Wiktionary:About Kari'na

This page explains considerations for Kari'na entries that are not covered by Entry layout explained and other general policies.

The Kari'na or Carib language (also known by many other names: see Category:Kari'na language; natively ) is an Amerindian language of the Cariban family spoken in Brazil, French Guiana, Guyana, Suriname, and Venezuela by some 7000 people.

Dialects
Kari'na can be subdivided into a number of mutually intelligible dialects. Four main dialects (or dialect groups) have been identified: Venezuelan, Guyanese, West Surinamese, and East Surinamese, with the latter category also including the Kari'na spoken in neighboring French Guiana. All varieties but that of East Suriname seem to be dying off and are, by and large, no longer spoken by young people. Wiktionary uses a cross-dialectal orthography (as devised by Hendrik Courtz) to represent Kari'na words. Where terms differ between dialects in a more-than-superficial way, the East Surinamese form should usually constitute the main entry, with other dialectal variants made into alternative-form entries as appropriate.

Terms and senses limited to specific dialects should be labelled appropriately, with labels such as,  ,  , and   added to the start of the definition line. Terms appearing in both West and East Surinamese but not other dialects may be labelled simply.

Orthography
There are a number of Kari'na alphabets in use in different countries. The cross-dialectal alphabet developed by Hendrik Courtz and used at Wiktionary consists of 15 letters: a, e, i, j, k, `, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u, w, and y. A grave accent is used for a plosive archiphoneme. Foreign loanwords and interjections may additionally feature the letters b, d, f, g, and the digraph sj, which are otherwise unused.

A comparison of the different official writing systems, together with Courtz’s transcription system as used at Wiktionary, is given below.

parameter to templates such as, as the alt parameter to (when adding translations), or as the second unnamed parameter to  (when linking to specific entries in various lists) and  (when mentioning Kari'na words). When a vowel would take both a grave accent and an acute simultaneously, both accents are replaced by a circumflex.

Parts of speech
Kari'na, like other Cariban languages, makes no distinctions between adjectives and adverbs. In keeping with our treatment of other languages in the Cariban family (and that of most linguists working with the family, but notably not Courtz’s grammar), we conventionally treat these words as adverbs.

Resources

 * Category:Kari'na reference templates
 * Galibi (True Carib)
 * Ka'lina (Carib) vocabulary list as recipient language (from the World Loanword Database)
 * Carib vocabulary list as donor language (from the World Loanword Database)
 * Entry for Carib at the Rosetta Project
 * Audio resources from the MPI-PL archive for linguistic resources, which origin from data collected by dr. Berend Hoff in the period 1955-1965
 * How to count in Kali’na
 * Entry for Carib at the Rosetta Project
 * Audio resources from the MPI-PL archive for linguistic resources, which origin from data collected by dr. Berend Hoff in the period 1955-1965
 * How to count in Kali’na