User:Kp6244/Kashinawa language

Kashinawa of the Ibuaçu River (also spelled Kaxinawá, Kashinawa, Kaxynawa, Caxinawa, Caxinawá, and Cashinahua) or Hantxa Kuin (Hãtxa Kuĩ meaning "genuine words/language") is a language belonging to the Nawa group of the Panoan language family. It is spoken by the indigenous South American Cashinahua people. Currently about 1,600 Cashinahua along the Curanja and the Purus Rivers in Peru, and 400 Cashinahua in the Brazilian state of Acre are proficient in Kashinawa. Many Brazilian Cashinahua are proficient in Portuguese since they have had a significant amount of contact with the outside civilization for over 120 years. The Peruvian Cashinahua are mostly monolingual and speak very little Spanish due to their preference of remaining mostly isolated. Although, in recent years, many more Peruvian Cashinahua have started learning Spanish. According to the Endangered Languages Project the Kashinawa language is threatened, but the DoBeS claims that it is endangered since only a fraction of the large Cashinahua population can speak the language proficiently. Dialects of Kashinawa of the Ibuaçu River include Brazilian Kashinawa, Peruvian Kashinawa, the extinct Juruá Kapanawa (Capanahua of the Juruá River) and the extinct Paranawa language. The Kashinawa people, like some other Panoan groups, call themselves Huni Kuin meaning "real/genuine man". The name Cashinahua was given to them by the Brazilians and means "bat people".

Classification
Panoan


 * Mainline branch
 * Nawa group
 * Central Panoan Assemblage
 * Headwaters subgroup
 * Kashinawa of the Ibuaçu River
 * Brazilian Kashinawa
 * Peruvain Kashinawa
 * Kapanawa of the Juruá River (extinct)
 * Paranawa (extinct)

The Central Panoan Assemblage consists of Nawa language subgroups that have been so influenced by each other due to their close proximity that their language boundaries are somewhat difficult to assess. Steward and Métraux (Handbook, vol. 6) state that Kashinawa is a Central Panoan language, which matches with Fleck's (2013) Central Panoan Assemblage classification, but places it under Amawaca of the Amenguaca subgroup and gives it only one dialect called Sheminawa. According to Fleck (2013), the Amawaca language is also a part of the Headwaters subgroup, but is a separate language from Kashinawa. It has the dialects Peruvian Amawaka, Nishinawa (extinct Brazilian Amawaka), and Yumanawa (extinct). The Yumanawa language is said to be similar to the Kashinawa language.

History
Around 1000 B.C, the early Cashinahua people were probably located near the mouth of the Juruá River. This was when the Panoan groups still shared the same identity. Soon after, some groups, including the Cashinahua, began to move upriver. In the 13th century, the Cashinahua people settled in the Brazilian state of Acre in the Juruá Basin. In 1866, William Chandless, an English geographer, was the first to mention them. By the late 1800s, Expeditions from the Brazilian state of Pará and Peru came for the rubber in the area. In the early 1900s, the Cashinahua became known as "Indios Seringueiros" and were forced to work in rubber estates called “seringais". In the 1920s, due to harsh treatment form rubber employers and disagreement within their community, a small group of Cashinahua revolted and fled to Peru, settling between the Embira and upper Curanja Rivers.    After this, the Peruvian group maintained little contact with their Brazilian families and almost no contact with the outside world for about 20 years.

The Cashinahua who stayed in Brazil continued to work for the rubber industries. Eventually, extracting rubber became a major part of their communal activities. They constantly came into contact with many other Brazilians and soon lost a lot of their culture due to intermixing. Once they gained independence from the rubber employers, they were able to create their own corporations for selling rubber. In the 1900s an economic crisis for rubber caused a shift in their lifestyles. In order to gain money they sold agricultural products, artifacts, and livestock. Older members also received government pension. Many Cashinahua got professional jobs.

The Brazilian Cashinahua introduced the Peruvian group to metal tools which became very important to them. So, in1945 or 1946 the Peruvian Cashinahua decided to restore contact with the world in order to replace their old tools and find more goods. A Cashinahua headman named Napudiun (Called Napoleon by Peruvian traders) lead a group of 8 men downstream to a Marinahua village where a Mestizo river trader was said to be living. After a 10 day journey, they found that he had left. The Marinahua people invited the Cashinahua group to stay while they went to call the trader back. Three days later, after a "mixi pae" (a drinking party where a hallucinogenic is used) all 8 men saw themselves being killed in their sleep by the Marinahua causing them to flee the next day. 6 days later, the trader and two Marinahua men caught up to them and gave them goods in exchange for the promise that the Cashinahua will work rubber and lumber for the trader and will move downstream so he can more easily access them. They agreed, but soon the work became too unfair and harsh. Some Cashinahua moved to the Marinahua village, including Napudiun, to be closer to the trader. Later, Napudiun is said to be killed by Marinahua sorcery and the Cashinahua retreat to their old lives and once again shut themselves off from the outside world.

In 1951, Harald Schultz, a Brazillian photographer-ethnographer visited Peru and reported about 500 Cashinahua and 8 villages. About 80% of the Peruvian Cashinahua died of an epidemic that same year. This triggered a mass migration of the remaining Peruvian Cashinahua to the Embira river in Brazil in hopes of getting help from the Brazilian Cashinahua. Eventually some found the foreign, more modern ways of living and the harsh treatment from the Brazilian community to be unbearable. The next year, 4 families (about 40 people ) returned to the Curanja river in Peru. There were only about 100 Peruvian Cashinahua in 1955 when Kenneth Kensinger arrived to study their language and culture. Contact with traders was only about 2 times a year, but it still left them in increasing, continual debt due to unfair prices. Every time a trader visited, a sickness also followed, consuming the village. The Cashinahua traded animal skins, meat, agriculture, artifacts, and wild rubber for modern goods including metal tools and pots, cloth, salt, and firearms. Very few Peruvian Cashinahua held government jobs and were able to pay off their debts. The traders also took young Cashinahua boys to work for them in Esperanza.

Between 1959 and 1966 about 200 Brazilian Cashinahua migrated to Peru at a steady rate. Due to their familiarity with foreigners, they began a shift in increased contact with the outside world, which vastly changed the Peruvian Cashinahua community. They began moving closer to Esperanza and gaining more money and goods. Members become more focused on the nuclear family unit instead of the community. Drawbacks of foreign contact included increased sickness, drunkenness, fighting, and theft. In the 1960s, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) in Peru developed teaching material in Kashinawa. They also trained the first Cashinahua teacher in the Balta village in the 1970s. In 1983, the NGO Comissão Pro-Lingo (CPO) made similar efforts in Brazil. Also between 1969 and 1981, many traditional Cashinahua stories were not being effectively passed to younger generations causing the language and culture to slowly fade. By 2006, some Cashinahua had set up temporary or permanent residence in either Peruvian or Brazilian towns and cities. Some have moved back to Brazil due to familiarity, resources, and better welfare and health care systems.

Geographic Distribution
The Kashinawa people live around the border of the Brazilian state of Arce and Peru. They live in a western region of the Amazon rainforest along the headwaters of the Juruá and Alto Purus Rivers   The journey between the Peruvian and Brazilian territories takes about 2 months for them. In 1966, there were 4 Peruvian Cashinahua villages along the upper Purus river and Curanja river. In 1992, there were about 1,200 Peruvian Cashinahua in this same region. Three of these villages were within hours from each other, but the fourth was a day downriver and had remained more culturally isolated. The Cashinahua have also settled in Esperanza, which is an army post in Peru about 130 km form the Purus river. This territory has the most genetic diversity due to increased intermixing with outsiders. The Brazilians have about 13 territories and share some with other Panoan groups including the Yaminawa, kulina, Katukina, Shanenawa, and Ashaninka people.

Dialects/Varieties
The Brazilian dialect has frayed more from the original Kashinawa language than the Peruvian dialect due to the Brazilians mixing their language more with Portuguese and other languages around them. The Peruvians tended to stay more isolated so their language remained mostly the same. Kapanawa of the Juruá River and Paranawa are extinct dialects.

Vowels
Although nasalization is generally marked by placing a tilde over the vowel, some authors choose to mark it with a following $⟨n⟩$ to denote that the previous vowel or contiguous vowels are nasalized.

Consonants
The stop consonant d may be pronounced as an alveolar flap  when between two vowels, like the North American English pronunciation of $⟨dd⟩$ in the word ladder.

Syntax
Kashinawa is considered a chaining language. Predicates and propositions are usually chained together in varying lengths with performatives or mood markers at the end. This makes it so that clauses and phrases are not easily understood unless looked at in relation to the entire chain. Due to this type of sentence structure, Montag (1992) uses the term "utterance" to describe their speech. When dependent clauses are chained, time relationships are used to connect them to the ones before and after. The tense is located at the end of the utterance, in the independent clause. Kashinawa does not use passive voices where subjects are not clearly stated for each clause. Verbs are used to express all actions and must be transitive so that clauses can be properly linked. Nouns and pronouns are not used often. The usual word order for Kashinawa SOV and it is verb-final.

Morphology
Kashinawa lacks prefixes and mainly uses suffixes. It is an agglutinative language. Morphology of nouns change depending on the noun class Clauses are ended with specific morphemes so that they can be logically linked.

Vocabulary/Lexis
Since the Cashinahua live in the forest and near rivers, they have adopted a higher vocabulary for things they normally encounter in the jungle to help them survive. They also locate things using a set of directions more tailored to their environment. This includes the directions "sun come", "sun go", "upstream", "downstream", "other side" (of a body of water), and "this side" (of a body of water). They also use body oriented directions including "right hand", "not right hand", "face", and "rear". The Kashinawa language does not include words for things that can not be visualized by them and, as a result, the Cashinahua lack the concept of abstract things. There are also no comparatives and opposites in their language and so they also lack this concept. Bilingual Cashinahua may have been able to gain these understandings through their second languages. A word for "to be" also does not exist in Kashinawa.

Writing system
Kashinawa is originally an unwritten language. J. Capitrano de Abreu, a Roman missionary, lived with the Brazillian Cashinahua and in the 1800s created an overly complicated orthography due to a misunderstanding of certain sounds. Still, the Cashinahua people were able to write things down for the first time using his writing system. The linguist Kenneth Kensinger made another orthography for the Summer Institute of Linguistics in the mid 1900s. Mario Maintin, a native Cashinahua, used this writing system to write the first letter written in Kashinawa in September of 1964 by using Kensinger's orthography. The first Kashinawa dictionaries were published in 1980 with grammatical sketches of the language.

The Roman alphabet is used.

Examples
How a Kashinawa utterance would sound in English: After arriving home, having cooked, while eating dinner, talking to family, having finished the meal, went to bed yesterday.