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Nawat grammar
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Nawat grammar
The Nawat or Pipil language is an endangered language spoken by the Pipils of western El Salvador and Nicarao people of Nicaragua. It belongs to the Nahua group within the Uto-Aztecan language family. Its typology includes VSO word order, head-marking, and a relatively small phoneme inventory.
The voiced allophones of /k/, [ɡ] and [ɣ], are common but their distribution is subject to both dialect variation and phonological rules (and their exceptions).
The /n/ phoneme has various allophones, as follows:
Most words are stressed on the second to last syllable. Some are stressed on the last syllable: these include a few lexical compounds such as tenkal 'door, patio' (from ten 'mouth' and kal 'house'), certain prefixed or reduplicated monosyllables such as (optionally) kajkal 'houses', and many diminutives in -tzin or -chin. There are also words in these categories with regular penultimate stress.
Reduplication is a morphological process employed in several parts of the grammatical system, which is characterized in phonological terms. Nawat reduplication takes the form of repetition of a word's first syllable (actually only the (C)V part thereof). So for example, a reduplication of kunet 'child' is ku-kunet 'children', and a derivative of the root petz- 'smooth' is pe-petz-ka 'a kind of small, silvery fish', local Spanish pepesca.
Another more productive variety of reduplication involves adding a j after the reduplication, e.g., ku-j-kunet 'children', pe-j-petz-naj plural of petz-naj 'smooth, naked'. Generalizing, plain reduplication (without j) is governed by lexical criteria. J-reduplication, on the contrary, is used by grammatical rules that:
The determiners (except for ne) and quantifiers may be used pronominally, i.e., without a noun head, or preceding the noun they determine or quantify, e.g., ne takat 'the man', ini techan 'this village', miak kal 'many houses', ume siwat 'two women'.
The prefixes shown below are attached to nouns to express who they 'belong' to, e.g., nu-yak 'my nose', i-eltiw 'his/her sister', tu-mistun 'our cat', mu-techan 'your village'.
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Nawat grammar
The Nawat or Pipil language is an endangered language spoken by the Pipils of western El Salvador and Nicarao people of Nicaragua. It belongs to the Nahua group within the Uto-Aztecan language family. Its typology includes VSO word order, head-marking, and a relatively small phoneme inventory.
The voiced allophones of /k/, [ɡ] and [ɣ], are common but their distribution is subject to both dialect variation and phonological rules (and their exceptions).
The /n/ phoneme has various allophones, as follows:
Most words are stressed on the second to last syllable. Some are stressed on the last syllable: these include a few lexical compounds such as tenkal 'door, patio' (from ten 'mouth' and kal 'house'), certain prefixed or reduplicated monosyllables such as (optionally) kajkal 'houses', and many diminutives in -tzin or -chin. There are also words in these categories with regular penultimate stress.
Reduplication is a morphological process employed in several parts of the grammatical system, which is characterized in phonological terms. Nawat reduplication takes the form of repetition of a word's first syllable (actually only the (C)V part thereof). So for example, a reduplication of kunet 'child' is ku-kunet 'children', and a derivative of the root petz- 'smooth' is pe-petz-ka 'a kind of small, silvery fish', local Spanish pepesca.
Another more productive variety of reduplication involves adding a j after the reduplication, e.g., ku-j-kunet 'children', pe-j-petz-naj plural of petz-naj 'smooth, naked'. Generalizing, plain reduplication (without j) is governed by lexical criteria. J-reduplication, on the contrary, is used by grammatical rules that:
The determiners (except for ne) and quantifiers may be used pronominally, i.e., without a noun head, or preceding the noun they determine or quantify, e.g., ne takat 'the man', ini techan 'this village', miak kal 'many houses', ume siwat 'two women'.
The prefixes shown below are attached to nouns to express who they 'belong' to, e.g., nu-yak 'my nose', i-eltiw 'his/her sister', tu-mistun 'our cat', mu-techan 'your village'.