Day 10

Sneakshot

We head to the UFRO in the morning to attend Jacqueline's weekly Mapudungun class. I was struck by how relaxed the class was, and how close our host seemed to be to her students. As they each came in, she shared a quick embrace with them, and asked how their week had gone. The learning itself was based mostly on repetition, and context creation. For example the teacher would ask one student 'Kümeleymi?', which means roughly 'How are you?', and the student would answer 'May, Kümelen. Eymi kay?', which means 'Yes, I am well, and yourself?'. I think this was done to get the students more confident in using Mapudungun in everyday talk, so that they would maybe be able to interact in Mapudungun with members of their communities who spoke the language fluently. As I mentioned in a previous post, Jacqueline believed firmly in the idea that to avoid being only superficial, the revitalisation of the Mapuche culture needed to have the language of the Mapuche at its core.

From the class there emerged a few points which I found to be of particular linguistic interest:

The vocalic system:

Mapudungun has a vocalic system which is quite different from that of Spanish. Mapudungun's orthographic <ü> is pronounced as a 'schwa' vowel, which, under phonetic notation, is written /ə/. This is the sound which is found in the first syllable of the word 'about'. Mapudungun also has the high back vowel /u/, which is found in the word 'who'. The two sounds are separate phonemic entities in Mapudungun: changing one for the other creates a different word. For example, the word 'pura' means 'eight', while the word 'püra' means 'to get up, to rise'. Because of this, we say that the two sounds are lexically contrastive.

Spanish is a language in which there is an almost perfect one to one correspondance between a letter (grapheme) and a sound (phoneme). We speak of phonemic orthography. English is an example of a language which is nonphonemic, because one same letter can have very different pronunciations in different words (think of 'knight' vs 'king' for example). Like English, Mapudungun is a nonphonemic language. A few students struggled with the pronunciation of Mapuche words, as they applied the sounds of Spanish to the words they encountered.

Prepositions:

There are actually no prepositions in Mapudungun, only postpositions. These come after the noun which they accompany. This type of construction is difficult to imagine for those who have English as a first language. This is because English is a language with prepositions. In English, 'the fork is on the table' is grammatical, while 'the fork is the table on' is not. In a language like Mapudungun, which has postpositions, a construction with the word order 'the fork is the table on' would be grammatical. There are only 2 postpositions in Mapudungun, 'mew' and 'püle'. These two are used to convey the meaning of every single preposition in English. 'Püle' is used when talking about a space that is clearly geographically delimitated, like a city or a country. 'Mew' is used in every other case. 'He is working in the quarry' is translated as 'küdawkiyawi kantera mew'. We see that 'mew' is a postposition as it follows the noun.

The Mapuche verb:

Mapudungun, like many other South American indigenous languages, has a highly synthetic morphology. A synthetic language is one which has a high morpheme to word ratio. What we call a morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in language. Take the German word 'Aufsichtsratsmitgliederversammlung'. This word can be divided into the following elements: 'Supervision + council + member + assembly'. As a whole, it comes to mean 'meeting of members of the supervisory board'. We say that German is a language with a tendency for synthetic morphology, because it has many words like this, which are made up of distinct units that can convey meaning on their own. Languages with synthetic morphologies clearly reflect the principle compositionality, which is one of the core properties of human language. This is the idea that language is structured in such a way that larger linguistic units can be decomposed into smaller units.

As I pointed out above, Mapudungun is a language which has a very synthetic morphology, and this is most observable in verbs. Here are some examples:

Kelluafen: This can be decomposed as 'Kellu-a-f-en', with each of these parts being separate units of meaning. 'Kellu' is the root of the verb 'to help', 'a' is a morpheme which marks the future tense, 'f' is an aspect marker which indicates possibility (here used to convey the idea that the future is not certain), and 'en' is a pronominal marker which indicates that the subject of the verb is the 1st person singular 'I', and that the object is the 2nd person singular 'you'. With all this information we are able to translate 'kelluafen' as 'I will help you'. Here, we see that the single word 'kelluafen' contains as much grammatical and lexical information as the entire English sentence 'I will help you'.

Katrüwirinketrangen: It was our host, the professor Jacqueline Caniguan, who shared this example with me, as part of her ongoing research on serialised verbs in Mapudungun. It is one of the most interesting examples of synthetic structure in the language. We can decompose this word thus: 'katrü-wirin-ketran-gen'. 'Katrü' is the root of the verb 'to cut, hack'. 'Wirin' is the root of the verb 'to plough'. 'Ketran' is the root of the verb 'to harvest, reap'. 'Gen' is a part of the verb 'to be'. Taken as a whole, 'Katrüwirinketrangen' means 'to cultivate, grow, farm'. What is so remarkable about this word is that the principle of compositionality is not confined to morphology, but rather clearly extends to semantics (meaning). The meaning of the word as a whole is somewhat equivalent to the sum of the meanings of the units that compose it. The order of the morphemes also somewhat reflects the meaning of the word. To grow something, you first need to clean the field, then plant seeds, then plough, then harvest the crops.

Plural formation:

It is relatively simple to put a noun in the plural in Mapudungun. To do this, we add the plural morpheme 'pu' before the noun that needs to be modified. Thus, 'che' which means 'a person' becomes 'puche' in the plural, 'people'.

Forming the plural of a noun+adjective complex is somewhat trickier. In these cases, the plural morpheme is not 'pu', it is 'ke'. As such, 'The small cats' is said 'pichikeñarki' in Mapudungun. This can be decomposed in the following way: 'pichi-ke-ñarki'. 'pichi' means 'little, small', 'ke' is the plural morpheme, and 'ñarki' means 'cat'.

It is important to understand that 'pu' and 'ke' are not equivalent. One cannot be used in the place of the other. 'pu' is a lexical morpheme, it literally means 'plural', and can stand on its own to mean 'plural'. 'ke' is a functional morpheme, it has no meaning of its own, and can can only appear between an adjective and a noun, in which case it pluralises the noun that follows it.