the present-day Zamucoan languages, Ayoreo and Chamacoco. This gave us the opportunity to formulate hypotheses on the historical development of Zamucoan verb morphology and to improve the already available reconstruction of Proto-Zamucoan verb inflection.

“…(iii) CH departs from the other languages because of the peculiar evolution of the 1st person pronouns, with: (a) the replacement of the original 1SG pronoun by means of the 1PL, a phenomenon typologically less frequent than the analogous replacement in the 2nd person, but not unprecedented; (b) the clusivity split in the subsequently created 1PL form (Ciucci & Bertinetto 2015).…”

Section: 2mentioning

confidence: 99%

Zamucoan Person Marking as a Perturbed System*

Bertinetto

2021

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This paper analyzes the Zamucoan system of Person markers: personal pronouns, verbal and possessive inflection. Comparing the three documented languages (Ayoreo and Chamacoco, currently spoken, and extinct Old Zamuco), one can reconstruct for a very ancient stage of this language family an agglutinating structure for both personal pronouns and verbal inflection, with Person and Number dealt with by, respectively, prefixes and suffixes. However, possessive inflection could not be accommodated within this system, since the noun suffix can only express possessum Number, while possessor Number has to be expressed by a dedicated prefix. This structural conflict forced the Zamucoan languages to attempt various solutions, departing from the original agglutinating logic.