Maipure language
Extinct language of Venezuela
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Maipure (Maypure, Mejepure, Maipure: maipùri jucuàre [maipúɺi jukuáɺɛ][1]) is an extinct language once spoken along the Ventuari, Sipapo, and Autana rivers of Amazonas and, as a lingua franca, in the Upper Orinoco region. It became extinct around the end of the eighteenth century. Raoul Zamponi provided a grammatical sketch of the language and furnished a classified word list, based on all of its extant eighteenth-century material (mainly from the Italian missionary Filippo S. Gilij).[1] It is historically important in that it formed the cornerstone of the recognition of the Maipurean (Arawakan) language family in 1783, along with the Moxo languages.[2]
Classification
Kaufman (1994)[3] gives its closest relatives as Yavitero and other languages of the Orinoco branch of Upper Amazon Arawakan. Aikhenvald places it instead in the Western Nawiki branch.[2]
Phonology
Any assessment about Maipure phonology is tentative due to the poor attestation of the language. A consonant and vowel system are presented below.[1]
Consonants
| Bilabial | Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop | voiceless | p | t | k | |||
| voiced | b | ||||||
| Fricative | s | h | |||||
| Nasal | m | n | |||||
| Lateral flap | ɺ | ||||||
| Trill | r | ||||||
| Glide | w | j | |||||
/r/ is phonetically long, [rː]. /h/ is not attested, but is mentioned by Gilij. /t, s, n/ are classified as dentals due to similar realizations in Baniva and Yavitero.
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | long | plain | long | plain | long | |
| High | i | iː | u | uː | ||
| Mid | e | eː | ||||
| Low | a | aː | ||||
/u/ is realized freely as either [u] or [o]. /e/ is presumably realized as [ɛ], as it is in Baniva and Yavitero. Long vowels are extremely rare.
