Yurumanguí is an extinct language isolate formerly spoken in Colombia. It is known solely from a wordlist collected in the 1760s and has historically been held to belong to various different language families.

History

Classification

Father Romero's word list was discovered in the archives and published, with analysis and commentary, by Rivet (1942), who argued that the language was a member of the Hokan language family.^[3] This claim was accepted by Joseph Greenberg (1960), but is currently considered poor and unconvincing; a critique of Greenberg is given by William Poser (1992).^[4] Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño (1945) sought to connect Yurumanguí with both Hokan and Chibchan, whereas Swadesh (1963) saw connections with Ofaye (Macro-Jê) and Chamicura (Maipurean). Willem Adelaar (2004) notes similarities with Esmeralda (Takame). However, it is generally considered to be a language isolate (e.g. by Terrence Kaufman (1990) and Adolfo Constenla Umaña (1991)).^[2]

Geographical distribution

Yurumanguí was spoken along the upper Yurumanguí, Cajambre, and Nava Rivers of Colombia.^[2]

Phonology

A few elements of Yurumanguí phonology may be ascertained; for example, the letters ⟨ll, x, r, rr, h⟩ are completely absent, there is only a singular attestation of ⟨d⟩, four instances of ⟨j⟩, and five occurrences of ⟨f, z⟩; many tokens of the latter are variants of ⟨s⟩. ⟨g⟩ is typically found between vowels or after ⟨n⟩; only two instances of word-initial ⟨g⟩ are known, one of which (gaga 'I am going to defecate') is probably onomatopoeic. The letters ⟨c, qu⟩ typically follow their usages as in Spanish, though there are some instances of ⟨c⟩ before ⟨i⟩, and it also alternates with ⟨s⟩ (e.g. asa~acá '1SG'), possibly hinting at an affricate phonetic value for these letters., though they may simply have been "difficult to distinguish" in the original document. A sequence of five vowels (or six if ⟨y⟩ is counted as [i]) is attested in the word yaioiabusca 'colino de plátano'. Closed, or consonant-final, syllables are rare, and Matthias Urban (2019) describes that "their presence can only be guessed at" from a number of words.^[5]

Morphology

Adelaar (2004) describes a number of affixes, such as -sa, which "characterises the citation form of several verbs", and ca(i)-, found in body parts and kinship terms,^[2] though there are a number of words belonging to the latter semantic categories which do not exhibit the prefix.^[5]

Vocabulary

Below are selected entries from the 1768 Yurumanguí vocabulary given in Ortiz (1946), with original Spanish glosses and translated English glosses.^[1]

Bibliography

• Loukotka, Čestmír (1968) Classification of South American Indian Languages. University of California, Los Angeles.

References

Wiktionary has a word list at Appendix:Yurumangui word list