Gününa këna language

The language of the Gününa-Küne (sometimes called Puelche) (autoglottonym: gününa yajïč pronounced [gɨnɨn a jaxətʃ]/ or gününa iajëch) was spoken by the Gününa-küne (sometimes called Puelches), a nomadic people of present-day Patagonia Argentina and the Andean valleys of southern Chile.

From a phylogenetic point of view, it has not been possible to establish a completely clear relationship with any other family, which is why it is frequently considered as an isolated language, although it is conjectured that it could be related to the Chon languages spoken by neighboring groups, like the Tehuelches or Patagonians.

History

The gününa-këna (gennaken, puelche, pampa, chewelche, tehuelhet, gününa küne, chulila küne) especially occupied the banks of the great rivers of northern Patagonia, and spread through the territories to the north of Chubut up to the province of Río Negro, continuously entering what is currently the south and center of the interior of the Province of Buenos Aires and the southeast of the Province of La Pampa.

Near extinction as an ethnic group, they lived in isolated and dispersed communities, mainly in the middle and upper basin of the Negro River and the Limay. The southern limit would be the Senguerr river, only occasionally reached by the gününa-këna. To the east, they never reached the sea.

The geographical area of the gününa-këna was constantly reduced, after the time of the Jesuit missions in which they were abandoning the areas located to the north of the Negro river basin.

The last speakers disappeared around 1960. Some of their descendants live dedicated to raising goats in the center-north of the province of Chubut. In the 1950s Rodolfo Casamiquela collected a vocabulary, along with songs and sentences in this language, obtained from some Puelche elders, which is one of the bases of current knowledge of the language, along with various short vocabularies collected by European travelers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the vocabulary collected by the researcher Roberto Lehmann-Nitsche at the beginning of the XX century.

The Mapudungun spoken in the Somuncurá plateau (Río Negro and Chubut) has a Puelche background, since its speakers descend from Mapuchized Gününa-Këna. This substrate is evident in the pronunciation of some consonants and in a few lexical items.

Kinship

Although it has been said that the percentage of lexicon between modern Puelche and Tehuelche does not exceed 11%, there is grammatical and lexical evidence to support that Puelche is the only representative of a northern branch associated with the rest of the Chon languages. Casamiquela associates it with the Tehuelche languages, but other authors (such as Suárez) deny this. Viegas Barros provided some evidence in favor of the relationship, but the evidence is not conclusive.

In addition to the Chon groups, relationships with the languages of the supposed hets ("old pampas") have been proposed. For example, of the languages of the Querandí (who were perhaps Thomas Falkner's Taluhets) only two sentences and a few words recorded by French sailors around 1555 are known. Based on these scant data, Viegas Barros (1992) showed that the language of the Querandíes was closely related to that of the Gününa-Këna, since he was able to translate both phrases almost completely using the Tehuelche language. However, currents of opinion persist that follow the opinions written by previous researchers, who affirmed that little could be known - and they were sincere from their point of view. The gününa-këna themselves are the "tehuelhet" of Falkner.

Phonology

Vowels

The Puelche has seven vowels:

In the orthography normally used for the language /i/ is written <ü>, while /ə/ is written <ë>.

Consonants

The inventory of consonants is as follows:

The phonemes /ts/ and /t͡ʃ/, together with /tsʼ/ and /t͡ʃʼ/, are phonetically affricates, but phonologically they have a behavior and distribution comparable to plosives, because they are obstrutive not continuing.