Cavineña language

Cavineña
Native to	Bolivia
Native speakers	1,700 (2006)[1]
Language family	Pano–Tacanan Tacanan Araona–Tacana Cavinena–Tacana Cavineña
Official status
Official language in	Bolivia[2]
Language codes
ISO 639-3	cav
Glottolog	cavi1250[3]

Cavineña is an indigenous language spoken on the Amazonian plains of northern Bolivia by over 1,000 Cavineño people. Although Cavineña is still spoken (and still learnt by some children), it is an endangered language. Guillaume (2004) states that about 1200 people speak the language, out of a population of around 1700. Nearly all Cavineña are bilingual in Spanish.

The Caviñeno people live in several communities near the Beni River, which flows north from the Andes. The nearest towns are Reyes (to the south) and Riberalta (to the north).

Phonology

Caviñena has the following consonants (Guillaume 2004:27). Where the practical orthography is different from IPA, it is shown between angled brackets:

	bilabial	velar	alveolar	alveo-palatal	glottal
voiceless stop	p	k	t	c ⟨ty⟩
voiced stop	b		d	ɟ ⟨dy⟩
labialized stop	kʷ ⟨kw⟩
voiceless affricate			ts	t͡ɕ ⟨ch⟩
voiceless fricative			s	ɕ ⟨sh⟩	h ⟨j⟩
liquid			ɺ ⟨r⟩	ʎ ⟨ry⟩
nasal	m		n	ɲ ⟨ny⟩
glide	w			j ⟨y⟩

It has the following vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i
Mid	e/ɛ ⟨e⟩		ʊ ⟨u⟩
Low		a

Examples in the morphology and syntax sections are written in the practical orthography.

Morphology

Verbs

Verbs do not show agreement with their arguments, but are inflected for tense, aspect, mood, negation, and aktionsart, among other categories. There are six tense/aspect/mood affixes (Guillaume 2004):

• -ya 'imperfective' (for present, generic, habitual, and near future events)
• -wa 'perfective' (for events that occurred earlier the same day)
• -chine 'recent past' (for events that occurred between a day and a year ago)
• -kware 'remote past' (for events that occurred a year or more ago)
• -buke 'remote future' (for events far in the future)
• e-...-u 'potential' (for events that are contingent on other events)

The following examples show the remote past and perfective affixes:

I-ke=bakwe	[e-kwe	e-wane=tsewe]	kanajara-kware	[e-kwe tujuri=ju].
1SG-FM =CONTRAST	1SG-GEN	1-wife=ASSOC	rest-REMOTE.PAST	1SG-GEN mosquito.net=LOC
'Me, I was resting with my wife in my mosquito net.'

Pakaka-wa =mi	[manga=ju=ke].
fall-PERF =2SG(-FM)	mango.tree=LOC=LIG
'You fell from the mango tree.'

Aktionsart suffixes include:

• -tere/tirya 'completive'
• -bisha 'incompletive'
• -nuka 'repeated/reiterative'

The following examples show the completive and reiterative suffixes:

Shana-tirya-kware	=tuna	[piya=kwana
leave-COMP-REM.PAST	=3PL(-ERG)	arrow=PL
'(They ran away and) left all their arrows behind.' (Guillaume 2004:193)

Peadya	tunka	mara=kwana	ju-atsu	=tu	ekwita	kwa-nuka-kware	babi=ra…
one	ten	year=APPROX	be-SS	=3SG(-FM)	person	go-REITR-REM.PAST	hunt=PURP.MOT
'After about ten years or so, the man went hunting again.' (Guillaume 2004:198)

This is the only language in the Amazon that has an antipassive voice.^[4]

Syntax

Nouns and noun phrases

Subtypes of nouns

There are three subtypes of nouns in Cavineña (Guillaume 2004:71-73).

• e-nouns, which are a closed class of about 100 to 150 terms which must take a prefix e-. (The prefix is realised as y- before the vowel a).
• kinship nouns, which are a small class of about 30 terms which are

obligatorily inflected for their possessor.

• independent nouns, which are an open class of a couple of thousand terms. Independent nouns do

not take any e- prefix nor any possessor inflections.

Case marking

Case marking on noun phrases is shown through a set of clitic postpositions, including the following:

• =ra 'ergative case'
• =tsewe 'associative case' (= English 'with')
• =ja 'dative case'
• =ja 'genitive case'
• =ju 'locative case'

The dative and genitive cases are homophonous.

Pronouns (independent or bound) also show these case distinctions.

The following example (Guillame 2004:526) shows several of the case markers in context:

I-ke=bakwe	[e-kwe	e-wane=tsewe]	kanajara-kware	[e-kwe tujuri=ju].
1SG-FM =CONTRAST	1SG-GEN	1-wife=ASSOC	rest-REMOTE.PAST	1SG-GEN mosquito.net=LOC
'Me, I was resting with my wife in my mosquito net.'

Pakaka-wa =mi	[manga=ju=ke].
fall-PERF =2SG(-FM)	mango.tree=LOC=LIG
'You fell from the mango tree.'

Ai =tu-ke =mi	mare-wa?
INT =3SG-FM =2SG(-ERG)	shoot-PERF
'What did you shoot?'

(Guillaume 2004:599)

Order in noun phrases

Noun phrases show the order (Relative Clause)-(Quantifier)-(Possessor)-Noun-(Adjective)-(Plural marker)-(Relative clause) (Guillaume 2004:69). The following examples show some of these orders.

E-marikaka	ebari=kwana
nounprefix-cooking:pot	big=plur
'big cooking pots'

dutya	tunaja	etawiki=kwana	e-tiru=ke
all	3:plur:genitive	bedding=plur	res-burn-ligature
'all their bedding that had burnt'

(The clitic =ke 'ligature' appears at the end of a relative clause.)

Pronouns

Pronouns in Caviñena can appear in either independent or bound forms. The two kinds of pronouns are pronounced almost exactly the same, but the bound pronouns appear in second position, after the first word of the sentence. Independent pronouns tend to be contrastive, and usually appear first in the sentence.

The following pronouns are found:

Absolutive pronouns
person	SG	DL	PL
1	i-Ø-ke	ya-tse	e-kwana
2	mi-Ø-ke	me-tse	mi-kwana
3	tu-Ø-ke	ta-tse	tu-na
3PROX	ri-Ø-ke	re-tse	re-na

Ergative pronouns
person	SG	DL	PL
1	e-Ø-ra	ya-tse-ra	e-kwana-ra
2	mi-Ø-ra	me-tse-ra	mi-kwana-ra
3	tu-Ø-ra	ta-tse-ra	tu-na-ra
3PROX	riya-Ø-ra(?)	re-tse-ra	re-na-ra

Dative pronouns
person	SG	DL	PL
1	e-Ø-kwe	ya-tse-ja	e-kwana-ja
2	mi-Ø-kwe	me-tse-ja	mi-kwana-ja
3	tu-Ø-ja	ta-tse-ja	tu-na-ja
3PROX	re-Ø-ja	re-tse-ja	re-na-ja

Guillaume (2004:597) notes that the formative suffix -ke (of singular absolutive bound pronouns) and the ergative suffix -ra (in ergative bound pronouns) do not show up when absolutive or ergative pronouns occur last among the second position clitics.

Sentences

Caviñena has ergative case marking on the subject of a transitive verb (Guillaume 2004:527). For sentences with a non-pronominal subject, this is shown with an ergative case clitic /=ra/:

Iba=ra=tu	iye-chine	takure.
jaguar=ERG=3SG(-FM)	kill-RECENT.PAST	chicken
'The jaguar killed the chicken.'

For a sentence with a pronominal subject, there are distinct ergative and absolutive forms of the pronouns:

I-ke=bakwe	kwa-kware=dya=jutidya.
1SG(ABS)-FM=CONTR	go-REM.PAST=FOC=RESTR
'I just went.'

E-ra=tu	[e-kwe	tata-chi]	adeba-ya=ama.
1SG-ERG =3SG(-FM)	1SG-GEN	father-AFFTN	know-IMPFV=NEG
'I do not know my father.' (Guillaume 2004:585)

Verbs do not inflect for the person of the subject or other arguments in the clause. Instead, a set of clitic pronouns occurs in the second position of the clause, as in the following examples (Guillaume 2004:595):

Tume =tuna-ja =tu-ke =Ø	be-ti-wa	budari.
then =3PL-DAT =3SG-FM =1SG(-ERG)	bring-GO.TEMP-PERF	banana
'I will go and bring bananas for them.'

Kwadisha-ya =tu-ke =e-ra =e-kwe	encomienda	[e-kwe	ata=ja=ishu].
send-IMPERFECTIVE =3SG-FM =1SG-ERG =1SG-DAT	package	1SG-GEN	relatives=GEN=PURP.GNL
'I am sending a packing to my relatives.'

The clitics are ordered so that 3rd person pronouns precede 2nd person pronouns, which precede 1st person pronouns. (Some of the clitic pronouns in these examples have a formative element /-ke/ after them and some do not.)

References

1. Cavineña at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. "Constitution of Bolivia, Article 5. I." (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-01-26.
3. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Cavinena". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
4. Dixon, R.M.W. & Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (eds) (1990). The Amazonian Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. xxvii

Bibliography

• Camp, Elizabeth, L. 1985. ‘Split ergativity in Cavineña’, International Journal of American Linguistics, 51.1: 38-58.
• Camp, Elizabeth, L. and Millicent R. Liccardi. 1978. Necabahuityatira Isaraisara Huenehuene. (Aprendamos a Leer y Escribir), Cochabamba: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano. (Revised edition.)
• Guillaume, Antoine. 2004. A grammar of Caviñena. Ph.D. thesis, La Trobe University.

External links

• Lenguas de Bolivia (online edition)