Abane (Avane), one of several languages called Baniwa, also known as Baniva Yavitero,
was an
Arawakan language
Arawakan (''Arahuacan, Maipuran Arawakan, "mainstream" Arawakan, Arawakan proper''), also known as Maipurean (also ''Maipuran, Maipureano, Maipúre''), is a language family that developed among ancient indigenous peoples in South America. Branch ...
of
Venezuela. It is believed to have become
extinct
Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...
by the late 20th century, and is only attested in a short word-list from the late 18th century.
History
It was primarily spoken in the
Amazonas region of Venezuela and along the
Colombia
Colombia (, ; ), officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country in South America with insular regions in North America—near Nicaragua's Caribbean coast—as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Car ...
n border, and had dialects called Quirruba
and Baniva-Avani.
The language likely began deteriorating with the arrival of the Jesuits in the late 18th century.
The Avane language included a colloquial name to refer to the neighboring indigenous Maipure people, "Metimetichini", which may be humorously alluding to the polysyllabic nature of many
Maipure words and contains two sounds not usually found in Avane.
The language also shares some words with others in the same family, including Maipure and
Guipunave, but is clearly phonetically distinct.
Phonetics
Avane is characterized phonetically in comparison to Maipure, showing some large differences. Avane uses the
dental stop /
, which is not seen in Maipure but is native to Yavitero and Baniva. It uses the
glottal fricative /
(/
) before /
and/or /
, where Maipure would use /
, /
, and /
. Also unlike Maipure, the Avane
diphthong
A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech o ...
s /
i and /
u do not appear to be contracted in
stressed syllables.
Ethnographer
Gilij described the Avane pronunciation as "rude, guttural" compared to the Maipure's "gentle, beautiful" version.
Morphology
In morphology, Avane is seen as close to Maipure, with both using the "empty morph"
suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry ...
"-cà" for certain
active and mainly
intransitive verbs.
References
Indigenous languages of the South American Northern Foothills
Arawakan languages
{{Arawakan-lang-stub