Taushiro language

Taushiro, also known as Pinche or Pinchi, is a nearly extinct language isolate of the Peruvian Amazon near Ecuador. The last living speaker of Taushiro is Amadeo García García. The language is poorly described, and was only documented beginning in the 1970s.

Documentation

No documentation seems to have been made or survived from before the 1970s, including colonial documentation or in Günter Tessmann's 1930 work Die Indianer nordost-Perus. The first glossary of Taushiro contained 200 words and was collected by Daniel Velie in 1971. The first substantial documentation was done in the mid-1970s by Nectalí Alicea Ortiz with SIL International.

Classification

Taushiro is generally considered a language isolate, a language with no known relatives.

Following Tovar (1961), Loukotka (1968), and Tovar (1984), Kaufman (1994) notes that while Taushiro has been linked to the Zaparoan languages, it shares greater lexical correspondences with Kandoshi and especially with Omurano. In 2007, however, he classified Taushiro and Omurano (but not Kandoshi) as Saparo–Yawan languages. Marcelo Jolkesky (2016) also identifies lexical similarities with Tequiraca and Leco.

Phonology

Consonants

Taushiro has 17 phonemic consonants. The only bilabial consonant in Taushiro is /w/, although it is analyzed as labiovelar by the SAPhon phonological database, thus lacking any labial consonants altogether. Phonemes with restrictions on occurrence are in (parentheses).

/ɾ/ is restricted to grammatical morphemes. /ŋ/ only occurs in the suffix -ŋɨ and is only pronounced in careful speech, often nasalizing the preceding vowel instead. /ᵑk/ only occurs in the grammatical forms /aᵑka/ 'REL' and /niᵑka/. /w/ and /j/ have nasal allophones of [w̃] and [ɲ], respectively.

Vowels

Nasality

Nasality spreads leftward within a word, only affecting glides /w/ and /j/.

Tone

Taushiro has two surface-level tones, high and low. The mora is the tone-bearing unit.

Phonotactics

Known syllable shapes include V(ː), CV(ː), and CV(ː)C, with /ʔ/ as the only possible coda. Words apparently must be at least bimoraic.

Morphology

Noun phrases

Pronouns

Three persons and a first person inclusive are distinguished in independent pronouns, which have long forms, used as the core argument in verbs, and short forms, used to complement postpositions. Number is not distinguished for pronouns, with the first person exclusive expressed using the simple first person pronouns.

Noun class

Taushiro distinguishes inalienable versus alienable possession, without any other noun classses.

Postpositions

Taushiro utlizes postpositions to indicate non-core arguments into a clause, most of which express spatial relation. Core arguments do not bear case markers.

Syntax

Word order in Taushiro is verb–subject–object.

Further reading

• Alicea Ortiz, Nectalí (2008) [1975]. . Datos Etno-Lingüísticos (in Spanish and Taushiro). Vol.22. Lima: Summer Institute of Linguistics.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link)