Purépecha language

The purépecha (autoglottony: pꞌurhepecha; IPA: [ pʰuˈɽepet͜ʃa]), Tarascan or Michoacano is a language spoken by members of the Purépecha people of western Mexico, mainly in the state of Michoacán. It presents many linguistic characteristics that make it seem like a singular language, very different from other languages of Mesoamerica.

In fact, the Purépecha language has been classified as an isolated language, since up to now it has not been possible to establish any relationship of common origin with any of the languages that were spoken, or are spoken, in Mexico or another country, although Morris Swadesh, suggested some remote lexical similarity with other languages of America. This proposal has not been widely accepted among specialists in these other languages.

Purépecha is one of the most vital indigenous languages of Mexico. It is divided into three dialectal variants: that of the lacustrine region, the central and the mountain (some include a fourth, that of the Ciénaga). According to figures from the XII General Population and Housing Census of 2000, there are some 121,409 speakers settled in 22 municipalities and 25% of them are monolingual in Purépecha and the rest bilingual in Spanish. Currently, 56 languages are spoken throughout the Mexican territory. Official statistics (INEGI 2020) indicate that 38 indigenous languages are spoken in the state of Michoacán.

Its boom picked up from 1895, the year from which a support movement began through the Academy of the Purépecha Language (Pꞌurhe Uandakueri Juramukua) through which the strengthening and diffusion of this language. Purépecha is currently a literary language due to the great diffusion that the Regional Story Contests in Indigenous Languages have had, coordinated by the General Directorate of Popular and Indigenous Cultures and the states of Hidalgo, Querétaro, Michoacán and Mexico, which have also strengthened the literary character of the Nahuatl, Otomi and Mazahua languages.

Classification

Purépecha is usually considered an isolated Mesoamerican language. IPA or IPA)" class="IPA">r/ and the retroflex /ɽ/. Of the five typical features of the Mesoamerican linguistic area, the Purépecha unquestionably only possesses one, the vigesimal numeral system.

However, Greenberg considers that this language is somewhat related to Chibcha, although this idea is rejected by most linguists specializing in American languages, such as Campbell, who considers it a language isolate.

Geographic distribution

Current distribution of p.urhepecha in the state of Michoacán.

Purépecha is spoken mainly in the western and central part of the state, mainly in the area between Lake Pátzcuaro and the mountains to the west of the state, known as the Tarascan Plateau. The territory encompasses 22 municipalities of the state of Michoacán, which together occupy an area of 8,370 km², which represents 14% of the surface of the state, of which 14 have a significant proportion of speakers of the language. These are: Chilchota, Charapan, Nahuatzen, Paracho, Tangamandapio, Cherán, Quiroga, Erongaricuaro, Coeneo, Los Reyes, Tzintzuntzan, Tingambato, Pátzcuaro and Uruapan.

In Morelia it is only spoken by migrants from these regions, since it is not a mother tongue of that city. Most of these migrants are students at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, which has this language in its language department.

The center of the ancient Tarascan Empire was around Lake Pátzcuaro, which is still an important center of the Purépecha community. This kingdom included almost the entire state of Michoacán and considerable parts of Guanajuato and Guerrero, as well as portions of the states of Mexico, Querétaro, and Jalisco.

Variants

Traditionally, four geographical varieties or dialects are recognized: that of the Meseta or Sierra, that of the lake area, that of La Cañada and that of the Ciénaga. The Meseta region concentrates approximately 62% of the speakers, and in fact it was until the 1980s the least communicated area of the territory. The lake area concentrates 17.8% of the speakers, the Cañada or Region of the Eleven Towns 14.7%, and the Ciénaga only 5.2%.

Ethnologue distinguishes two varieties: the central dialect spoken by approximately 120,000 people (1990) around Pátzcuaro and the western highland dialect spoken in the vicinity of Zamora, Los Reyes de Salgado, Paracho, and Pamatácuaro, all of them in the vicinity of the Paricutín volcano.

Use

Book of prayer in the language of J. J. Apolonio Maya dated 1849

It is one of the languages most widely used by the ethnic group that supports it as part of its identity and is one of the few indigenous languages that has come to have its own language academy. However, it is a language that is experiencing a gradual contraction and in some towns it has been reduced to a minimum and in one or two generations it will be completely lost if the current process of abandonment of the language continues.

Official Status

This language, along with all the indigenous languages of Mexico and Spanish, were recognized as "national languages" due to the General Law of Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples promulgated and published in 2003.

Normalization

Purépecha began to be written in the XVI century, when the language friars adapted the Latin spellings for it. Attempts at modern standardization date back to the Tarasco Project (1939), when some orthographic proposals began to be discussed. Currently there is still no consensus on this issue, although the standard proposed by the Academia de la Lengua Purépecha and the proposal of the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) have some weight. The latter is the one used by the General Directorate of Indigenous Education for school books.

Phonology

The following tables show the Purépecha phonemes with their main allophones. The vowel inventory is made up of the following units:

	Previous	Central	Poster
Closed	i		u
Media	e		or
Open		a

The two middle vowels /e, o/ are rare, in fact /o/ is quite unusual. For its part, the consonantal inventory is made up of:

		Bilabial	Alveolar	Postalveolar o Palatal o Retrofleja	Velar	Labiovelar
Occlusive	Simple.	(b)	(d)		(g)	kw (gw)
	vacuum	ph (p)	th (t)		kh (k)	kwh (gwh)
Africada	Simple.		t)s ())	())
	vacuum		t)sh ())	())
Fridge			s (z)	MIN	x
Nasal		m	n		Русский
Gothic			♥
Approximately				j		w

Grammar

Morphologically, Purépecha makes extensive use of inflection and has a complex morphology. From a typological point of view, it is an agglutinative language in which words show a clear limit and are easily segmented into morphemes, generally existing a univocal correspondence between morpheme and function that it performs as in:

(1a) arhani /a- a-ni/ (comer-MED-INF"comer"

(1b) akukwarheni /a-ku-k^wa e-ni/ (comer-ACT-REFL-INF"comer (from what cultivates oneself)

(1c) akukuni /a-ku-k^wa e-ni/ (comer-ACT-3OBJ-INF"comer (from what cultivates oneself)

One of the most productive subsystems within the Purépecha language is that of classifiers or body locatives. Body locatives are in some cases lexical units and in other cases grammatical particles. Their function is interesting, since they delimit and name objects that do not necessarily have to do directly with the human body, however, they are provided with arms, legs, mouth, head, etc. They also refer to the part of the body that receives or exerts the action of a verb.

Some examples of body locative:

(2) kachuk mauraspka ma tsakapu

'I cut my hand with a stone'

The verb “cut your hand” exists as such, where you can identify the particle kꞌu, which refers to the palm of the hand. We also see that in this case there is only juxtaposition and the instrumental jimbo (“with”) is omitted, which would have to go right after tsakapu (“stone”).

(3) misitu uarhime itsïrhu

'The cat fell into the water.'

Here we observe that the verb uarhini is added with the particle me, referring not precisely to a part of the human body, but to liquids, that is; to things that are generally related to water. Even with this locative present in the verb, the idea of water is reiterated with the word itsï, added with the locative rhu, whose literal meaning is “in”.

(4) putimukupti mari sapini

'I kissed a girl.'

The verb “to caress” is putini, so putimukuni is something like caressing with the mouth. It is precisely to the mouth that the particle mu refers, which is totally inserted in the morphology of the verb. The rest of the sentence is somewhat routine, a noun added with an application case.

Purepecha is a language endowed with a morphological case. Certain historical developments have been detected since the 16th century, the date the language was first documented. For example, the marking of certain cases by clitics or postpositions is giving way to genuine case markings, which are added to cases already present in the century XVI. Purépecha is an exclusively suffix language, Swadesh identified up to 150 suffixes.

Syntax

The morphosyntactic alignment is of the nominative-accusative type with the subject without explicit mark (zero morph) and the object (indirect or direct) marked with -ni:

(5th) akwarhentukutireni Pedro [Clears of the CenturyXVI]

/ak^wrhe-ntu-ku-ti-haraeni pedro/

(herir-pie-CAUS-3.aIND-1.aOBJ Pedro) 'Pedro hurt me (in the foot)'

(5b) axaska Pedroand P Paskwarho [P delurhépecha del siglo]XVI]

/ašá-s-ka Pedro-ni P-ask^wAnchor

(send)PF-1.aIND Peter...OBJI sent Peter to Pátzcuaro.

(5c) Pedru uiríaspti [P modernourhépecha moderna]

/Pedru uirí-as-p-ti/

(Peter running)PF-PRT-3.aIND"Pedro ran."

(5d) Juanu atasptini Pédruand [P modernourhépecha moderna]

/Xuanu atá-s-p-ti-ni Pédru-ni/

(John running)PF-PRT-3.aIND Pédru-OBJ"John beat Peter."

The syntactic order is clearly one, in which the subject precedes the verb (there is some further discussion as to whether SOV or SVO is more basic), for example:

(6th) Juchá jatsiska kutáá

/xučá xací-s-ka kut/á/

1PER.PL. have-PAS-1IND house

'We have a house.'

(6b) juchá kut jaá jatsiska jiní juatárhu

/xučá kut-á xací-s-ka xiní xuatá-errau/

1PER.PL. home have-PAS-1IND Over there.LOC

'We have a house there in the hill'

Nominal bending

The nominal inflection in Purépecha includes number and case (there are no grammatical gender differences). The number category distinguishes between plural and non-plural, the plural being marked with -echa or -cha (the former in forms whose singular form ends in /u/ or /a/ (this is elided in the plural), while the other form appears after forms ending in /i, ɨ, e/ in the singular), some examples:

Singular	Plural
wíchu 'the dog'	wíchu-echa 'the dogs'
acháti 'The Lord'	acháti-cha 'the lords'
warhíti 'the woman'	warhíti-cha 'Women'

Case inflection distinguishes the following cases:

nomination	-ø
objective	-ni
genitive	-iri
crazy, temporary	-rhu
residential	-
temporary	-nkuni
instrumental, locative, residential, temporary, agent, recipient, cause	- Mm-hmm.

The commitative and instrumental cases are not actually cases, since they are postpositions written after the noun, not affixes.

Lexicon and cosmogony

• Kurhikuaeri 'The Burner' or Curicaveri. the greatest creator of the universe, father of Tata Jurhiata and Nana Kutsï,
• Tata Jurhiata 'Lord/Father Sun'. God of the sun and day, brother and husband of Kutsï
• Nana Kutsï 'Mother/Mother Moon'. Goddess of the moon and night, sister and wife of Jurhiata
• Nana Kueuerajpiri 'Madre Creator' or Nana Cueráperi 'Mother nature'. Daughter of Jurhiata and Kutsï. He gave birth to the four elements: land, water, air and fire, of a second birth were born all the plants and all the existing flora, of a third birth were born all the animals with movement and instinct but without reason, who populated all the land, in the fourth birth, men and women arose, to whom he gave Mitikua or 'Knowing to distinguish between the good and the bad', and also gave them the sound so that they would turn it into Uandakua or 'Palabra', and so you can communicate with your brothers of other races.