Wiktionary:About Ye'kwana

This page deals with the specific issues of Ye’kwana entries on Wiktionary. For language-independent guidelines for entries see Entry layout explained.

Dialects
There are a number of different dialects of Ye’kwana, sometimes identified as separate languages in their own right. All retain a high level of mutual intelligibility with each other.

Traditionally four variants have been identified: Ye’kwana in the narrow sense in the northeast, along the and  Rivers; De’kwana in the west, along the middle and lower ; Ihuruana in the center, at the sources of the Caura, Ventuari, and other rivers; and Kunuana in the southwest, along the. In practice there is disagreement as to what exactly these terms refer to. Some recent research suggests that what were referred to as Kunuana and De’kwana may represent a single dialect, as also Ihuruana and Ye’kwana (in the narrow sense). However, it is clear that there is also linguistic variation within each of these groups, as well as in other areas such as the Ye’kwana settlements in Brazil.

Terminology can be confusing, as speakers see the term Ye’kwana/De’kwana as applying to all Ye’kwana, regardless of which dialectal variant of the term they use, while linguists also use these terms to refer to individual dialects, as mentioned above. In this latter usage, dialects that have a separate phoneme /ð/ or /d/ may be termed Dhe’kwana or De’kwana, while those that keep this phoneme merged with /j/ may be termed Ye’kwana. Such usage should not be confused with the common use of these terms to refer to the language as a whole. Cautious use of sources is advised. In order to avoid confusion, in this article we will speak of /j/-dialects, /ð/-dialects, and /d/-dialects when referring to the isogloss in question.

Current practice on Wiktionary broadly labels Ye’kwana dialects according to the river basin where their data was recorded. Thus, the data recorded by Natalia Cáceres reflects a dialect spoken along the Caura River (a /j/-dialect), whereas the data recorded by Katherine Hall reflects a dialect spoken along the Cunucunuma River (a /d/-dialect). The dialect spoken along the Auari River (a /ð/-dialect) is simply labelled ‘Brazil’, since the part of the river basin inhabited by the Ye’kwana corresponds to the Brazilian part of their territory. This convention sidesteps the terminological ambiguity alluded to above.

Orthography
Ye’kwana has used several different systems of transcription in the past. Historically, the two main systems in use were one propagated by the New Tribes Mission and still used in some areas of Venezuela, and one later devised in the 1970s according to the Venezuelan Indigenous Languages Alphabet (ALIV) conventions. A third system has come into official use in Brazil. Various other systems also remain inconsistently in use among linguists. The transcription system used at Wiktionary, essentially following the modification of the ALIV conventions given in Cáceres’s Functional-Typological Grammar of Maquiritari, is given below.

Vowels can be long phonemically, but they can also become long due to stress considerations. Some orthographies represent the latter as long, others as short. On Wiktionary the main lemma forms represent only phonemic vowel length.

Syllable-final /w/ and /j/ (represented by ⟨u⟩ and ⟨i⟩, respectively) are in free variation with a pronunciation where the semivowel drops out and the following consonant is geminated and either labialized or palatalized, respectively; with certain consonants, this gemination can further be realized as a glottal stop followed by the original consonant. Thus, a word like can be realized as anything from [ajt͡ʃuɾ̠i] to [att͡ʃuɾ̠i] to [aʔt͡ʃuɾ̠i]. Such sequences of sounds should be rendered with syllable-final ⟨u⟩ or ⟨i⟩, regardless of how they are realized by any particular speaker. Thus, the word is lemmatized at and not  or. Similarly, the Cunucunuma River dialect sequence of sounds in free variation /wɾ̠/ ~ [wɾ̠ʷ] ~ [ɾ̠w] (always /ɾ̠ɾ̠/ in Caura River dialects) should be lemmatized as.

Certain regular synchronic changes such as the vowel harmony assimilations [ə] > [o] and [ɨ] > [u] are ignored in the orthography, but sound changes which can not be accounted for synchronically are always represented.