Wanano language
Guanano is a Tucanoan language spoken in the northwest part of Amazonas in Brazil and in Vaupés in Colombia. It is spoken by the Wanano. The Wanano and the closely related Pira-tapuya do not intermarry, but their languages are 75% lexically similar.
Classification
Wanano is a member of the Tucanoan language family, which is found in northwest Amazonia. The Tukanoan family can be sub-categorized into two groups: Western Tukanoan Languages and Eastern Tucanoan Languages, Wanano belonging to the Eastern Tucanoan family. The Eastern Tukanoan group is much larger than the Western Tukanoan family with 16 languages and around 28,000 speakers, while the Western Tucanoan family has 4 languages with around 3,000 speakers.Wanano belongs to the Northern branch of the Eastern Tucanoan languages, along with Tucano.
Documentation
The first known work on the Wanano language was a grammatical outline recorded by a Salesian missionary named Antônio Giacone in 1967. Since then a lot of work has been conducted by Nathan and Carolyn Waltz who have worked with the SIL organization in Colombia from 1963 to 1996. They have published a pedagogical grammar, papers on the aspects of Wanano phonology, a volume containing a study of Wanano kinship terms, a grammatical sketch of the language and a long interlinearized text and the grammatical overview of Wanano found in the Caro y Cuervo collection. In 2007, Nathan Waltz published a Wanano – Spanish dictionary. More research has been done on the Wanano language by Dr. Kristine Stenzel who has been conducting research in the Upper Rio Negro area since 2000. She has published a book on the grammar of Kotiria that discusses the morphology and syntax of the language. Along with this book she has written many articles about different aspects of the Wanano language and people .Wanano was described in a language documentation project funded by Programa de Documentação de Línguas e Culturas Indígenas at the Museu do Índio. The project was coordinated by Dr. Kristine Stenzel and was a teaching workshop of Kotiria pedagogical grammar.
Phonology
Consonants
Nasalization is carried on vowels. Voiced plosives and may surface as the nasal consonants,,, and in the environment of nasal vowels.Suprasegmentals
Syllables may be marked with either a high or low stress accent. Nasalization is suprasegmental and moves from left to right through a word.Morphology
Wanano is a nominative accusative language with an SOV sentence structure that contains the following grammatical categories: nouns, verbs, particles, pronouns, and interrogatives. These are outlined in Stenzel’s Reference Grammar of Wanano. Under nouns Stenzel goes into further detail regarding the animates: human vs non-human animates and inanimates: mass nouns vs count nouns. Stenzel discusses the pronouns which will be examined further below. For verbs Wanano have suffix morphemes that indicate evidentiality, as well as imperative, interrogative and irregular morphemes. While there are adverbial morphemes in Wanano, there are no adjectives.Pronouns
Pronouns in Wanano are categorized by personal, possessive, interrogative and demonstrative. A like English, gender is seen in 3rd person pronouns only. The pronouns are categorized into deictic for 1st and 2nd person and anaphoric for 3rd person.Demonstrative pronouns
Other
Gender coding of nouns is a morphological aspect discussed in the grammar of Wanano. Nouns with human referents are obligatorily marked for gender, most noun roots with human referents are masculine, otherwise feminine if marked by morpho-phonological means. The gender coding suffix -ko that appears at the end of the noun is feminine while -kʉ is masculine, for example phʉ-ko-ro and phʉ-kʉ-ro. Sometimes these endings can be reduced to o for feminine and ʉ for masculine. Examples of this are ~ducho-ro and ~duchʉ-ro.A mass noun is a noun that has no plural form, not meaning singular but that it is an uncountable referent. For example, you cannot count water however you can weigh it to measure its mass. By adding the morpheme –ro to the root of a mass noun or verb in Wanano, it changes into a count noun. Some examples of this are: ko is turned into ko-ro by adding –ro; tha is turned into tha-ro.
Syntax
Wanano is a nominative-accusative case system, this means that the subject of the transitive and intransitive verbs are marked the same way.Intransitive
Intransitive verbs are verbs that require a single nominal argument. Below are some examples.Transitive
Transitive verbs are verbs that require two core nominal arguments.As we can see from the examples above, Wanano is a nominative accusative language. For example, in example 1, 1SG yʉˈʉ is the same as in example 8. In example 9, the 3SG to is the same as in example 3. As well as in example 6 ANPH-SG ti is the same as in example 5.
Transitive motion verbs
Transitive motion verbs frequently occur with adjunct expressions coded only by the locative -pʉ and there are certain motion verbs in Wanano which can be syntactically transitive. In other words, they take a second, oblique argument coded by -pʉ-re.Wanano is typologically nominative-accusative, and that it codes the grammatical rather than the semantic roles of core arguments.
Semantics
Plural morphemes in Wanano
The most common plural morpheme used in Wanano is -a/ ̴da. The alternation between the two is still unclear however there is a tendency for ̴da to be used for animates with human referents, for example pho’da, while –a is used for other animates. When pluralizing male or females the morphemes - ̴sʉba and ̴sa ̴dubia are used. Some examples of this are:For pluralizing animals, since they are non-human the morpheme –a is used. There are some exceptions where –ya is used. Some examples of this are:
The word die-ya 'dogs' can become 'female dogs' when suffixed with ̴dubia 'woman'.