Seri language
Seri is an indigenous language spoken by between 716 and 900 Seri people in Punta Chueca and El Desemboque, two villages on the coast of Sonora, Mexico. The language is generally considered an isolate, however, there have been attempts to include it in the theoretical Hokan language family. There is no concrete evidence for connections to other languages.
The earliest records of the Seri language are from 1692 but the population has remained fairly isolated. Extensive work on Seri began in 1951 by Edward and Mary Beck Moser with the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
The language is viable within its community and is used freely in daily life. Exceptions include primary and secondary school, some parts of local church services, and communications with Spanish speakers outside of the Seri community. Most members of the community, including youth, are fluent in their language. However, the population of speakers is small and cultural knowledge has been dwindling since the traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle was essentially replaced in the 1930s by fixed settlements. Furthermore, many children are no longer becoming fluent in the language, for a variety of reasons ; some children are completely monolingual in Spanish. For these reasons, Seri is listed as a vulnerable language by UNESCO.
Classification
Serian family is a language family with Seri as its only living member; related languages have disappeared in the last couple of centuries. Attempts have been made to link it to the Yuman family, to the now-extinct Salinan language of California, and to the much larger hypothetical Hokan family. These hypotheses came out of a period when attempts were being made to group all of the languages of the Americas into families. In the case of Seri, however, very little evidence has ever been produced. Until such evidence is presented and evaluated, the language is most appropriately considered an isolate.Name
The name Seri is an exonym for this people that has been used since the first contacts with the Spaniards. Gilg reported in 1692 that it was a Spanish name, but surely it was the name used by another group of the area to refer to the Seris. Nevertheless, modern claims that it is a Yaqui term that means something like "people of the sand" or an Opata term that means "people who run fast" are lacking in factual basis; no evidence has been presented for the former and no credible evidence has been presented for the latter.The name used within the Seri community itself, for the language, is Cmiique Iitom, which contrasts with Cocsar Iitom and Maricaana Iitom. The expression is a noun phrase that is literally " with which a Seri person speaks". The word Cmiique is the singular noun for "Seri person". The word iitom is the oblique nominalization of the intransitive verb caaitom, with the prefix i-, and the null prefix for the nominalizer with this class of root. Another similar expression that one hears occasionally for the language is Cmiique Iimx, which is a similar construction based on the transitive verb quimx .
The name chosen by the Seri committee for the name of the language used in the title of the recent dictionary was Comcaac quih Yaza, the plural version of Cmiique Iitom. It was appropriate for a project of that type although it is not a commonly used term. Comcaac is the plural form of Cmiique and yaza is the plural nominalized form corresponding to iitom. is the nominalizer; the prefix for third person possessor elides before the y. The word quih is a singular article.
The language was erroneously referred to as Kunkaak as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, and this mistake has been repeated up to the present day by people who confuse the name of an ethnic group with the name of its language. The lexeme Comcaac is used in the Seri language only to refer to the people.
Phonology
Vowels
is contrastive only in stressed syllables. The low front vowels are phonetically between open-mid and near-open and have also been transcribed as.The non-rounded vowels may be realized as diphthongs when followed by the labialized consonants, but this small phonetic detail is not written in the community-based writing system.
Consonants
occurs only in loanwords. occurs in loanwords and in a few native words, where it may alternate with depending on the word and the individual speaker. Other consonants may occur in recent loans, such as in hamiigo, and in hoova.The labial fricative may be labiodental for some speakers, and the postalveolar fricative may be retroflex.
and are prototypically dental.
In unstressed syllables, assimilates to the place of articulation of the following consonant. This assimilation may take place over word boundaries in connected speech. When is preceded by or, it becomes a nasalized approximant and the following vowel becomes nasalized, e.g. cmiique "person; Seri" is pronounced or. For some speakers, word-final may become at the end of a phrase or sentence, or when said in isolation. It can be documented, by careful examination of word lists collected in the nineteenth century, that some of these phonetic rules have arisen fairly recently.
Syllable structure
structure in Seri is fairly complex. Simple syllable onsets are most common, however, syllables without onsets can occur at the beginning of a word. The language generally allows up to three consonants to occur together at the beginning of a syllable, although consonants cannot be repeated. It is like English in this respect, which allows three-consonant combinations like spray and acts. Unlike English, however, the specific combinations that may occur are much less restricted. For example, English allows spr- but disallows *ptk-, which Seri allows, as in ptcamn,. Rarely, clusters of four consonants can occur: in cösxtamt,..., "there were many,..."; in ipoomjc x,... "if s/he brings it,...",.The nuclei of Seri syllables can include one, two, or three vowels. Long vowels are indicated by repetition. Vowel clusters may include 3 separate letters, as in the one syllable word kaoi. Syllables with complex nuclei must be stressed; otherwise, the stress generally occurs on the first syllable of a words root. Because of this, vowel clusters often occur in the initial syllable of a root.
Simple coda do exist, however, complex coda are more common. Word-medial coda may not include more than one consonant, while word-final coda may include up to three.
Affixes, which may consist of one or more consonants with no vowels, can be added before or after existing consonant clusters, thereby complicating pronunciation and syllabification. When necessary, empty vowel positions are inserted and often filled with a syllabic nasal or an "i" to aid in pronunciation.
Stress
is contrastive in Seri. Although it usually falls on the first syllable of a root, there are many words where it does not, mostly nouns, as well as a small class of common verbs whose stress may fall on a prefix rather than on the root. An alternative analysis, recently proposed and with fewer exceptions, assigns stress to the penultimate syllable of the root of a word. This rule is also sensitive to syllable weight. A heavy final syllable in the root attracts stress. A heavy syllable is one that has a long vowel or vowel cluster or a final consonant cluster.Consonants following a stressed syllable are lengthened, and vowels separated from a preceding stressed vowel by a single consonant are also lengthened so that cootaj is pronounced. Such allophonically lengthened vowels may be longer than the phonemically long vowels found in stressed syllables. The lengthening does not occur if the following consonant or vowel is part of a suffix if the stressed syllable consists of a long vowel and a short vowel, or if the stressed vowel is lengthened to indicate intensity. It also does not affect most loanwords.
Morphology
Verbs, nouns, and postpositions are inflected word categories in Seri.Nouns
Nouns inflect for plurality through suffixation. Compare noosi 'mourning dove' and noosi-lc 'mourning doves'. Pluralization is very complicated; for this reason, each noun is listed in the dictionary with its plural form. Some nouns ostensibly use an infix to indicate plural: caatc 'grasshopper', caatjc 'grasshoppers'. A few nouns have completely suppletive plural forms: cmiique 'Seri person', comcáac 'Seri people', ziix 'thing', xiica 'things'.Kinship terms and body part nouns inflect for possessors through prefixes. Compare ma-sáac 'your son' and mi-lít 'your head'. As they are obligatorily possessed nouns, a special prefix appears when no possessor is specified, and kinship terms sometimes have additional material at the end as well. Compare ha-sáac-at 'one's son', and ha-lít 'one's head'. Some nouns have an additional plural form to distinguish between singular and plural possessors: itoj 'his/her eye', itoj 'his/her eyes', itolcoj 'their eyes'.
Verbs
Finite verbs obligatorily inflect for number of the subject, person of the subject, direct object and indirect object and tense/mood. For subject person and number, compare ihpyopánzx 'I ran', inyopánzx 'you ran', yopanzx 'it ran, she ran, he ran', hayopáncojc 'we ran', mayopáncojc 'you ran', yopáncojc 'they ran'.For object person, compare ma hyooho 'I saw you ', mazi hyooho 'I saw you ', and ihyóoho 'I saw him/her/it/them'.
For indirect object, compare me hyacóhot 'I showed it to you ', cohyacóhot 'I showed it to him/her/them'.
The verb "tenses" divide between medial forms and final forms, irrealis and realis: popánzx ' it/she/he runs', tpanzx ' it/she/he ran', yopánzx 'it/she/he ran', impánzx 'it/she/he ran', spánxz aha 'it/she/he will run'.
A verb may also be negative and/or passive.
A transitive verb may be detransitivized through a morphological operation, and causative verbs may be formed morphologically.
Postpositions and relational preverbs
The postpositions of Seri inflect for the person of their complement: hiti 'on me', miti 'on you', iti 'on her/him/it'. Most of the words that have been called postpositions at one time are actually relational preverbs; they must occur in a position immediately before the verbal complex and are commonly not adjacent to their semantic complements. Some of these have suppletive stems to indicate a plural complement; compare miihax 'with you ' and miicot 'with you '.Grammar
The Seri language is a head-final language. The verb typically occurs at the end of a clause, and main clauses typically follow dependent clauses. The possessor precedes the possessum. The language does not have many true adjectives; adjective-like verbs follow the head noun in the same kind of construction and with the same kind of morphology as verbs in the language. The words that correspond to prepositions in languages like English are usually constrained to appear before the verb; in noun phrases they appear following their complement.Articles
Seri has several articles, which follow the noun.The singular indefinite article is zo before consonants, and z before vowels. The plural indefinite article is pac.
There are several different definite articles, depending on the position and movement of the object:
- Quij and coxalca are used with seated objects.
- Cap/cop and coyolca are used with standing objects. Cap and cop are dialectal variants.
- Com and coitoj are used with objects lying down.
- Hipmoca and hizmocat are used with close, approaching objects.
- Hipintica and hipinticat are used with close objects going away.
- Timoca and tamocat is used with distant, approaching objects.
- Tintica, tanticat, himintica, and himinticat are used with distant objects going away.
- Hac are used with locations and verbal nouns. Hac is pronounced after vowels and after consonants.
- Quih and coi are unspecified. Quih is pronounced before consonants, before vowels, and at the end of an utterance.
Demonstratives
Four simple demonstrative pronouns occur, plus a large set of compound demonstrative adjectives and pronouns. The simple demonstratives are tiix, taax, hipíix, and hizáax.The compound demonstratives are formed by added a deictic element to an article. Examples include himcop, ticop, hipcop, himquij, himcom, etc. These compound demonstratives may be used either as adjectives or as pronouns.
Personal Pronouns
Two personal nonreflexive pronouns are in common use: he and me. These pronouns may have singular or plural referents; the difference in number is indicated in the verb stem. The reflexive pronouns are hisoj "myself", misoj "yourself", isoj "herself, himself, itself", hisolca "ourselves", misolca "yourselves" and isolca "themselves".Lexicon
The Seri language has a rich basic lexicon. The usefulness of the lexicon is multiplied many times over by the use of idiomatic expressions. The expression for 'I am angry' is hiisax cheemt iha, literally 'my.spirit stinks ', for example.Seri has a small number of loanwords, most ultimately from Spanish, but also from other languages such as O'odham.
Many ideas are expressed not with single words, but with fixed expressions consisting of several words. For example, "newspaper" is hapaspoj cmatsj, "compass" is ziix hant iic iihca quiya, and "radio" is ziix haa tiij coos. This kind of phrase formation is deeply ingrained in the lexicon; it has been used in the past to create new terms for lexical items that became taboo due to the death of a person whose nickname was based on that word.
Writing system
Seri is written in the Latin script.| A a | C c | Cö cö | E e | F f | H h | I i | J j | Jö jö | L l | M m |
| N n | O o | P p | Qu qu | R r | S s | T t | X x | Xö xö | Y y | Z z |
represents before the vowels e and i, while c is used elsewhere, as in Spanish. Long vowels are indicated by doubling the vowel letter. The voiced lateral is indicated by placing an underline under, i.e.. Stress is generally not indicated, but can be marked by placing an acute accent over the stressed vowel. The representation of the rounded back consonants using a digraph which includes o-dieresis serves to visually unite morphemes that have allomorphs containing the full vowel o, the historical source of the rounded consonants. Example: xeecoj , xeecöl .
The letters B, D, G, Gü, and V occur in some loanwords.
The Seri alphabet was developed in the 1950s by Edward W. and Mary B. Moser, and later revised by a committee of Seri men and women working with Stephen Marlett. In particular:
- The rounded velar stop was written both and, but is now only written.
- The diphthongs were written respectively, but are now considered to be allophones of before rounded consonants, e.g. Tahéojc → Tahejöc.
- The velar nasal was written, but is now considered an allophone of and written, e.g. congcáac → comcaac.
- Nasalized vowels were marked with an underline, but are now considered allophones occurring after, e.g. cuá̱am → cmaam.
- Lengthening of vowels and consonants that follow a stressed syllable were written double, but are now considered allophonic, e.g. hóoppaatj → hóopatj. Long vowels and consonants in other situations are still written double.
- Word boundaries sometimes changed, with clitics being often originally written solid with the adjacent words, but now written separately.
Literature
The Constitution of Mexico has been translated in its entirety into the Seri language by the Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas. The official name of the Constitution in Seri is Icaaitom Caaixaj Quipac Coha Hapaspoj Caacoj Quih Iti Hant Coii Hant Iij Cacloj Com Oaanloj Coi.