Uchumataqu: The Lost Language of the Urus of Bolivia. A Description of the Language as Documented between 1894 and 1952 (review)

This grammar of Uchumataqu, the now extinct language of the Urus of the Lake Titicaca area in western Bolivia, is the first detailed study of historical material relying on extensive comparison of language data of different levels of quality and reliability. As the author notes at the beginning, it “is based on the efforts and results of the early researchers, who worked in Irohito and on Uchumataqu” (p. 1) between 1894 and 1952 (some of the findings were published much later in Vellard 1967). Further, she recognizes that “working with (in part) historic material on a language that is not acquired by anyone any more as native language involves a certain degree of reconstruction and makes necessary more assumptions and uncertainties than would have been the case with a language that is still spoken” (p. 1). What the author describes in her introduction is also the greatest achievement of this grammar, the analysis of contradictory and ambiguous data to arrive at generalizations–some of which inevitably are tentative or speculative. Hannß provides linguists with a more thorough analysis of the typological characteristics of this language than has ever previously been available. (Uchumataqu and the closely related Chipaya are described briefly by Adelaar [2004: 362–75]; Chipaya is described more fully by Cerrón-Palomino [2006]).

The book is organized as follows. Chapter 1 provides a general introduction and overview. This chapter is really more than an introduction, considering that it takes up more than a fifth of the book. Here, Hannß describes all available sources of data on Uchumataqu in great detail and evaluates them for their quality and their contribution to her present analysis (pp. 23–56). Moreover, she provides the reader with background information that should be of interest to a wider range of readers than just linguists. Her text is entertaining and not without humor. In chapter 2, phonology and orthographical conventions are illustrated. Chapter 3 summarizes grammatical processes and identifies the different parts of speech. Chapter 4 discusses nominal morphology in detail, and chapter 5 does the same for verbal morphology. Chapter 6 treats adverbs, postpositions, and negation. Finally, chapter 7 describes clause types, clause combination, and clausal clitics. A brief index is included. Unfortunately, there is no map to visualize the settings, where the author introduces the specific settlements of Uchumataqu and Chipaya (on pp. 5–6), nor is a vocabulary (such as a Swadesh list) or a sample text provided.

In the remainder of this review, I discuss genetic affiliation and language mixing, point out an undescribed genitive suffix, and make some critical comments on the morphological analysis.

Uchumataqu is part of the Uru-Chipaya language family (an otherwise isolated language family, consisting of the two closely related languages Uru/Uchumataqu and Chipaya). Many linguists have grouped Uru/Uchumataqu with the Arawakan language family, mainly because of a misinterpretation: an alternative name for Uchumataqu (used by the Uru themselves) is “Pukina”–identical to the name of the (genetically unrelated) extinct Pukina language. The non-Uchumataqu Pukina language, which is argued to have been the lexical source of the secret language Callawaya (see Adelaar 2004:350), is assumed to have been related to the Arawakan language family (Hannß p. 13; see Fabre 1995:53). Even though Payne (1987:59) does not wish to exclude the possibility that Uru-Chipaya could have been distantly related to Arawakan, Fabre (1995:57) denies that the relation is of any great significance (8.26 percent of 109 Arawakan protolanguage entries are represented in Uru-Chipaya and Pano-Takanan). Structurally, Uchumataqu is very different from all the Arawakan languages, and none of the features widely distributed among languages of that family can be found. (The book under review does not compare Uchumataqu to any Arawakan languages; the following remarks stem from my own investigation.) The person...