"Our language" - the word for language in Sirionó

[Östen Dahl]

Dan Everett asks:

"What are the literal meanings for the words translated 'language' in
the Guarani and Siriono cases?"


As I hinted at by adding ’our speech’ to the gloss of the Sirionó phrase
"nande chëë", the meaning of "chëë" (the trema marks a nasal in the
recently introduced spelling) is somewhat unspecific. I quote the
Franciscan missionary Anselmo Schermayr’s dictionary from 1958:

"habla; lengua; palabra; oración; conversación; yosin"

- maybe the best English translation is really "talk". "Nande" is the
inclusive first person plural pronoun, here used possessively.

- Östen Dahl