Alyutor Language
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Alyutor or Alutor is a
language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...
of
Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...
that belongs to the Chukotkan branch of the
Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages The Chukotko-Kamchatkan or Chukchi–Kamchatkan languages are a Language families and languages, language family of extreme northeastern Siberia. Its speakers traditionally were indigenous hunter-gatherers and reindeer-herders. Chukotko-Kamchatk ...
, by the Alyutors. It is moribund, as only 25 speakers were reported in the
2010 Russian census The 2010 Russian census () was the second census of the Russian Federation population after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Preparations for the census began in 2007 and it took place between October 14 and October 25. The census The cen ...
.


Sociolinguistic situation

The Alutor are the indigenous inhabitants of the northern part of the
Kamchatka Peninsula The Kamchatka Peninsula (, ) is a peninsula in the Russian Far East, with an area of about . The Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Okhotsk make up the peninsula's eastern and western coastlines, respectively. Immediately offshore along the Pacific ...
. The language is unwritten and moribund; in the 1970s residents of the chief Alutor village of Vyvenka under the age of 25 did not know the language. In recent years the Vyvenka village school has started teaching the language. Until 1958 the language was considered the "village" (settled) dialect of the Koryak language, but it is not intelligible with traditionally nomadic varieties of Koryak. The autonym means "villager".


Phonology


Vowels

Alyutor has six vowels, five of which may be long or short. The schwa cannot be long.


Consonants

There are 18 consonants in Alyutor.


Stress

Stress generally falls on the second syllable of polysyllabic words, and on the first syllable of disyllabic words, e.g.: * 'water', 'skin', 'to feed', 'husband', ' mukluk'. An
open syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of Phone (phonetics), speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''ma ...
containing schwa cannot be stressed. As a consequence, if a disyllabic term begins with such a syllable, the stress is shifted to the last syllable and thereafter a new, epenthetic syllable is added at the end, e.g.: ** -> 'mosquito'. The final syllable of a word is never stressed.


Syllable structure

All Alyutor syllables begin with a single consonant. If the vowel is short, including a schwa, they may also close with a single consonant. Consonant clusters are not permitted in the word initial or word final positions. The schwa is used to break up disallowed clusters. Examples are 'to work', 'eagle', 'parka'. Alyutor word boundaries always coincide with syllable boundaries.


Orthography

The Alyutor language does not have an official orthography, but the newspaper ''Aborigen Kamchatki'' uses the following orthography:


Typology

Alutor is a
polysynthetic In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able t ...
language. The morphology is
agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes (word parts), each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglu ...
, with extensive prefixes and suffixes. The argument structure is ergative. The
word order In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how languages employ different orders. Correlatio ...
is variable, and it is difficult to say which typology is basic. The verb-absolutive orders AVO and VAO are perhaps most common.


Morphology

Alyutor has the following parts of speech: nouns, adjectives, numerals, pronouns, verbs, participles, adverbs, postpositions, conjunctions, and particles.


Nouns

Nouns are inflected for number, case, definiteness, and grammatical person. There are three
grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a Feature (linguistics), feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement (linguistics), agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and many other ...
s: singular, dual and plural. There are eleven cases:
absolutive In grammar, the absolutive case (abbreviated ) is the case of nouns in ergative–absolutive languages that would generally be the subjects of intransitive verbs or the objects of transitive verbs in the translational equivalents of nominative� ...
, ergative,
locative In grammar, the locative case ( ; abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which indicates a location. In languages using it, the locative case may perform a function which in English would be expressed with such prepositions as "in", "on", "at", and " ...
,
dative In grammar, the dative case (abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a drink". In this exampl ...
, lative, prolative, contractive,
causative In linguistics, a causative (abbreviated ) is a valency-increasing operationPayne, Thomas E. (1997). Describing morphosyntax: A guide for field linguists'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 173–186. that indicates that a subject either ...
, equative,
comitative In grammar, the comitative case (abbreviated ) is a grammatical case that denotes accompaniment. In English, the preposition "with", in the sense of "in company with" or "together with", plays a substantially similar role. Other uses of "with", l ...
, and
associative In mathematics, the associative property is a property of some binary operations that rearranging the parentheses in an expression will not change the result. In propositional logic, associativity is a valid rule of replacement for express ...
. Number and case are expressed using a single affix. A suffix is used for all cases except the comitative and associative, which are expressed using
circumfix A circumfix ( abbr: ) (also parafix, confix, or ambifix) is an affix which has two parts, one placed at the start of a word, and the other at the end. Circumfixes contrast with prefixes, attached to the beginnings of words; suffixes, attached a ...
es. There are two
declension In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence by way of an inflection. Declension may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and det ...
s, taught as three noun classes. The first class are nonhuman nouns of the first declension. Number is only distinguished in the absolutive case, though verbal agreement may distinguish number when these nouns are in the ergative. The second class are proper names and kin terms for elders. They are second declension, and distinguish number in the ergative, locative, and lative cases, as well as the absolutive. The third class are the other human nouns; they may be either first or second declension.


Case roles

*The absolutive case is the citation form of a noun. It is used for the argument ("subject") of an intransitive clause and the object of a transitive clause, for "syntactic possessives", and for the
vocative In grammar, the vocative case (abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which is used for a noun that identifies a person (animal, object, etc.) being addressed or occasionally for the noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numeral ...
. *The ergative is used for the agent ("subject") of a transitive verb, as an
instrumental case In grammar, the instrumental case ( abbreviated or ) is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the ''instrument'' or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action. The noun may be either a physical object or ...
, and as the argument of an
antipassive The antipassive voice (abbreviated or ) is a type of grammatical voice that either does not include the object or includes the object in an oblique case. This construction is similar to the passive voice, in that it decreases the verb's valency ...
clause. *The locative is used for position and direction (
essive In grammar, the essive case, or similaris case, ( abbreviated ) is a grammatical case.O'Grady, William, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, and Janie Rees-Miller. "Morphology: The Analysis of Word Structure." Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. 6 ...
and
lative case In grammar, the lative ( ; abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which indicates motion to a location. It corresponds to the English prepositions "to" and "into". The lative case belongs to the group of the general local cases together with the loc ...
s), as well as arguments which are "driven away", e.g.: *The dative is used for recipients, benefactors, directional objects (
allative case The allative case ( ; abbreviated ; from Latin ''allāt-'', ''afferre'' "to bring to") is a type of locative grammatical case. The term allative is generally used for the lative case for the majority of languages that do not make finer distinc ...
), and subjects of experiential verbs *Lative is used for motion toward a goal *Prolative is used for movement along and movement from (
perlative In grammar, the perlative case (abbreviated ), also known as pergressive, is a grammatical case which expresses that something moved "through", "across", or "along" the referent of the noun that is marked. The case is found in a number of Australia ...
and
elative case In grammar, the elative case (abbreviated ; from "to bring or carry out") is a locative grammatical case signifying that something comes from something, somewhere or someone. Usage Uralic languages In Finnish, the elative is typically formed ...
s) * Equative is used with the meanings 'like X', 'as X', usually with verbs like 'to become', 'to turn into', 'to work as,' etc. * Contactive is used for objects that make contact * Causative is used for noun phrases that cause or motivate an action * Comitative is used for ... . It is primarily used with high-animacy referents. * Associative is used for secondary or passive accompaniment. It is only attested in the declension of nouns of the first declension, usually inanimate.


Grammatical person

Grammatical first and second person suffixes on nouns are used to equate a noun with participants in the discourse. They only appear in the absolutive, with an intervening ''j'' on nouns ending in a vowel and an ''i'' on nouns ending in a consonant. * ...ʡopta am-ʡujamtawilʔ-ə-muru "yes we the people" * japlə=q ʡujamtawilʔ-iɣəm "and I'm a man"


Numerals

Alyutor has simple numerals for the numbers one to five, ten, and twenty. All other numbers are compounds based on these numerals.


Verbs

There are finite (conjugated) and non-finite verbs. There are several conjugations.


Polypersonal conjugation

Finite verbs agree in person and number with their nuclear
arguments An argument is a series of sentences, statements, or propositions some of which are called premises and one is the conclusion. The purpose of an argument is to give reasons for one's conclusion via justification, explanation, and/or persua ...
; agreement is through both prefixes and suffixes. Transitive verbs agree with both arguments (ergative and absolutive), whereas intransitive verbs agree with their sole (absolutive) argument. Verbs distinguish two aspects,
perfective The perfective aspect (abbreviated ), sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect that describes an action viewed as a simple whole, i.e., a unit without interior composition. The perfective aspect is distinguished from the imp ...
, the bare stem, and
imperfective The imperfective (abbreviated , , or more ambiguously ) is a grammatical aspect used to describe ongoing, habitual, repeated, or similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. Although many languages have a ...
, using the suffix ''-tkə / -tkəni''. There are five moods,
indicative A realis mood ( abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood which is used principally to indicate that something is a statement of fact; in other words, to express what the speaker considers to be a known state of affairs, as in declarative sentence Dec ...
, imperative,
optative The optative mood ( or ; abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood that indicates a wish or hope regarding a given action. It is a superset of the cohortative mood and is closely related to the subjunctive mood but is distinct from the desiderative ...
, potential (marked by the circumfix ''ta…(ŋ)''), and conjunctive (prefix ''ʔ-/a-'').


Monopersonal conjugation

Monopersonal verbs include two conjugations, one with the third-person singular in ''ɣa-...-lin,'' and the other in ''n-...-qin''.


Impersonal conjugation

For impersonal forms of conjugation include verbal predicate (formed with the circumfix a...ka) and imperative (formed by circumfix ɣa...a/ta). Non-finite forms Impersonal forms include the verbal predicate with the circumfix ''a…ka,'' and the imperative in ''ɣa…a/ta.''


Non-finite forms

These include the infinitive,
supine In grammar, a supine is a form of verbal noun used in some languages. The term is most often used for Latin, where it is one of the four principal parts of a verb. The word refers to a position of lying on one's back (as opposed to ' prone', l ...
, gerunds, and participles.


References


Bibliography

*Kibrik, A.E., S.V. Kodzasov, I.A. Murav'eva. 2000. ''Jazyk i fol'klor aljutorcev.'' Moscow: IMLI RAN Nasledie. *Nagayama, Yukari. 2003. ''Ocherk grammatiki aljutorskogo jazyka''
ELPR
Publication Series A2-038). Osaka: Osaka Gakuin University.


External links


The Aliutors




{{DEFAULTSORT:Alyutor Language Agglutinative languages Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages Indigenous languages of Siberia Subject–verb–object languages Endangered languages of Asia Languages written in Cyrillic script