Miskito grammar

The Miskito language, the language of the Miskito people of the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua and Honduras, is a member of the Misumalpan language family and also a strongly Germanic-influenced language. Miskito is as widely spoken in Honduras and Nicaragua as Spanish, it is also an official language in the Atlantic region of these countries. With more than 8 million speakers, Miskito has positioned in the second place in both countries after Spanish. Miskito is not only spoken in Central America, but in Europe (United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, France and Italy), the USA, Canada and in many other Latin American countries. Miskito used to be a royal state language in the 16th to 19th dynasties of the Miskito Kingdom.

Miskito alphabet
The Miskito alphabet is the same as the English alphabet. It has 21 consonants and 5 vowels.

A (a), B (be), C (ce), D (de), E (e), F (ef), G (ge), H (ha), I (i), J (jei), K (ka), L (el), M (em), N (en), O (o), P (pi), Q (ku), R (ar), S (es), T (te), U (yoo), V (vee), W (dubilu), X (eks), Y (yei), Z (zet).

Phonemes

 * The exact status of vowel length is not clear; long vowels are not consistently indicated in Miskito writing.

Suprasegmentals
Word stress is generally on the first syllable of each word.

Ligature
Ligature is a term (with precedents in other languages) for describing a grammatical feature of Miskito traditionally referred to with less accuracy in the Miskito context as 'construct'. A ligature is a morpheme (often -ka) which occurs when a noun is linked to some other element in the noun phrase. In Miskito, most of the elements that require the presence of ligature are ones that precede the head noun:

Ligature takes a variety of forms:

Some nouns take no ligature morpheme; these mostly denote parts of the body (e.g. bila 'mouth', napa 'tooth', kakma 'nose') or kinship (e.g. lakra 'opposite-sex sibling'), although there is only an imperfect correlation between membership of this morphological class and semantic inalienability (see also relationals below).

Pronouns and adverbs
The personal pronouns differentiate three persons and also have an exclusive/inclusive distinction in the first person plural. The general plural morpheme nani or -nan is added to form plurals (except with yawan). Use of these pronouns is optional when person is indexed in the possessed form, relational or verb group.

The pronouns are not case-specific, and may, under comparable conditions, be marked by the same postpositions as other noun phrases.

Relationals
Relationals are quasi-nouns expressing some relationship (often spatial) to their possessor complement. Many of the relationals perceivably originate in locatives (in -ra) of nouns designating parts of the body employed metaphorically to convey spatial or other relations.

Overview
Finite forms include several tenses and moods, in each of which the person (but not number) of the subject is marked by suffixes. The tenses themselves have characteristic suffixes which combine with the subject-indexing suffixes.

In addition to synthetic (simple) tenses, there is also a considerable range of periphrastic (compound) tenses. These are formed with a non-finite form of the main verb followed by an auxiliary verb.

Some of the synthetic tenses represent original periphrastic tense structures that have become welded into single words. This helps to explain why there are two different forms each in the present, past and future. (The sample verb used is pulaia 'play', stem pul-, given here in the third-person form of each tense.)

In addition to a subject index which form part of a verb's suffix, for transitive verbs the verb group includes an object index  in the form of a preverbal particle marking the person (but not the number) of the object. The subject markers vary somewhat according to the tense, but the most usual forms are shown in the following table (see below for more details).

Conjugation
The stem of a verb is obtained by removing the -aia suffix from the infinitive. Most verb stems end in a consonant, and are conjugated as follows (our sample verb is pulaia 'play').

Verbs whose stems end in i (bri- 'have', wi- 'tell', pi- 'eat', di- 'drink', swi- 'allow') vary from the above paradigm in a few minor points. Bal-aia 'come' and w-aia 'go', have an irregular Present I tense. The verb yabaia 'give' is anomalous in a different way by having irregularly derived non-third-person object-indexing forms. Finally, the most irregular verb of all is the defective and irregular kaia 'to be'.

Periphrastic tenses
The range of aspectual, modal and other notions that can be expressed is enlarged considerably by the availability of various periphrastic constructions in which a verb acting as auxiliary is placed after the main verb. The conjugated component can take a variety of tenses, including periphrastic ones, and the periphrases themselves may often be combined; thus chains of several auxiliaries are possible. Some representative examples of such periphrases follow:

Propositional structure
While no systematic case marking differentiates formally between subjects and objects, there exist (apart from word order) certain option for achieving disambiguation.

Information structure
A system of specialized postpositions is used to identify topics and focused constituents:

Valency
Most verbs are built up from a monosyllabic lexical root ending in a vowel or a single consonant, to which an extension or stem consonant is very often added. The extensions correlate with transitivity: transitive stems have either -k- or -b- (unpredictably), while intransitive stems have -w-. There is also a valency-decreasing verb-prefix ai- which, added to transitive stems, produces unergative, reflexive, reciprocal or middle verbs. See the section on Derivation (below) for examples.

Relative clauses
There are two major constructions which may be used to form relative clauses in Miskito, the 'external head' strategy and the 'internal head' strategy.

General
As regards origin, the Miskito lexicon consists of the following principal components:


 * words of native Miskito origin;
 * a considerable number of loans from surrounding languages of the related Sumo group;
 * a large number of loan words from English;
 * a smaller number of words borrowed from Spanish.

Derivation
Some derivational affixes:

Phoneme inventory
The Miskito phoneme inventory includes four vowels (a, e, i, o, u), apparently with phonemic length playing a part. Consonant series include voiced and voiceless plosives, voiced nasals and semivowels, two liquids and the fricative s. Orthographic h apparently represents a suprasegmental feature.

Other aspects
Syllables consist of a vowel nucleus preceded and followed by a maximum of two consonant: (C)(C)V(C)(C). Word stress is normally on the first syllable and not distinctive.

Morphology
Inflectional and derivational morphology are of moderate complexity and predominantly suffixing, together with the use of infixes in the nominal paradigm.

Nominal morphology
The nominal morphological categories are ligature and person (but not number) of the possessor, the exponents of which have suffix and infix allophones, except for third person and first person inclusive possessor indices, which are preposed particles. Plural number is indicated by a postpositive particle.

Verbal morphology
In the verbal morphology, tense, mood and person (of the subject) are marked by suffixes (and sometimes fused into portmanteau suffix forms). Object indices of transitive verbs are represented by particles preceding the verb (third person is zero). Number is not marked in these subject and object indices, but a plural subject may be indicated through a verbal periphrasis serving this function.

Word order
Sentence order is predominantly SOV. Auxiliaries follow main verbs. Sentence particles are sentence-final. Within the noun phrase, most determiners precede the head, but articles follow it, as do quantifiers. Adjectives may either precede or follow the head noun. Possessors precede possessed, and relative clauses precede their head. The ligature morpheme generally occurs on the noun whenever this is preceded by one of the items mentioned, and also when it takes a possessive index. Postpositional structures are found.

Head or dependent marking
Miskito is consistently head-marking. There is pro-drop for both subject and object (i.e. subject and object pronouns are commonly omitted). The finite verb's subject argument is indexed for person (not for number) on the verb. Transitive verbs also index their object through pre-verbal particles (zero for third person). A maximum of one such object index is possible. If a transitive verb has both a patient and a recipient, the latter is not indexed and appears as a postpositional phrase (indirect object).

The expression of nominal possessive or genitive relations is similarly head-marking: the head (i.e. the possessed) is marked with indices indicating the person of the dependent (the possessor), the noun phrase expressing which is either omitted normally if pronominal (a pro-drop phenomenon) or precedes the head, e.g. arask-i 'my horse' (or yang arask-i), araska 'his horse' (zero-marked possessor), Juan araska 'Juan's horse' (cf. aras 'horse' without ligature).

Adpositions
Other relations between a verb and its noun phrase complements or adjuncts are expressed by means of postpositional structures or relational constructions. Postpositions are invariable and follow the noun phrase, e.g. Nicaragua ra 'in/to Nicaragua'. A relational construction has the internal form of a possessive construction (above), except that the place of the head noun is occupied by a quasi-noun called a relational; the latter is often followed by a postpositon. E.g. nin-i-ra (or yang ninira) 'behind me', nina-ra (or witin ninara) 'behind him', Juan nina-ra 'behind Juan', where the relational nina imitates a possessed noun.

Predication, sentence types and compound and complex sentences
There is a copula with an irregular and defective conjugational paradigm.

Negation is achieved through various constructions. One is the use of the verb's negative participle, which is invariable for person and tense; another is through use of a negative particle apia which follows verbs (in the future only), but precedes the copula. Yes–no questions have no special grammatical marking as such, but all kinds of questions are optionally followed by the sentence particle ki. Other sentence particles express different modal nuances.

Verbs or whole clauses may be conjoined by juxtaposition, all but the last verb in the chain adopting the form of a switch reference participle. These vary in form depending on whether the following verb has the same or a different subject, and also depending on certain tense or aspect relations, and on the person of the subject in the case of different-subject participles.

Besides these widely used constructions, clauses may also be linked by coordinating conjunctions, and subordinate clauses may be marked by a clause-final subordinator.