The language of the Andes people

Languages are fascinating inventions of human beings. Some languages are known for their complexity like the Chinese, some for their antiquity and supremeness like the sanskrit, but only some live through ages and continue to perplex linguists even today. We shall see some astonishing facts about a native american language called as Aymara.

1. Aymara (Aymar aru) is an Aymaran language spoken by the Aymara people of the Andes.

2. It is one of only a handful of Native American languages with over a million speakers. Aymara, along with Quechua and Spanish, is an official language of Peru and Bolivia. It is also spoken to a much lesser extent in Chile and in Northwest Argentina.

3. Some linguists have claimed that Aymara is related to its more widely-spoken neighbour, Quechua. This claim, however, is disputed — although there are indeed similarities such as the nearly identical phonologies, the majority position among linguists today is that these similarities are better explained as areal features resulting from prolonged interaction between the two languages, and that they are not demonstrably related.

4. The Aymara language is an agglutinating (agglutination is the morphological process of adding affixes to the base of a word) and to a certain extent polysynthetic language, and has a subject-object-verb word order.

5. The old suggestion that the word "Aymara" comes from the Aymara words "jaya" (ancient) and "mara" (year, time) is almost certainly a quite mistaken folk etymology. Many linguists now favor the theory that the term came from an ethnic group from the Apurimac region known as the Aymaraes, but the etymology remains unclear.

6. Aymara has three phoneme vowels /a i u/, which distinguish two degrees of length. Stress is usually on the penult (the syllable before the last one), but long vowels may shift it.

7. There are roughly two million Bolivian speakers, half a million Peruvian speakers, and perhaps a few thousand speakers in Chile and Argentina. At the time of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, Aymara was the dominant language over a much larger area than today, including most of highland Peru south of Cuzco.

8. Aymara placenames are found all the way north into central Peru, and indeed (Altiplano) Aymara is actually but one of the two extant languages of a wider language family, the other surviving representative being Jaqaru/Kawki.

Unique Features:
9. The language has attracted interest because it is based on a three value logic system, and thus supposedly has better expressiveness than many other languages based on binary logic.

10. It is cited by the author Umberto Eco in The Search for the Perfect Language as a language of immense flexibility, capable of accommodating many neologisms.

11. In 1860 Emeterio Villamil de Rada suggested it was "the language of Adam" (la lengua de Adán). Iván Guzmán de Rojas has suggested that it be used as an intermediary language for computerised translation.

12. Linguistic and gestural analysis by Núñez and Sweetser also asserts that the Aymara have an apparently unique, or at least very rare, understanding of time, and Aymara is, with Quechua, one of very few languages where speakers seem to represent the past as in front of them and the future as behind them.

13. There is increasing use of Aymara locally and there are increased numbers learning the language, both Bolivian and abroad. There are even projects to offer Aymara through the internet, such as by ILCA

Source: Wikipedia

Mohan Rao

Nothing is exactly as it seems, nor is it otherwise
- Zen Proverb