Questions tagged [american-languages]
The indigenous pre-Columbian languages of North, Central, and South America and their descendants.
14
questions
3
votes
1
answer
81
views
Derivation of Morpheme for "Raising" in NACLO Problem
The Problem
The Solution
Partial Explanation
chak appears in both (11) and (12), both of which are about catching. It doesn't appear anywhere else, so we can assume it is some form of "catching&...
- 5,029
0
votes
2
answers
200
views
Could the precursor to Pre-Proto-Quechua have been a monosyllabic tonal language?
So this has been intriguing me for years:
In 'Perspectives on the Quechua-Aymara Contact Relationship and the Lexicon and Phonology of Pre-Proto-Aymara', Nicholas Emlen mentions, citing Adelaar (1986) ...
- 83.3k
5
votes
2
answers
490
views
Have other language families been mapped like Proto-Indo-European has?
Are there Linguists that have or are currently working to reconstruct proto-languages other than PIE? Or to map the historical relationships between various African, Asian, Native American, or other ...
- 9,331
2
votes
1
answer
88
views
How dialectal/linguistic variation in Plains Indian Sign Language
Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL) was used as a lingua Franca in the Americas between tribes which didn’t have shared spoken languages.
But according to Wikipedia, PISL was spoken across most of a ...
- 18.6k
3
votes
0
answers
62
views
OCR for alaska native languges
I have a physical dictionary of a language that has very few speakers. I have scanned it and would like to OCR it as it is over 300 pages long. The problem is It has characters like ł and ŋ. I have ...
- 31
27
votes
2
answers
3k
views
Fourth person (in Slavey language)
I was reading a Wikipedia article about the Slavey (Slave) language in Canada, and it says that Slavey has first, second, third and fourth person. I've never heard about a language having a fourth ...
CommunityBot
- 1
0
votes
2
answers
141
views
Can Native Americans of different linguistic background still communicate using sign language?
Are they able to understand each other using gestures and symbols only? despite of their differences in language?
- 30.4k
10
votes
2
answers
733
views
Before being borrowed by Europeans, was "hurricane" ever pronounced with an initial "f"?
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, Spanish works about the New World in the 1500s wrote the word we spell in modern English as "hurricane" alternatively as "huracan" or "furacan". A ...
CommunityBot
- 1
4
votes
2
answers
49
views
What's a good resource where I can publish some narratives in a minority language?
During my fieldwork, I recorded, transcribed and translated a dozen or so narratives in an indigenous language of Central America, in close cooperation with a couple native speakers (including some ...
- 30.4k
12
votes
1
answer
411
views
What is the current understanding of the classification of indigenous American languages?
Inspired by this recent question on Greenberg's classification of African languages, I wonder about the current state of classification of the American languages. (By "American" I mean the indigenous ...
CommunityBot
- 1
2
votes
0
answers
1k
views
What is the origin and meaning of the word/name "Idora"? (Shortened)
I have been researching the word "Idora" for a couple years now in hopes of discovering the meaning as it applies to the defunct trolley park "Idora Park" formerly in Youngstown, Ohio.
"Idora Park" ...
- 29
3
votes
0
answers
108
views
Did any indigenous American languages have/develop a word for "Native American"?
Obviously the political landscape of the Americas was a hugely complex thing during the period of European colonization, and what was true of one Native American group was almost never true of all of ...
- 489
6
votes
2
answers
257
views
Corpora of Indigenous American Languages?
Does anyone know of any (preferably free) online corpora of indigenous American languages (anywhere on the American hemisphere)? I've managed to find corpora of many of the common world languages, but ...
- 1,157
23
votes
1
answer
2k
views
Is the Dené–Yeniseian hypothesis widely accepted, and has it led to further research?
In 2008 Edward Vajda presented his decade-long research into a connection between the Yeniseian languages of central Siberia (e.g. Ket, Yugh) and the American Na-Dené (Athabaskan–Eyak–Tlingit) family. ...
- 6,891