Pirah?language

From Wacklepedia - The Free Encyclopedia

The Pirah?language is spoken by the people of the same name. They live in Brazil, along the Maici river, a tributary of the Amazon.

The Pirah?language is phonologically the simplest language known, having just ten phonemes, one less than in Rotokas. Its phonemes are:

                 Bilabial  Alveolar  Velar   Glottal
Voiceless stop   p         t         (k)+    x
Voiced stop      b                   g
Fricative                  s*                h

Vowels           a   o
                   i

+ high tone

+ /k/ is believed to be an optional portmanteau of /h/ and /i/.
* /s/ is used only by men; /h/ is substituted by women.

The total number of phonemes is just 11 if /k/ is counted as a phoneme; if not, then men use 10 phonemes, and women just 9 (English, by comparison, has 40). However, many allophones of these phonemes exist; /b/, for instance, has as allophones a bilabial nasal (equivalent to English /m/) and bilabial voiced trill, and /g/ has a highly unusual double flap that is so far unique to this language.

The SAMPA equivalents of the phonemes are:

/p t k ? b g s h a i o/

Pirah?is agglutinative, using many affixes to communicate meaning. A lot of verbs in Pirah?are affixes, particularly verbs of existence or equivalence. For instance, the Pirah?sentence "there is a paca (a type of mammal) there" uses just two words:

k?xih?ao.xaag?        g?h?/strong>
paca      .poss-exist/be there

Pirah?also uses suffixes which communicate evidentiality, a category of grammar which English totally lacks. One such suffix, /-x?gah?/strong>/, means that the speaker is completely certain of his or her information:

 hoagax?i hi p?ai        kaop?.i.sai.x?gah?/strong>
 H.        he fish-species catch.EPEN.NOMIN.certainty

Interestingly, Pirah?uses five discourse channels; information may be spoken (the default), whistled, hummed, yelled or encoded in music. Whistled languages are rare, making Pirah?an interesting study in the strength of tone and stress in communication.

Pirah?has a few loan words, mainly from Portuguese. Pirah?k?po cup is from the Portuguese word copo, and bikagogia business comes from Portuguese mercadoria.

Only about 150 people speak Pirah? in eight villages along the Maici; however, most of these people are monolingual, knowing only a few words of Portuguese. It is the belief of the Pirah?people that their language is the best one to speak, so there seems to be no immediate danger of Pirah?dying out.