Ventureño is a member of the extinct
Chumashan languages, a group of
Native American languages previously spoken by the
Chumash people
The Chumash are a Native American people of the central and southern coastal regions of California, in portions of what is now San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties, extending from Morro Bay in the north to Mali ...
along the coastal areas of
Southern California
Southern California (commonly shortened to SoCal) is a geographic and cultural region that generally comprises the southern portion of the U.S. state of California. It includes the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the second most populous urban a ...
from as far north as
San Luis Obispo
San Luis Obispo (; Spanish for " St. Louis the Bishop", ; Chumash: ''tiłhini'') is a city and county seat of San Luis Obispo County, in the U.S. state of California. Located on the Central Coast of California, San Luis Obispo is roughly hal ...
to as far south as Malibu. Ventureño was spoken from as far north as present-day Ventura to as far south as present-day
Malibu and the
Simi Hills
The Simi Hills are a low rocky mountain range of the Transverse Ranges in eastern Ventura County and western Los Angeles County, of southern California, United States.
Geography
The Simi Hills are aligned east-west and run for , and average aro ...
,
California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
. Dialects probably also included
Castac and Alliklik.
[Campbell 1997:126 ]
Ventureño is, like its sister Chumashan languages, a
polysynthetic language, having larger words composed of a number of morphemes. Ventureño has separate word classes of
verb
A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...
,
noun
A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for:
* Living creatures (including people, alive, ...
, and oblique adjunct; with no separate word class for adjectives or adpositions.
Nouns and verbs are often heavily
affixed (mostly
prefixed) in Ventureño, affixing being a way to denote those meanings often conveyed by separate words in more
analytic languages. Verbs play a primary role in Ventureño with utterances often composed only of a verb with clitics. Chumash word order is
VSO/
VOS, or VS/
VO.
Phonology
Ventureño has a similar phonemic inventory to other Chumash languages. Ventureño consists of 30 consonants and 6 vowels.
Vowels
Ventureño consists of a regular 5-vowel inventory with a sixth vowel transcribed as .
[ In Barbareño transcriptions, is used. It is not known whether these two phones are the same in both languages (and the difference in transcription merely one of convention), or whether the sounds were in fact different enough for Harrington to use different symbols.
]
Consonants
Orthography
Ventureño has been written in several different ways by different linguists.[ John Peabody Harrington, who compiled most of the data on Ventureño, used a modified version of the ]International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...
. Harrington differed from the International Phonetic Alphabet in the following symbols: a kappa (small-cap 'k') for , a for , a slanted bar for , a reversed apostrophe for aspiration, and a right-turned (standard) apostrophe for a glottal stop (this symbol was also used for ejectives and glottalized sonorants).[Harrington, J. P. (1981). The Papers of John Peabody Harrington in the Smithsonian 1907-1957: A Guide to the Field Notes: Native American History, Language, and Culture of Southern California/Basin, vol. 3. Elaine L. Mills and Ann J. Brockfield, eds. Microfilm reels 69, 89, and 94 on Ventureño.]
The Barbareño/Ventureño Band of Mission Indians has adopted an Americanist form of transcription for Ventureño based on the work done by Harrington: for , for , for , for aspiration, for , and for . A standard apostrophe continues to be used for a glottal stop and for denoting ejectives. Glottalized
Glottalization is the complete or partial closure of the glottis during the articulation of another sound. Glottalization of vowels and other sonorants is most often realized as creaky voice (partial closure). Glottalization of obstruent consona ...
sonorants are written with a combining apostrophe over the symbol. This transcription is in keeping with most current Chumashists (such as Wash below) except that alveolar affricates () are written as in Ventureño, where other Chumashists write them as . Likewise, Ventureño writes postalveolar affricates () as , where other Chumashists write this sound as .
Morphology
Chumash morphology is fairly polysynthetic. This applies especially to the verbs of the language, which has over 15 distinct morphological slots (when counting nominalized verbs).
This is illustrated in the table below by the nominalized verb meaning "your wanting to make fun of us".
Numbers
The Chumash languages exhibit a quaternary numeral system.
References
External links
Ventureño language
overview at the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
*
OLAC resources in and about the Ventureño languageVentureño at the California Language Archive
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ventureno language
Chumashan languages
Indigenous languages of California
Extinct languages of North America
Languages extinct in the 20th century
History of Ventura County, California