Huarpean Languages
The Huarpean languages are a small family documented in the 17th century around what is today the province of Cuyo, Argentina.
Allentiac
Language Family: Huarpe.
ISO 639-3: haus1240
Glottolog: alle1238
Status: dormant
Allentiac, also known as Huarpe, is a dormant language formerly spoken in the Cuyo region of Argentina, specifically in the provinces of Mendoza, San Juan, and San Luis. Together with Millcayac, it constitutes the Huarpean language family.
Our knowledge of Allentiac is based primarily on the work of the Jesuit missionary Luis de Valdivia, who produced a catechism, a grammar, and a short word list (1894 [1607]; see also Mitre 1909–10).
On the basis of de Valdivia’s materials, Viegas Barros (2007: 3) proposes a tentative reconstruction of the Allentiac sound system. He explicitly acknowledges both the scarcity of the available data and the uncertainty surrounding the phonetic interpretation of de Valdivia’s orthography. Table 1 presents Viegas Barros’s proposal. Symbols in angle brackets (< >) represent de Valdivia’s original orthography, while symbols in square brackets ([ ]) reflect Viegas Barros’s phonological interpretation. It should be noted, however, that the interpretation of de Valdivia’s spelling, particularly with respect to the fricatives [s] and [ʃ], remains disputed (see Adelaar & Muysken 2004: 545; Viegas Barros 2007: 6).
Table 1: Tentative consonants in Allentiac (Viegas Barros 2007, 5)
| Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Pharyngeal -glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive | <p> [p]<b> [b] | <t> [t] | <c>, <qu>, <q> [k] | |||
| Nasal | <m> [m] | <n> [n] | <ñ> [ɲ] | <g> [ŋ] (sometimes also [g]) | ||
| Affricate | <zh> [ts] | <ch> [tʃ] | ||||
| Fricative | <z> [s], <s> [s, ʃ], <x> [ʃ] | <h> (either [h] or [ʔ]) | ||||
| Lateral | <l> [l] | <ll> [ly] | ||||
| Rhotic | <r> [r] | |||||
| Glide | <hu>, <gu>, <v> [w] | <i>, <y> [y] |
The tentative phonotization of vowels is presented in Table 2.
Table 2: Tentative vowels in Allentiac (Viegas Barros 2007, 9-10)
| Height | Front | Central | Back |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | <i>, <y> [i] | <ù>, <ú> [ï] | <u>, <v> [u] |
| Mid | <e> [e] | <o> [o] | |
| Low | <a> [a] |
References
- Adelaar, Willem & Peter Muysken. (2004). The languages of the Andes. Cambridge University Press.
- Mitre, Bartolomé .(1909–10). Catálogo razonado de la sección Lenguas Americanas, 3 vols. Buenos Aires: Museo Mitre.
- de Valdivia, Luis. (1894 [1607]). Doctrina Cristiana y catecismo con un confesionario, Arte y vocabulario breves en lengua allentiac, ed. José Toribio Medina. Sevilla: E. Rasco.
- Viegas Barros, J. Pedro (2007): Una propuesta de fonetización y fonemización tentativas de las hablas huarpes. Available here.
Millcayac
Glottolog: mill1237
Language Family: Huarpe.
Status: Dormant
Millcayac is a Huarpean language formerly spoken around the Cuyo region, Argentina. There is a grammar, a confessional and a vocabulary written by the Jesuit Luis de Valdivia in the 17th century (cf. Cancina 2017).
References
- Cancino, Nataly (2017). «Los tratados millcayac y allentiac (1607) de Luis de Valdivia. Noticia de un hallazgo bibliográfico». Onomázein (Facultad de Letras. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) (31): 112-143.
- Valdivia, Luis de. 1607. In Schuller, Rodolfo, 1913. Discovery of a fragment of the printed copy of the work on the Millcayac language by Luis de Valdivia. In Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol III, Nº2. Cambridge, Mass.