Yvlipkan language
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| Yvlipkan language | |
|---|---|
| Native to |  Oroshia |
| Ethnicity | Yvlipka people |
Native speakers | 3,000? (2010) |
Gujino-Bintani
| |
Early form | |
| Sabarian | |
| Official status | |
Official language in | Oroshia |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | yv |
| ISO 639-2 | yvl |
| ISO 639-3 | yvl |
 Map of regions where a majority (dark blue) and a minority (light blue) are native speakers of Yvlipkan. | |
Yvlipkan (fsəpkənò, pronounced: [fsəpkəˈnɔ]; Oroshan: əvłəpkavi) is a Gujino-Bintani language spoken in the north of Surucia, in the western lowlands of Oroshia and further west. Along with Oroshan, it forms the Coast Gujin languages. It is a severely under-documented language, and it is thought that census counts for speakers of Yvlipkan are deliberately under-reported in Oroshia. Recent censuses would put the number of speakers at around 3000, but it is estimated that the true figure is something like 15,000 native speakers. It has long been considered a dialect of Oroshan, despite the lack of intelligibility with it, by the Oroshan government.
Speakers of Yvlipkan are hypothesized to have migrated from the west as tribes of reindeer herders, along with the rest of the Gujino-Bintani family, some languages of which remain those of nomadic pastoralists. The Yvlipkan language has been threatened by Jogin encroachment ever since the colonization of Oroshia, and, since independence, the restrictive minority language policies of the Oroshan government. Much of what is known about Yvlipkan is due to the work of one Baptistois linguist, Théodore Lozé, who worked on documenting the language in the late 1970s.
Phonology
Yvlipkan seems to have innovated greatly phonologically from the reconstructed earlier stages of the language, shared with Oroshan, producing a contrastive voiced series of consonants.
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ŋ | |||
| Plosive | p b | t d | k g | q (ɢ?) | ʔ | |
| Fricative | f | θ s | ɣ | |||
| Affricate | ts dz | tʃ dʒ | ||||
| Lateral affricate | tɬ dɮ | |||||
| Approximant | w | j |
Like Oroshan, Yvlipkan makes use of a productive glottal infix, arising from an earlier posited glottal suffix. Syllables carry two qualities: glottalized and unglottalized, where the glottalized syllable can mark the past tense, or the plural form of a noun.
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | u | |
| Mid | e | ə | o |
| Open | a | ɔ |
Originally, /q/ may have only caused lowering of close vowels, but it seems that /q/ has shifted to /ɣ/ before vowels, leaving them lowered, and creating two new phonemes, /e/ and /o/. This phenomenon is also seen in some dialects of Oroshan and Namchogi.
A maximum syllable structure, presented by Lozé in 1977, is CCVCNCC, and allows for many clusters. Stress is invariably on the last syllable, and /a/ is only found in that final syllable.
Grammar
Nouns in Yvlipkan have three numbers: singular, dual, and plural, and decline for 3 cases: absolutive, ergative, and genitive, making Yvlipkan an ergative-absolutive language.
Verbs decline for tense, past and non-past, and are marked for person, and therefore case. Unconjugated verbs function as a true adjective, which seems to be an innovation compared to related languages, though they are grouped functionally with adverbs and adpositions in that they do not conjugate (or else they will become a verb) or decline.
Adpositions are used in Yvlipkan to indicate location or movement, and coordinate with the genitive case on the head noun. Yvlipkan is a strongly head-final language, with SOV word order.
Orthography
Though many Yvlipka are illiterate in Yvlipkan as a consequence of the Oroshan government's language policies, Yvlipkan is tentatively written with an extended version of the Sabarian script, based mostly on Oroshan orthography.
| Yvlipkan Sabarian | Aa | Čč | DŽdž | Əə | Ee | Ğğ | Ii | Jj | Kk | Gg | Łł1 | Mm | Nn | Ŋŋ | Oo | Òò | Pp | Bb | Ss | Tt | Dd | Ŧŧ | Uu | Ff | Ww | ʔ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IPA | /a/ | /tʃ/ | /dʒ/ | /ə/ | /e/ | /ɣ/ | /i/ | /j/ | /k/ | /g/ | ∅ | /m/ | /n/ | /ŋ/ | /o/ | /ɔ/ | /p/ | /b/ | /q/, /ɢ/? | /s/ | /t/ | /d/ | /θ/ | /u/ | /f/ | /w/ | /ʔ/ |
1Only used in the digraph tł.
Vocabulary
Below is a sample of cognates between Oroshan and Yvlipkan, created by Lozé in 1976.
| Yvlipkan | Oroshan | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| mis | mił | sun |
| ğoğ | quğ | ice |
| ŋgač | aŋkač | strong |
| ŧigaw | sikav | berry |
| kədžajs | kačajł | two |