Talk:Arawakan languages

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Classification is after Aikhenvald 1999, The Amazonian Languages. --kwami

Classification of Arawakan languages

Lets drop both Aikhenvald and the Ethnologue without arguing about which is better and use the classification in David L. Payne "A Classification of Maipuran (Arawakan) Languages Based on Shared Lexical Retentions" in Desmond C. Derbyshire and Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds) "Handbook of Amazonian Languages" Mouton de Gruyter 1991, Vol. 3, 355-499, especially page 364.

It is even longer than the Ethnologue, but I will type it in if everybody agrees that it can replace both earlier classifications.

Incidently, I don't agree with Payne on all details. For example, he has not recognized that Baniva-Yavitero is closely related to Maipure. But I promise not to change the classification, although I may add some comments.

Kleinecke

Sounds good to me. Maybe a comment that Payne based his classification on lexical retentions, which really don't tell us very much. But, if I understand correctly, at least it's not an areal grouping like Aikhenvald. kwami 04:53, 2005 May 7 (UTC)

P.S. If you have reasonably good evidence for your claims, I wouldn't mind you modifying the classification – or perhaps you could add a separate table of what you believe to be shortcomings.

hi. i put Kaufman 1994's classification up at Maipurean. Kaufman based it on Payne and Mary Wise's work and also writes that the classification benefited from conversations with Payne. Campbell 1997 includes Kaufman's classification because it included many languages that were not considered by Payne & he says that Payne 1992 (encyclopedia article) is similar to Kaufman. peace – ishwar  (speak) 00:01, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

TAINOSPAN???

This article claims that descendants of Taino people speak a variant of the Taino language called Tainospan. This is complete and utter nonsense! As a matter of fact try googling tainospan; the only pages that will show are this article because "tainospan" was something made up and is probably the result of vandalism to this page. I was born in the Puerto Rico (one of the places where the Taino people lived) and I have traveled in the Caribbean and I can assure there isn't a language called "Tainospan". The Spanish spoken in the Caribbean is peppered with a few Taino words but it is Spanish (grammatically and phonetically).

Munichi?

It was David Payne that suggested that Munichi may have some correspondence with Arawakan, but he obviously didn't feel strongly enough to list it. May be an Arawakanist could have a look and come to a more secure conclusion?

--Drmaik 16:46, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Minor Changes

The island carib language is not closely related to Achagua. It is in the Caribbean family of Arawakan languages along with Taino, Arawak, Wayuu, Garifuna and Paraujano, so I have taken out that sentence. Also (Island) Caribs live in St. Lucia and St. Vincent also. Please do not write us off. We still exist! Kalinagowoman 05:45, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Do any still speak the language? 66.27.205.12 11:56, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Arawak, Wayuu, and Garifuna are still spoken. The ethnologue states that Paraujano is extinct but i'm sure those 20 speakers that it counted in 2004 are still living. It doesn't seem like it's being passed on so it's moribund. Taino and Island Carib or Karifuna, are extinct though there is a revival project for the Karifuna (Island Carib) language.Kalinagowoman 21:50, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Hurricane

Hi, I'm visiting from Mayan languages. I was wondering if anyone here could speak to - preferably with sources - the etymology of the word "Hurricane"? Mayan sources frequently give the Mayan storm god Jun Raqan as the original source, which has a plausible etymology (one leg, or maybe "the unique one") in Mayan (see the discussion here: Talk:Huracan#Verification). Obviously the word was shared between Mayan and Arawak pre-conquest. Is there good reason to believe that Arawak was the original source? (Aside from the speculation that Arawak islander populations would probably assign more importance to, and thus be less likely to borrow a word for, the phenomenon itself.) You can respond here, but it would be even better to also do so over at Talk:Mayan languages. Thanks, --Homunq 22:16, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

North America Arawak connection?

I am unable to determine the relevance of the reference to North America in the second INTRO paragraph (there are no links for additional information on this).

Could someone please correct this in one way or another?

Victorsteelballs (talk) 14:11, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

<Arawakan vs Maipurean> link or section missing

There is a link referencing this, but it goes nowhere since there is no such section.

Could someone please correct this by providing the missing section, deleting the link, or directing the link to a section in another article?

Victorsteelballs (talk) 14:15, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Conflicting numbers

In the "Geographic Distribution" section, there is also a discussion of current speakers of the languages. In one paragraph, it says there are an estimated 590,000 speakers of Garifuna. In the next, it says there are 100,000 speakers of Garifuna. Neither statements are cited.Parkwells (talk) 21:47, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

Arawakan language tree

Hi all, the Arawakan language tree is pretty outdated (19 years to be exact), so I've been working on a new one based on Walker et al. (2011) and Carling et al. (2013), Template:Arawakan languages. I don't know what to call some of the clusters, since the papers don't name them, but I tried to go with names used in previous papers. Please let me know what you think. --Victar (talk) 17:26, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

• Walker et al. (2011) is not based on "actual" historical linguistics, but is rather more of an automatically generated tree. On the other hand, Payne's methodology is quite sound. — Stevey7788 (talk) 19:42, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

If you read Carling et al, you'll see they've used a mixture of many methods, including geographical and computational phylogeny. --Victar (talk) 20:30, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Also, if you look my work, you'll see I've been pretty diligent at citing each reconstructed branch, Payne cited most of all. --Victar (talk) 20:33, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

As Victar pointed out, it is not ours to judge whether a cited work is sound or not. According to the Wikipedia policies, we need a Neutral Point of View and all the proposed classifications of Arawakan languages, terminology, features and so on should be cited in this article, without preferring one other the others. --SynConlanger (talk) 11:30, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

Can't find sources on Cabiai

I'm trying to get rid of red links but I'm struggling with Cabiai. The only source on Cabiai that I can find is https://anthropology.missouri.edu/sites/default/files/WalkerRibeiro11.pdf. Even then it is only mentioned once and it is in a tree. Can anyone find anything? Do we even think this language deserves its own article? Gdog1102 (talk) 16:51, 21 March 2017 (UTC)