Yahgan language

Yahgan or Yagán is an extinct language that is one of the indigenous languages of Tierra del Fuego, spoken by the Yahgan people. It is regarded as a language isolate, although some linguists have attempted to relate it to Kawésqar and Chono.
Yahgan was also spoken briefly on Keppel Island in the Falkland Islands at a missionary settlement. In 2017, Chile's National Corporation of Indigenous Development convened a workshop to plan an educational curriculum in the Yahgan language, and in June 2019 it planned to inaugurate a language nest in the community of Bahía Mejillones, near Puerto Williams. The government also funded the publication of a "concise and illustrated dictionary" of the Yahgan language.
Following the death of Cristina Calderón of Villa Ukika on Navarino Island, Chile, no native speakers of Yahgan remain.

Phonology

Vowels

There are three analyses of the phonological system of Yahgan, which differ in many details from one another. The oldest analysis is Thomas Bridges' dictionary based on the English Phonotypic Alphabet; from the middle of the 20th century by Haudricourt and Holmer ; and towards the end of the 20th century, by Guerra Eissmann, Salas y Valencia, and Aguilera.

	Front	Central	Back
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All vowels are long in stressed syllables. Vowel is the most frequent. It may be pronounced as a schwa in syllables in pretonic or post-tonic position. In final tonic syllables, vowels and may become a diphthong. Vowels and are very unstable in final unaccented syllables, alternating with and respectively.

Consonants

Morphophonology

Yahgan shows a number of sandhi effects on consonants and vowels. For instance, the terminal -i of teki 'to see, recognize' when affixed by -vnnaka 'to have trouble/difficulty doing' becomes -e:- of teke:vnnaka 'have trouble recognizing/seeing'
In syllables reduced through morphophonetic processes, terminal vowels of original bisyllables will often drop, and resultant final stops will fricativize. Aside from losing stress, any vowels preceding these shifted consonants will often shift from tense to lax. Ex. -a:gu: 'for self, with one's own' > -ax-. ata 'to take, convey' > vhr-, and so on. Present tense usually results in the dropping of the final vowel of the infinitival form of the verb and associated changes as above, as does affixation by many, but not all, further derivational and inflectional suffixes beginning with stops, affricates, and other consonants. Ex. aiamaka 'to fight' aiamux-tvlli 'to fight confusedly'.
The sounds m, n, and l are particularly labile in some environments. atama 'to eat' atu:-yella 'to leave off eating'. n from -Vna 'state' is often reduced to -V: when one would expect -Vn-. lt can disappear entirely before some consonants. vla 'to drink', vlnggu: or vnggu: 'to drink'. Initial h- in roots and affixes drops in many instances. Ex. kvna 'to float, be in boat'+ haina 'to walk, go' gives kvn-aina. ng is purely morphophonetic, from terminal n before a velar consonant. Many instances of m before a labial consonant are similarly motivated. w after a passive/reflexive prefix m- often drops. w often vocalizes to u: or o: or drops : tu:- causative plus wvshta:gu: 'work' is tu:vshta:gu: 'make work'. y is also relatively labile- after reduced -ata- > -vhr- the suffix -yella 'to leave off' becomes -chella. In combination with preceding -a y often vocalizes: ki:pa 'woman' plus yamalim 'plural animates/people' becomes ki:paiamalim.

Stress

In recent analyses of the speech of remaining speakers, word stress was felt to be nondistinctive. However, in the mid-19th century Yahga Strait dialect word stress was distinctive at least at the level of the individual morpheme, with stress shifting in regular patterns during word formation. Certain otherwise identical word roots are distinguishable by different stress marking. No information is available about phrase or clause level stress phenomena from the Yahga dialect.
Some roots, particularly those with doubled consonants, exhibit stress on both vowels flanking the doublet. Diphthongs appear to attract stress when they are morphophonetic in origin, sometimes removing it from vowels on both sides that would otherwise be stressed. The first vowel -V- in -Vna ' in a state' also appears to attract stress, while -ata 'attain' repels stress to the left. Thus the combination -Vnata 'get into a state' is harmonious. Diphthongal attraction often trumps -Vna, drawing stress further left, while two successive diphthongs often have the stress on the rightmost one. Syllables reduced morphophonetically generally lose whatever stress they might have carried. The vast majority of 'irregular' stress renderings in Bridges' original dictionary manuscript seem to arise from just these five sources.
It may be that these effects help to preserve morpheme boundary and identity information. For instance, given the importance of derivation of verbs from nouns and adjectives using -Vna- and -ata-, shifted stress allows one to differentiate these morphemes from lexical -ata- and those -na-'s that are part of lexical roots. -Vna itself will often lose stress and reduce to a tense vowel before other suffixes, leaving the shifting as a hint of its underlying presence.
Stress can also differentiate otherwise identical voice morpheme strings: tú:mu:- causative reflexive from tu:mú:- the causative of making oneself seem, or pretend to be in some state, and tu:mú:- the circumstantial of same. Circumstantial T has different allomorphs- some having following stressable vowel, others not- this also complicates matters for the learner but may also help disentangle morpheme boundaries for the listener.

Sound symbolism

There appears to be a great deal of remnant sound symbolism in the Yahgan lexicon. For example, many roots ending in -m encode as part of their senses the notion of a texturally softened positive curve, while an -l in similar position often shows up when the reference is to bloody core parts, often out from once safe confinement inside the body. Many roots with initial ch- refer to repeated, spiny extrusions, final -x to dry, hard-edged, or brittle parts, and so on.
The historical sources of these patterns cannot be known for sure, but it may be possible that there was at one time a shape and texture classifier system of some sort behind them. Such systems are rather common in South American languages.
There is little direct onomatopoeia recorded by Bridges, despite descriptions of highly animated imitative behavior on the part of speakers being recorded in the late 19th century. Several bird names are perhaps reduplications of calls, and there are a couple of imitative cries and sound words. Most words denoting sounds end in an unproductive verb-deriving suffix -sha, which may be derived from the Yahgan root ha:sha 'voice, language, uttered words, speech, cry', or vra 'to cry' — e.g. gvlasha 'to rattle'.
In the Bridges dictionary of the language one may note several otherwise identical terms differing only in whether they are spelled with an s or a ch — e.g. asela/achela 'skin'. It is not known whether this was dialectal, dialect mixture, ideolectal, gender-based usage or a real grammatical variation such as might occur with augmentative/diminutive sound symbolic shifting.

Alphabet

The alphabet currently sanctioned officially in Chile is as follows:
a, æ, ch, e, ö, f, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, rh, s, š, t, u, w, x.
A simplified orthography is a variant of the old Bridges system, created for online use on the Waata Chis discussion list on Yahoo Groups and elsewhere. It has tense and lax vowels as well as voiced and voiceless consonants. In the system, tenseness is marked by colon following the vowel sign: a, a:, ai, au, e, e:, i, i:, iu:, o, o:, oi, u, u:, v, all corresponding to unique graphemes in the Bridges orthography. The consonants are b, d, ch, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, ng, p, r, s, sh, t, w, x, y, z, all corresponding to unique Bridges graphemes. Some are found only in restricted environments. The phonemes hm, hn, hl, hr, hw, and hy are used as well, and are digraphs in the earlier Bridges writings, but single graphemes in later ones.
Still later, Bridges made further orthographic modifications: w, h, and y became superscripts, and à is read as ya, á as ha, and ā as wa. Superscripts could combine to give hw, hy, etc. Because iu: could now be represented by u: plus y- superscript, and because the original graphemes for u: and u were easily confused with each other as well as with the now-superscripted w, Bridges began using the now-redundant grapheme for iu: for u: in his renderings. All of these changes took place in a very short time frame, and have led to substantial confusion on the part of later scholars.
In addition, Bridges' modifications of the 19th century phonetic alphabet of Alexander Ellis also included a number of signs meant for transliterations of foreign terms.
There are some ambiguities in Bridges' renderings. He himself notes that g/k, j/ch, d/t and p/f are, in many instances, interchangeable. In certain environments s and sh are hard to distinguish. The same goes for ai versus e: and au versus o:. Such ambiguities may go far to help explain the loss or lack of contrasts in the surviving dialect.

Pronunciation

Grammar

Syntax

Yahgan exhibits extensive case marking on nouns and equally extensive voice marking on verbs. Because of this, word order is relatively less important in determining subject and object relations. Most of the clauses in the three published biblical texts, the dictionary, and the various grammars show either verb medial or verb final orders. Certain clause types are verb initial, but are the distinct minority.
Further analysis of the biblical texts is showing that the Yahga dialect allowed for semantic reordering of constituents. For instance, if SVO is considered the default order for subject and object flanking the verb, then when O is left-shifted there is often a sense that the object nominal has more say in his/her patient-hood than if kept to the right of the verb. Similarly, when the subject is right-shifted its agent-hood appears often less than what one would expect. It will remain to be seen how pervasive this principle is in the language, and how intricately it interacts with Tense-Aspect-Mood and Polarity marking, topicalization, focus, etc.
The adverb kaia 'fast, quick' can be used lexically to modify predications, but in the three biblical texts it is also apparently used to mark the second component clause in 'if-then' types of constructions. There is no mention made of this in surviving grammars, nor in the dictionary glosses of kaia. The progressive verb suffix -gaiata may be related.