OLAC Record: Documentation of Katwena

OLAC Record
oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0009-5E1D-6

Metadata

Title: Oral Traditions: Howler Monkey

Documentation of Katwena

Contributor: Čufuyu

Contributor (researcher): Roland Hemmauer

Coverage: Suriname

Date: 2006

Description: Location: Kwamalasamutu, Suriname The village of Kwamalasamutu is a multi-ethnic village situated on the Sipaliwini river, with a fluctuating population of 800-1000 inhabitants. The population is composed of a majority of Trio (Tarëno) and several minority groups. The Katwena (Tunayana) group has about 200 members. The recordings were made during fieldwork trips to Kwamalasamutu in January-March 2006 and February-April 2007. Recordings: All audio and video recordings were made by the researcher Roland Hem¬mauer. Audio files were recorded on a Hi-MD MiniDisc recorder, using either a headset or a table microphone. Video recordings were made on MiniDV tape. In some cases, the audio track from the video recording rather than from the minidisc had to be used due to failure of the audio equipment. Narratives and life histories were recorded. Texts were transcribed by the researcher with the help of the narrators themselves. Younger helpers, who had a passive understanding of Katwena and who were occasionally consulted during the first fieldwork period, turn¬ed out to only have an active command of Waiwai and to be unable to reproduce spoken Katwena. Translations were made into Dutch with the help of Tanini, a clinical assistant and former school teacher who speaks (Surinamese) Dutch reasonably fluently. In the course of translation, Tanini also helped to recheck the transcriptions made by the researcher. Some texts have also been translated into Trio.

The NWO Endangered Languages Programme “Giving them back their Languages: The endangered Amerindian languages of the Guianas” research falls within the aim of documenting all the highly endangered Amerindian languages of the Guianas that is currently being carried out at Leiden University, and which has until now focussed on Trio (Cariban), Mawayana (Arawakan), and Kari’na (Cariban), as they are spoken in Suriname. Ongoing work also includes Wapishana (Arawakan) and Taruma (isolate) in Guyana. The two languages chosen for the present project are Wayana and Tunayana-Waiwai (both Cariban) which are spoken in the southern rainforest of Suriname, French Guiana, Guyana and Brazil. The researchers will focus mainly but not exclusively on these groups resident in Suriname since it is there that these languages are found to be relatively conservative compared to the varieties spoken in the other countries. Tunayana-Waiwai is spoken by approximately 150 people in Suriname. The Wayana speakers in Suriname number approximately 400. Previous and ongoing research has shown that these Cariban and Arawakan languages of the Guianas exhibit features that have been hitherto undescribed or analyzed, that can enhance our understanding of the complexities of the language-culture interface, and how such cognitive structures within these languages can develop and grammaticalize. The languages of the Guianas constitute an as yet untapped source of knowledge for those studying emergent grammar and grammaticalization processes, as well as ethnolinguistics. The primary aim of the programme is to write two comprehensive grammars of Wayana and Tunayana-Waiwai. In particular, full grammatical descriptions of these languages are required for the programmatic focus of the project which aims to look in detail at certain aspects of the languages that have cultural import, namely the semantic and pragmatic domains pertinent to the worldview of the speakers. The culturally-dependent conceptualization patterns that obtain in these languages include classificatory patterns in the locative and directional postpositions, evidentiality patterns, and truth-tracking devices. While a lot of attention has been paid in the anthropological literature to the worldviews of Amazonian peoples, whereby one commonality is the transformational world in which they live - that is, these peoples live in constant interaction with the omnipresent (invisible) spirit world - little attention has been paid to the differing structures through which this commonality is expressed, be these ethnographic or linguistic in nature. In previous and ongoing work on related languages of these two language families, a number of grammatical morphemes (clitics, suffixes and modal particles) have come to light that in their basic meaning are used to chart interactions between "this world", that is, the world of humans, and the "other-world", that is, the world of spirits, both of which are intertwined. Concomitant with such grammatical markers, one finds a number of categories that can best be subsumed under the term "truth and knowledge markers" that include a frustrative marker, assertion markers, and markers which are used to assign responsibility to an actant. It is such complex categories of grammatical marking that are difficult to grasp unless one takes into account the worldview according to which the speakers live. In the Cariban languages, for example, one finds a marker –me (-pe), often translated as 'being' or 'as' in the literature and termed facsimile marker in Carlin (2004) that is used on nominals to mark that the denotee of that nominal is manifestly but not inherently that which is denoted by that nominal, that is, it is seemingly but not intrinsically so, as shown in the Trio example below. Here the speaker is talking about an adopted daughter: without the –me marked on j-eemi, the speaker is referring to his biological daughter. j-eemi-me nai mëe 1poss-daughter-facs she.is 3pr.anim.prox she is my daughter (but not biologically so) What such examples as that given above show is that it is obligatory for the speakers of these languages to mark different kinds of truths, that is, actual truths and apparent truths, or truths that are transient but not absolute. The researchers aim to chart systematically the linguistic processes and means for the construction of possible worlds and the ensuing knowledge of those worlds, with as a point of departure “the reality of a multiplicity of knowledges or versions of the world” (Overing 1990:603).

History of the Katwena and Tunayana: Direct contacts with the Katwena or Tunayana have only been recorded since the begin¬ning of the 20th century. The first short mention of Katwena (“Katawians”) is found in Farabee, William Curtis 1924: The Central Caribs. The name Tunayana had kept appear¬ing in the literature for several centuries (for details see Bos, Gerrit 1998: Some re¬coveries in Guiana Indian ethnohistory.), but has long been considered the name of a mythological people. As far as can be inferred from the literature and from personal life histories, the Katwena and Tunayana were inhabitants of the Trombetas (Ka:fu) river and its right-bank tributaries, esp. the Cachorro (Kašuru) and Turuna (Turuñe) rivers, in northern Brazil during the first half of the 20th century. Some authors also place the Tunayana on left-bank tributaries of the Trombetas, and the Katwena on the Mapuera (Irišamna; Waiwai: Kumwaw) river. It cannot be confirmed with absolute certainty whe¬ther the names Katwena and Tunayana refer to one and the same group or to two closely related groups, but most speakers consider Tunayana to be an alternative name for Ka¬twena. The Katwena were probably part of or closely related to the Parukoto. The names Kahyana and Minhoyana that were also mentioned to the researcher refer to subgroups of the Katwena or to closely related groups. Other Cariban groups with whom the Katwena had closer contact were Čikyana (Sikiâna, Sikïijana, Chikena), Šerew (Xerew, Shereo), Trio (Tiriyó, Tarëno), Kaxuyana, and the Arawakan Mawayana. In the 1960s, the Katwena and Tunayana were contacted by the Waiwai at the instigation of American evangelical missionaries, and resettled in the Trio village of Alalapadu in southern Suriname and in Waiwai villages in southern Guyana. In the late 1970s, the en¬tire population of Alalapadu moved downstream to the newly founded village of Kwama¬lasamutu on the Sipaliwini river. There have been several migrations of Katwena indi¬viduals or families between Guyana, Suriname, and new multi-ethnic Waiwai villages that had been founded along the Mapuera river in Brazil, esp. during the 1980s. Around 2002, part of the Katwena and Tunayana left Kwamalasamutu and re-established the abandoned village of A’yarama in neighbouring Brazil. Regular and long-term visits be¬tween the Katwena and Tunayana of Kwamalasamutu and A’yarama are still common. Location: Kwamalasamutu, Suriname The village of Kwamalasamutu is a multi-ethnic village situated on the Sipaliwini river, with a fluctuating population of 800-1000 inhabitants. The population is composed of a majority of Trio (Tarëno) and several minority groups. The Katwena (Tunayana) group has about 200 members. The recordings were made during fieldwork trips to Kwamalasamutu in January-March 2006 and February-April 2007. Recordings: All audio and video recordings were made by the researcher Roland Hem¬mauer. Audio files were recorded on a Hi-MD MiniDisc recorder, using either a headset or a table microphone. Video recordings were made on MiniDV tape. In some cases, the audio track from the video recording rather than from the minidisc had to be used due to failure of the audio equipment. Narratives and life histories were recorded. Texts were transcribed by the researcher with the help of the narrators themselves. Younger helpers, who had a passive understanding of Katwena and who were occasionally consulted during the first fieldwork period, turn¬ed out to only have an active command of Waiwai and to be unable to reproduce spoken Katwena. Translations were made into Dutch with the help of Tanini, a clinical assistant and former school teacher who speaks (Surinamese) Dutch reasonably fluently. In the course of translation, Tanini also helped to recheck the transcriptions made by the researcher. Some texts have also been translated into Trio.

Actors: - female: Čufuyu (oldest Katwena speaker in the village), Waniya, Waka, Yahkara - male: Mišo, Amakara, Yakuta, Omhi; (Mereka, Šiwiri) At the time of recording, all Katwena informants were between 60 and 75 years old, with the exception of Waka, who was in her 50s. Mišo, who provided the majority of texts, is Amakara’s older brother; Omhi, who acted as a flute player, is their half-brother. Waniya and Omhi are spouses. Mereka, who is Čufuyu’s son, and his brother-in-law Šiwiri only contributed some set phrases by way of an introduction to the language, and one short report on a hunting trip, but the language they use in these recordings is Waiwai, not Katwena. Both are between 30 and 40 years old. Čufuyu’s younger brother Ša:fi, who is allegedly the best storyteller of their group and who also participated in translating the Bible into Waiwai, could not be consulted, since he had moved to the village of A’yarama across the Brazilian border a few years before fieldwork in Suriname took place. Mereka is an influential church elder, and Yakuta has the official status of a basja (as¬sistant of the village head) of the Katwena (Tunayana) group. The other informants do not have any outstanding political functions.

Katwena Language: Classification: Katwena belongs to the Cariban language family. It is mutually intelligible with Waiwai, of which it is often considered a dialect, and closely related to Hixkaryana, Xerew (She¬reo) and Kaxuyana (Kashuyana). Besides lexical differences, the most important features that distinguish Katwena from Waiwai are: - lack of automatic palatalizations t > č, n > ñ before front vowels - e ~ o ablaut in oCo-initial nouns - retention of third-person subject prefix n- with all verbs - pronouns kimyamu ‘we (incl.pl.)’, no:ku ‘who’, mokro ‘MED:ANIM’ (Waiwai: kiwyam, onoke, mikro) Sociolinguistic situation: Katwena (Tunayana-Waiwai) is actively spoken by the older generation (generally above 60 years old) of the Tunayana group living in Kwamalasamutu. There is also a small spin-off of this group (approx. 30 individuals) who have recently moved across the Bra¬zilian border to the former village of A’yarama and other new villages further down the Trombetas river (with the storyteller Ša:fi, Čufuyu’s younger brother, living there). Lar¬ger numbers of Katwena are also reported to live in mixed Waiwai villages in southern Guyana and in neighbouring Brazil, esp. along the Mapuera river. The older Katwena speakers of Kwamalasamutu generally use Katwena among themselv¬es and with their children, and Trio with others. The middle generation of the Tunayana group have a passive understanding of Katwena, while actively being bilingual in Trio, the majority language of the village, and Waiwai, as it is found in the Waiwai Bible trans¬lation and as it is also spoken by the Mawayana minority living of Kwamalasamutu. The middle generation generally speaks Trio with their children. The majority of the younger generation (below 20 years of age) are monolingual in Trio, with only some of them hav¬ing a passive understanding of Katwena and Waiwai. Language features: Katwena has 14 consonant phonemes, with a preponderance of alveolar/palatal phoneme pairs, and a six-vowel system with three high (/i i u/) and three non-high (/e a o/) vowels. Implosives occur as positional allophones of homorganic nasals; /k/ is realized as a glot¬tal stop before implosives and occasionally elsewhere. Non-phonemic vowel length is predictable on the basis of a default iambic rhythm in open-syllable sequences. Phonemic long vowels occur mainly in initial syllables of disyllabic (C)VCV words and as a result of compensatory lengthening due to /r/-deletion. Consonant clusters are frequent both word-initially and word-internally, and do generally not allow long vowels to precede or follow them. The default syllable structure is CV(C). Word-initially, V(C) and CCV(C) are also possible. All words end in a vowel phonologically. High-vowels are frequently syncopated in inflection and derivation. High vowels also exhibit vowel harmony to a limited extent. Katwena is a polysynthetic, head-marking language, with nouns, verbs and postpositions as its major word classes. The language is mainly suffixing, but person is exclusively ex¬pressed by prefixes. Further prefixes are: reflexive/reciprocal e- ~ es- ~ et-, linker y-, di¬rect-obejct nominalizer n-, distributive ak-, and a non-productive causative en-. Prefixes and some of the suffixes (including all verbal suffixes) influence the (iambic) metrical structure of a word, while most (esp. nominal and phrasal) suffixes are metrically inert. Focus, epistemic modality, speaker knowledge and attitude, and some aspectual/temporal concepts, are expressed by enclitics, that often combine into long clitic chains. Katwena has a rich derivational system of both deverbal nominalizations and denominal verbalize¬tions. Adverbs and postpositional phrases can also be nominalized, and nouns can form possessive adverbs. Additionally, verbs have valency-increasing and valency-decreasing (reflexive/reciprocal) morphology. Verbs, possessed nouns, and postpositions are inflected with person prefixes, indicating direct objects, possessors, and postpositional arguments, respectively. Four persons cate¬gories are distinguished: first person (1), second person (2), third person (3), and inclusive person (1+2); first-person exclusive (1+3) is always marked by a free pronoun amna that triggers third-person agreement. Plural number is always marked separately by suffixes. Finite verbs have special nominative subject prefixes indicating the S or A argument, and first person even has different subject prefixes for transitives (w- ‘1A’) and intransitives (k- ‘1S’). With transitive verbs, only the higher-ranking argument (either A or O) is ex¬pressed on the verb, according to a person hierarchy 2 > 1 > 3. Additionally, there is one portmanteau prefix k- ‘1>2’, combining first-person A with second-person O. Verbs have two aspectual stems: perfective and imperfective, with four tenses in total: non-past (from the imperfective stem), immediate past (from the perfective stem), distant past perfective, and distant past imperfective. Imperfective stems are marked by a suffix or by ablaut; stative verbs and inchoative production verbs have additional telicity mark¬ing on their perfective stem. Both stems also have their own subordinated form (perfect¬ive -the, imperfective -tawu), and an irrealis is formed by adding a suffix -ri to the per¬fective stem. Deontic modal categories are person-specific (1: intentional; 2: imperative; 3: jussive; 1+2: hortative) and partly distinguish between plain, itive and ventive forms. An adverbial participle is formed by a circumfix t-…-so ~ t-…-ši. Negation is done through negative adverbialization of the verb stem. Nouns can be marked for plural, past tense, completive aspect, negation, augmentative, and diminutive. Most nouns have both a bare non-possessed and a marked possessed stem, derived by possession suffixes -ri, -ni, -ti, -či. Possessors precede their heads in possessive NPs. Core grammatical relations (S, A, O) are not marked on nouns, but post¬positions express peripheral spatial and non-spatial relations. Spatial postpositions gener¬ally distinguish the primitive spatial relations of position (locative), goal (directional), source or distance (ablative), and path (perlative) for all location types. Postpositional phrases and adverbs can be marked for plural, indicating that the relation they describe applies more than once within the situation described by the predicate. Katwena has a basic OVA word order in transitive clauses and both SV and VS word orders in intransitive clauses. New or focused information is preverbal, while given de¬focused information usually follows the verb. The same pragmatic order is found in nom¬inal clauses. Adjuncts are most frequently found in clause-initial or clause-final position. Afterthoughts occur in a right-dislocated position, followed by the placeholder particle _ha. Verbal subordination constructions are non-finite and structurally treated like post¬positional phrases, except for finite causal clauses headed by eširke ‘because’, which are probably calqued from a structurally identical construction in Trio. Katwena has a high number (> 30) of phrasal, second-position, and clause-final particles enclitic particles that often combine into long particle chains, fulfilling various discourse, TAM, focus, and modifier functions.

Format: audio/x-wav

Identifier: oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0009-5E1D-6

Under the auspices of an NWO project: 355-70-015

Publisher: Roland Hemmauer

Leiden University

Subject: Oral Traditions

Animal Trickster

Karata language

Katwena

Subject (ISO639): kpt

Type: audio

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Citation: Čufuyu; Roland Hemmauer (researcher). 2006. Roland Hemmauer.
Terms: area_Europe country_RU iso639_kpt

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Metadata
Title:		Oral Traditions: Howler Monkey
Title:		Documentation of Katwena
Contributor:		Čufuyu
Contributor (researcher):		Roland Hemmauer
Coverage:		Suriname
Date:		2006
Description:		Location: Kwamalasamutu, Suriname The village of Kwamalasamutu is a multi-ethnic village situated on the Sipaliwini river, with a fluctuating population of 800-1000 inhabitants. The population is composed of a majority of Trio (Tarëno) and several minority groups. The Katwena (Tunayana) group has about 200 members. The recordings were made during fieldwork trips to Kwamalasamutu in January-March 2006 and February-April 2007. Recordings: All audio and video recordings were made by the researcher Roland Hem¬mauer. Audio files were recorded on a Hi-MD MiniDisc recorder, using either a headset or a table microphone. Video recordings were made on MiniDV tape. In some cases, the audio track from the video recording rather than from the minidisc had to be used due to failure of the audio equipment. Narratives and life histories were recorded. Texts were transcribed by the researcher with the help of the narrators themselves. Younger helpers, who had a passive understanding of Katwena and who were occasionally consulted during the first fieldwork period, turn¬ed out to only have an active command of Waiwai and to be unable to reproduce spoken Katwena. Translations were made into Dutch with the help of Tanini, a clinical assistant and former school teacher who speaks (Surinamese) Dutch reasonably fluently. In the course of translation, Tanini also helped to recheck the transcriptions made by the researcher. Some texts have also been translated into Trio.
		The NWO Endangered Languages Programme “Giving them back their Languages: The endangered Amerindian languages of the Guianas” research falls within the aim of documenting all the highly endangered Amerindian languages of the Guianas that is currently being carried out at Leiden University, and which has until now focussed on Trio (Cariban), Mawayana (Arawakan), and Kari’na (Cariban), as they are spoken in Suriname. Ongoing work also includes Wapishana (Arawakan) and Taruma (isolate) in Guyana. The two languages chosen for the present project are Wayana and Tunayana-Waiwai (both Cariban) which are spoken in the southern rainforest of Suriname, French Guiana, Guyana and Brazil. The researchers will focus mainly but not exclusively on these groups resident in Suriname since it is there that these languages are found to be relatively conservative compared to the varieties spoken in the other countries. Tunayana-Waiwai is spoken by approximately 150 people in Suriname. The Wayana speakers in Suriname number approximately 400. Previous and ongoing research has shown that these Cariban and Arawakan languages of the Guianas exhibit features that have been hitherto undescribed or analyzed, that can enhance our understanding of the complexities of the language-culture interface, and how such cognitive structures within these languages can develop and grammaticalize. The languages of the Guianas constitute an as yet untapped source of knowledge for those studying emergent grammar and grammaticalization processes, as well as ethnolinguistics. The primary aim of the programme is to write two comprehensive grammars of Wayana and Tunayana-Waiwai. In particular, full grammatical descriptions of these languages are required for the programmatic focus of the project which aims to look in detail at certain aspects of the languages that have cultural import, namely the semantic and pragmatic domains pertinent to the worldview of the speakers. The culturally-dependent conceptualization patterns that obtain in these languages include classificatory patterns in the locative and directional postpositions, evidentiality patterns, and truth-tracking devices. While a lot of attention has been paid in the anthropological literature to the worldviews of Amazonian peoples, whereby one commonality is the transformational world in which they live - that is, these peoples live in constant interaction with the omnipresent (invisible) spirit world - little attention has been paid to the differing structures through which this commonality is expressed, be these ethnographic or linguistic in nature. In previous and ongoing work on related languages of these two language families, a number of grammatical morphemes (clitics, suffixes and modal particles) have come to light that in their basic meaning are used to chart interactions between "this world", that is, the world of humans, and the "other-world", that is, the world of spirits, both of which are intertwined. Concomitant with such grammatical markers, one finds a number of categories that can best be subsumed under the term "truth and knowledge markers" that include a frustrative marker, assertion markers, and markers which are used to assign responsibility to an actant. It is such complex categories of grammatical marking that are difficult to grasp unless one takes into account the worldview according to which the speakers live. In the Cariban languages, for example, one finds a marker –me (-pe), often translated as 'being' or 'as' in the literature and termed facsimile marker in Carlin (2004) that is used on nominals to mark that the denotee of that nominal is manifestly but not inherently that which is denoted by that nominal, that is, it is seemingly but not intrinsically so, as shown in the Trio example below. Here the speaker is talking about an adopted daughter: without the –me marked on j-eemi, the speaker is referring to his biological daughter. j-eemi-me nai mëe 1poss-daughter-facs she.is 3pr.anim.prox she is my daughter (but not biologically so) What such examples as that given above show is that it is obligatory for the speakers of these languages to mark different kinds of truths, that is, actual truths and apparent truths, or truths that are transient but not absolute. The researchers aim to chart systematically the linguistic processes and means for the construction of possible worlds and the ensuing knowledge of those worlds, with as a point of departure “the reality of a multiplicity of knowledges or versions of the world” (Overing 1990:603).
		History of the Katwena and Tunayana: Direct contacts with the Katwena or Tunayana have only been recorded since the begin¬ning of the 20th century. The first short mention of Katwena (“Katawians”) is found in Farabee, William Curtis 1924: The Central Caribs. The name Tunayana had kept appear¬ing in the literature for several centuries (for details see Bos, Gerrit 1998: Some re¬coveries in Guiana Indian ethnohistory.), but has long been considered the name of a mythological people. As far as can be inferred from the literature and from personal life histories, the Katwena and Tunayana were inhabitants of the Trombetas (Ka:fu) river and its right-bank tributaries, esp. the Cachorro (Kašuru) and Turuna (Turuñe) rivers, in northern Brazil during the first half of the 20th century. Some authors also place the Tunayana on left-bank tributaries of the Trombetas, and the Katwena on the Mapuera (Irišamna; Waiwai: Kumwaw) river. It cannot be confirmed with absolute certainty whe¬ther the names Katwena and Tunayana refer to one and the same group or to two closely related groups, but most speakers consider Tunayana to be an alternative name for Ka¬twena. The Katwena were probably part of or closely related to the Parukoto. The names Kahyana and Minhoyana that were also mentioned to the researcher refer to subgroups of the Katwena or to closely related groups. Other Cariban groups with whom the Katwena had closer contact were Čikyana (Sikiâna, Sikïijana, Chikena), Šerew (Xerew, Shereo), Trio (Tiriyó, Tarëno), Kaxuyana, and the Arawakan Mawayana. In the 1960s, the Katwena and Tunayana were contacted by the Waiwai at the instigation of American evangelical missionaries, and resettled in the Trio village of Alalapadu in southern Suriname and in Waiwai villages in southern Guyana. In the late 1970s, the en¬tire population of Alalapadu moved downstream to the newly founded village of Kwama¬lasamutu on the Sipaliwini river. There have been several migrations of Katwena indi¬viduals or families between Guyana, Suriname, and new multi-ethnic Waiwai villages that had been founded along the Mapuera river in Brazil, esp. during the 1980s. Around 2002, part of the Katwena and Tunayana left Kwamalasamutu and re-established the abandoned village of A’yarama in neighbouring Brazil. Regular and long-term visits be¬tween the Katwena and Tunayana of Kwamalasamutu and A’yarama are still common. Location: Kwamalasamutu, Suriname The village of Kwamalasamutu is a multi-ethnic village situated on the Sipaliwini river, with a fluctuating population of 800-1000 inhabitants. The population is composed of a majority of Trio (Tarëno) and several minority groups. The Katwena (Tunayana) group has about 200 members. The recordings were made during fieldwork trips to Kwamalasamutu in January-March 2006 and February-April 2007. Recordings: All audio and video recordings were made by the researcher Roland Hem¬mauer. Audio files were recorded on a Hi-MD MiniDisc recorder, using either a headset or a table microphone. Video recordings were made on MiniDV tape. In some cases, the audio track from the video recording rather than from the minidisc had to be used due to failure of the audio equipment. Narratives and life histories were recorded. Texts were transcribed by the researcher with the help of the narrators themselves. Younger helpers, who had a passive understanding of Katwena and who were occasionally consulted during the first fieldwork period, turn¬ed out to only have an active command of Waiwai and to be unable to reproduce spoken Katwena. Translations were made into Dutch with the help of Tanini, a clinical assistant and former school teacher who speaks (Surinamese) Dutch reasonably fluently. In the course of translation, Tanini also helped to recheck the transcriptions made by the researcher. Some texts have also been translated into Trio.
		Actors: - female: Čufuyu (oldest Katwena speaker in the village), Waniya, Waka, Yahkara - male: Mišo, Amakara, Yakuta, Omhi; (Mereka, Šiwiri) At the time of recording, all Katwena informants were between 60 and 75 years old, with the exception of Waka, who was in her 50s. Mišo, who provided the majority of texts, is Amakara’s older brother; Omhi, who acted as a flute player, is their half-brother. Waniya and Omhi are spouses. Mereka, who is Čufuyu’s son, and his brother-in-law Šiwiri only contributed some set phrases by way of an introduction to the language, and one short report on a hunting trip, but the language they use in these recordings is Waiwai, not Katwena. Both are between 30 and 40 years old. Čufuyu’s younger brother Ša:fi, who is allegedly the best storyteller of their group and who also participated in translating the Bible into Waiwai, could not be consulted, since he had moved to the village of A’yarama across the Brazilian border a few years before fieldwork in Suriname took place. Mereka is an influential church elder, and Yakuta has the official status of a basja (as¬sistant of the village head) of the Katwena (Tunayana) group. The other informants do not have any outstanding political functions.
		Katwena Language: Classification: Katwena belongs to the Cariban language family. It is mutually intelligible with Waiwai, of which it is often considered a dialect, and closely related to Hixkaryana, Xerew (She¬reo) and Kaxuyana (Kashuyana). Besides lexical differences, the most important features that distinguish Katwena from Waiwai are: - lack of automatic palatalizations t > č, n > ñ before front vowels - e ~ o ablaut in oCo-initial nouns - retention of third-person subject prefix n- with all verbs - pronouns kimyamu ‘we (incl.pl.)’, no:ku ‘who’, mokro ‘MED:ANIM’ (Waiwai: kiwyam, onoke, mikro) Sociolinguistic situation: Katwena (Tunayana-Waiwai) is actively spoken by the older generation (generally above 60 years old) of the Tunayana group living in Kwamalasamutu. There is also a small spin-off of this group (approx. 30 individuals) who have recently moved across the Bra¬zilian border to the former village of A’yarama and other new villages further down the Trombetas river (with the storyteller Ša:fi, Čufuyu’s younger brother, living there). Lar¬ger numbers of Katwena are also reported to live in mixed Waiwai villages in southern Guyana and in neighbouring Brazil, esp. along the Mapuera river. The older Katwena speakers of Kwamalasamutu generally use Katwena among themselv¬es and with their children, and Trio with others. The middle generation of the Tunayana group have a passive understanding of Katwena, while actively being bilingual in Trio, the majority language of the village, and Waiwai, as it is found in the Waiwai Bible trans¬lation and as it is also spoken by the Mawayana minority living of Kwamalasamutu. The middle generation generally speaks Trio with their children. The majority of the younger generation (below 20 years of age) are monolingual in Trio, with only some of them hav¬ing a passive understanding of Katwena and Waiwai. Language features: Katwena has 14 consonant phonemes, with a preponderance of alveolar/palatal phoneme pairs, and a six-vowel system with three high (/i i u/) and three non-high (/e a o/) vowels. Implosives occur as positional allophones of homorganic nasals; /k/ is realized as a glot¬tal stop before implosives and occasionally elsewhere. Non-phonemic vowel length is predictable on the basis of a default iambic rhythm in open-syllable sequences. Phonemic long vowels occur mainly in initial syllables of disyllabic (C)VCV words and as a result of compensatory lengthening due to /r/-deletion. Consonant clusters are frequent both word-initially and word-internally, and do generally not allow long vowels to precede or follow them. The default syllable structure is CV(C). Word-initially, V(C) and CCV(C) are also possible. All words end in a vowel phonologically. High-vowels are frequently syncopated in inflection and derivation. High vowels also exhibit vowel harmony to a limited extent. Katwena is a polysynthetic, head-marking language, with nouns, verbs and postpositions as its major word classes. The language is mainly suffixing, but person is exclusively ex¬pressed by prefixes. Further prefixes are: reflexive/reciprocal e- ~ es- ~ et-, linker y-, di¬rect-obejct nominalizer n-, distributive ak-, and a non-productive causative en-. Prefixes and some of the suffixes (including all verbal suffixes) influence the (iambic) metrical structure of a word, while most (esp. nominal and phrasal) suffixes are metrically inert. Focus, epistemic modality, speaker knowledge and attitude, and some aspectual/temporal concepts, are expressed by enclitics, that often combine into long clitic chains. Katwena has a rich derivational system of both deverbal nominalizations and denominal verbalize¬tions. Adverbs and postpositional phrases can also be nominalized, and nouns can form possessive adverbs. Additionally, verbs have valency-increasing and valency-decreasing (reflexive/reciprocal) morphology. Verbs, possessed nouns, and postpositions are inflected with person prefixes, indicating direct objects, possessors, and postpositional arguments, respectively. Four persons cate¬gories are distinguished: first person (1), second person (2), third person (3), and inclusive person (1+2); first-person exclusive (1+3) is always marked by a free pronoun amna that triggers third-person agreement. Plural number is always marked separately by suffixes. Finite verbs have special nominative subject prefixes indicating the S or A argument, and first person even has different subject prefixes for transitives (w- ‘1A’) and intransitives (k- ‘1S’). With transitive verbs, only the higher-ranking argument (either A or O) is ex¬pressed on the verb, according to a person hierarchy 2 > 1 > 3. Additionally, there is one portmanteau prefix k- ‘1>2’, combining first-person A with second-person O. Verbs have two aspectual stems: perfective and imperfective, with four tenses in total: non-past (from the imperfective stem), immediate past (from the perfective stem), distant past perfective, and distant past imperfective. Imperfective stems are marked by a suffix or by ablaut; stative verbs and inchoative production verbs have additional telicity mark¬ing on their perfective stem. Both stems also have their own subordinated form (perfect¬ive -the, imperfective -tawu), and an irrealis is formed by adding a suffix -ri to the per¬fective stem. Deontic modal categories are person-specific (1: intentional; 2: imperative; 3: jussive; 1+2: hortative) and partly distinguish between plain, itive and ventive forms. An adverbial participle is formed by a circumfix t-…-so ~ t-…-ši. Negation is done through negative adverbialization of the verb stem. Nouns can be marked for plural, past tense, completive aspect, negation, augmentative, and diminutive. Most nouns have both a bare non-possessed and a marked possessed stem, derived by possession suffixes -ri, -ni, -ti, -či. Possessors precede their heads in possessive NPs. Core grammatical relations (S, A, O) are not marked on nouns, but post¬positions express peripheral spatial and non-spatial relations. Spatial postpositions gener¬ally distinguish the primitive spatial relations of position (locative), goal (directional), source or distance (ablative), and path (perlative) for all location types. Postpositional phrases and adverbs can be marked for plural, indicating that the relation they describe applies more than once within the situation described by the predicate. Katwena has a basic OVA word order in transitive clauses and both SV and VS word orders in intransitive clauses. New or focused information is preverbal, while given de¬focused information usually follows the verb. The same pragmatic order is found in nom¬inal clauses. Adjuncts are most frequently found in clause-initial or clause-final position. Afterthoughts occur in a right-dislocated position, followed by the placeholder particle _ha. Verbal subordination constructions are non-finite and structurally treated like post¬positional phrases, except for finite causal clauses headed by eširke ‘because’, which are probably calqued from a structurally identical construction in Trio. Katwena has a high number (> 30) of phrasal, second-position, and clause-final particles enclitic particles that often combine into long particle chains, fulfilling various discourse, TAM, focus, and modifier functions.
Format:		audio/x-wav
Identifier:		oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0009-5E1D-6
Identifier:		Under the auspices of an NWO project: 355-70-015
Publisher:		Roland Hemmauer
Publisher:		Leiden University
Subject:		Oral Traditions
		Animal Trickster
		Karata language
		Katwena
Subject (ISO639):		kpt
Type:		audio
OLAC Info
Archive:		The Language Archive at the MPI for Psycholinguistics
Description:		http://www.language-archives.org/archive/www.mpi.nl
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for OLAC format
GetRecord:		Pre-generated XML file
OAI Info
OaiIdentifier:		oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0009-5E1D-6
DateStamp:		2017-02-14
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for simple DC format
Search Info
Citation:		Čufuyu; Roland Hemmauer (researcher). 2006. Roland Hemmauer.
Terms:		area_Europe country_RU iso639_kpt
Inferred Metadata
Country:		Russian Federation
Area:		Europe