Chono is a poorly attested extinct language of confusing classification. It is attested primarily from an 18th-century catechism, which is not translated into Spanish.
There are various placenames in
Chiloé Archipelago
The Chiloé Archipelago ( es, Archipiélago de Chiloé, , ) is a group of islands lying off the coast of Chile, in the Los Lagos Region. It is separated from mainland Chile by the Chacao Channel in the north, the Sea of Chiloé in the east and ...
with Chono etymologies despite the main indigenous language of the archipelago at the
arrival of the Spanish being
Veliche.
Classification
Campbell (2012) concludes that the language called Chono or Wayteka or Wurk-wur-we by Llaras Samitier (1967) is spurious, with the source material being a list of mixed and perhaps invented vocabulary.
Viegas Barros, who postulates a relationship between
Kawesqar and
Yaghan Yaghan, Yagán or Yahgan may refer to:
* Yahgan people, an ethnic group of Argentina and Chile
* Yahgan language, their language
* Yaghan (dog), an extinct domesticated fox
See also
* Yagan (disambiguation)
* Yagha, a province of Burkina Faso ...
, believes that 45% of the Chono vocabulary and grammatical forms correspond to one of those languages, though it is not close to either.
''
Glottolog'' concludes that "There are lexical parallels with Mapuche as well as Qawesqar, ... but the core is clearly unrelated." They characterize Chono as a "language isolate", which corresponds to an
unclassified language
An unclassified language is a language whose genetic affiliation to other languages has not been established. Languages can be unclassified for a variety of reasons, mostly due to a lack of reliable data but sometimes due to the confounding inf ...
in other classifications.
Samitier (1967) word list
The following list of Chono (Wayteka) words, as spoken in the
Gulf of Penas The Gulf of Penas (''Golfo de Penas'' in Spanish, meaning "gulf of distress") is a body of water located south of the Taitao Peninsula, Chile.
Geography
It is open to the westerly storms of the Pacific Ocean, but it affords entrance to several nat ...
, is from Samitier (1967).
[Samitier, Liaras. 1967. El grupo chono o wayteka y los demas pueblos fuegopatagonia. ''Runa'' 10. 1-2:123-94 (Buenos Aires).] It was later found to be spurious by Campbell (2012).
References
External links
*
Chono works at
Wikisource
Wikisource is an online digital library of free-content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole and the name for each instance of that project (each instance usually re ...
{{South American languages
Extinct languages of South America
Indigenous languages of South America
Language isolates of South America