P'urhépecha language

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P'urhépecha, Tarascan, Phorhé P'urhépecha
Pronunciation:	[pʰuɽˈepeʧa]
Spoken in:	Michoacán, Mexico
Total speakers:	~120,000
Language family:	Language isolate
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	tsz
ISO 639-3:	pua
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

P'urhépecha (also Tarascan, Tarasco, Phorhé, Purepecha) is a language isolate spoken by more than 100,000 P'urhépecha people in the highlands of the Mexican state of Michoacán. Even though it is spoken within the boundaries of Mesoamerica P'urhépecha does not share many of the traits defining the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area, probably due to a long adherence to an isolationist policy.

P'urhépecha was the official language of the pre-Columbian Tarascan state and became widespread in north western Mexico during the height of the Tarascan state.

Contents 1 Geographical extension 2 Classification 3 Phonology 3.1 Vowels 3.2 Consonants 4 Grammar 4.1 The Noun 4.2 The Verb 5 Media 6 References

[edit] Geographical extension

The P'urhépecha language is mostly spoken in rural communities in the highlands of Michoacán. The former center of the Tarascan state was around lake Pátzcuaro and this remains an important center of the P'urhépecha community. The Ethnologue counts two variants of P'urhépecha: the central dialect spoken by approximately 120,000 people (1990) around Pátzcuaro and the western highland variety spoken around Zamora, Los Reyes de Salgado, Paracho, and Pamatácuaro, all of which are in the vicinity of the Paricutín volcano.

[edit] Classification

P'uréhepecha has been included by Greenberg (1987) in the Chibchan language family but this idea is rejected by most linguists, and Campbell's (Campbell 1997) authoritative classification lists P'urhépecha as an isolate.

[edit] Phonology

This phonemic inventory is given for the Tarecuato dialect of P'urhépecha by Paul de Wolf (1989). The Tarecuato dialect is phonologically different from other dialects by having a velar nasal phoneme which the others lack. All dialects of P'urhépecha have phonemic stress (denoted by acute accent in transcriptions of P'urhépecha words).

[edit] Vowels

The central high unrounded vowel /ɨ/ is written as <ï> in the transcription below.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i	ɨ	u
Mid	e		o
Open		ɑ

[edit] Consonants

It is interesting to note that P'urhépecha is one of only two Mesoamerican languages (the other is Huave) which does not have a phonemic glottal stop. It contrasts plain and aspirated stops and affricates and it has two rhotics ('r'-sounds; one of them retroflex) but no lateral ('l'-sound).

		Bilabial	Alveolar	Postalveolar or palatal	Velar
Stops	plain	p	t		k
	aspirated	pʰ	tʰ		kʰ
Affricates	plain		ʦ	ʧ
	aspirated		ʦʰ	ʧʰ
Fricatives			s	ʃ	x
Nasals		m	n		ŋ
Rhotics			r	ɽ
Approximants		w		j

[edit] Grammar

The P'urhépecha language is agglutinating and exclusively suffixing and has a large number of suffixes (160 according to Pollard 1993) and clitics. It has no noun compounding or incorporation. The verb distinguishes thirteen aspects and six modes. It has a nominal case system distinguishing nominative, accusative, genitive, Comitative, Instrumental and locative cases, but also a large number of nominal derivational affixes. Basic word order is SVO, but other word orders are commonly used for pragmatic purposes (Capistrán 2002).

[edit] The Noun

Plural of a noun is formed by a suffix -echa/-icha or -cha (de Wolf 1989)

kúmi-wátsï "fox" - kúmi-wátsïcha "foxes"
iréta "town" - irétaacha "towns"
warhíticha tepharicha maru "some fat women (lit. women fat some)"

The nominative case is not marked, but the accusative (also called objective) case, used to mark direct and sometimes indirect objects, is marked by a suffix -ni

Pedrú pyásti tsúntsuni "Pedro bought the pot"

Pedrú pyá-s-ti tsúntsu-ni

Pedro buy-PRF-3ind pot-ACC

Genitive is expressed by a suffix -ri or -eri.

imá wárhitiri wíchu "that woman's dog"

imá wárhiti-ri wíchu

that woman-GEN dog

A clitic -sï is used to mark emphasis or focus on a noun or noun phrase (Capistrán 2002).

Ampésï arhá Pedrú? "What did Pedro eat?"

ampé-sï arh-∅-∅-á Pedrú

what-FOC eat-PRF-INT Pedro

kurúchasï atí. "it was fish that he ate"

Kurúcha-sï a-∅-tí

fish-FOC eat-PRF-3IND

[edit] The Verb

The P'urhépecha verb inflects for aspects and modes. There are also a number of suffixes expressing position or bodyparts affecting or affected by the verbal action. Transitivity is manipulated by suffixes forming transitive verbs with applicative or causative meaning or intransitives with passive or inchoative meanings.

[edit] Media

P'urhépecha-language programming is carried by the CDI's radio station XEPUR-AM, based in Cherán, Michoacán.

[edit] References

• Campbell, Lyle (1997). American Indian languages: the historical linguistics of Native America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.

• Capistrán, Alejandra, 2002, "Variaciones de Orden de Constituyentes en P'orhépecha" in Ed. Paulette Levy, Del Cora al Maya Yucateco: Estudios lingüísticos sobre algunas lenguas indígenas mexicanas, UNAM, Mexico

• Chamoreau, C. (2003) Parlons Purépecha, Paris: L'Harmattan, ISBN 2747543579.

• Foster, Mary LeCron (1969) The Tarascan Language, University of California publications in linguistics, v. 56, Berkeley: University of California Press.

• Foster, Mary LeCron (1971) "Tarascan", in Studies in American Indian Languages, Jesse Sawyer, Ed., Berkeley: University of California Press.

• Friedrich, Paul (1984) "Tarascan: From Meaning to Sound", in Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians, Vol. 2, Munro Edmonson, Ed., Austin: University of Texas Press.

• Greenberg, Joseph (1987) Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

• Monzón, C. (1997). Introducción a la lengua y cultura tarascas, U. de Valencia, ISBN 8437033071.

• Pollard, Helen Perlstein (1993) Taríacuri's Legacy: the prehispanic Tarascan state, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

• de Wolf, Paul, 1989, Estudios Lingüísticos sobre la lengua P'orhé, Colegio de Michoacán, Mexico.