Language, time and the Amondawa

[Daniel Everett]

Amondawa is a subgroup of the Kawahiv, also including at least the Juma, the Parintintin, and the Tenharim (where Levi-Strauss worked). Waud Kracke, of the U of Illinois, Chicago, is the principal academic authority on the culture of the Kawahiv and speaks the language fluently. SIL has translated a New Testament into the language (for the Tenharim). 

The Kawahiv are traditional enemies of the Pirahas (who refer to them regularly as bogeymen to scare children "The Kawahiv are going to get you!"). 

Testing these results should be straightforward. I know of at least one planned set of replication experiments planned for this summer. 

This is an interesting paper. However, Pierre Pica, in the BBC news report, raises some interesting questions. Both Mundurucu, where Pica works, and Amondawa are Tupi-Guarani (Aryon Rodrigues actually places Mundurucu and Satere-Mawe in a separate Mundurucu family of the Tupi phylum, but I am not sure if he has published on that). 

It is always good to look at culture and language simultaneously. 

Jeanette Sakel and I offer some methodological suggestions on how to do the latter in our forthcoming textbook, Linguistic Fieldwork: A Student Guide, to appear next academic year in the CUP red series.

Dan



On May 20, 2011, at 1:00 PM, jess tauber wrote:

> This reminds me a little of the way Yahgan deals with number. The only true numerals are 1,2,3, matching the singular, dual, trial marking in the grammar. Yet 'number' is pervasive throughout the (classical 19th C.) language. Number higher than 3 tends to rely on ranges rather than specific positions, and even here it seems the system differentiated whether the value was arrived at by addition, by subtraction, or existed neutrally. Anatomically based terms could be ambiguous (for ex. 5 and 10 relative to the fingers of the hands). There were several different terms for 'halves' differentiating how the halves were physically produced.
> 
> Time as an abstract notion was also absent- a year was a winter, and terms for spring also occur used for new occurrences, so perhaps the beginnings of an abstract system? It is a question as to whether consolidated 'day' and 'month' terms existed abstractly except in the minds of the missionaries who recorded and described the language- the language divided day/night into different salient parts, and the lunar cycle also. Names for seasons were usually attached to the events transpiring within them- crab season, canoe-bark season, and so on.
> 
> Color terms in Yahgan were generally binary. The second term defined darkness, whiteness, or reddishness, and then the first acted to more precisely specify it. So yellowish-red was aia-lush, or bile-red. So the underlying set is just black, white, red.
> 
> Jess Tauber
> phonosemantics at earthlink.net
>