Ciucci, Luca, and Piat, Gabriella Erica (2019) Linguistic taboos in Ayoreo. The Mouth: critical studies on language, culture and society, 4. pp. 31-54.

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Abstract

The present paper will address linguistic taboos in Ayoreo, a Zamucoan language spoken in the Chaco area of southeastern Bolivia and northern Paraguay. According to the 2012 census of the respective countries, there were 2,189 Ayoreo in Bolivia (INE 2015) and 2,461 in Paraguay (DGEEC 2014), a total of 4,650 people, almost all of them fluent in their language. The term Ayoreo is a plural form of the word ayorei (m.sg.ff), ayore (m.sg. bf; f.sg.bf/ff) 'human being, 'real person', as opposed to outsiders (Ciucci 2016: 33).3 The Zamucoan family also includes Chamacoco, spoken by about 2,000 people in northern Paraguay, and †Old Zamuco, an extinct language documented by the Jesuits in the 18th century (Chomé 1958 [ante 1745]; Ciucci 2018, forthcoming). The Ayoreo had the first stable contact with Western culture in 1947, but were affected by previous contact with Jesuit missionaries. Indeed, a number of their ancestors had lived for a while in the Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos in southeastern Bolivia (see Fischermann 1988, 1996; Combès 2009), where Old Zamuco was the second language after Chiquitano, the lingua franca of those missions. Ayoreo and Old Zamuco share most of their lexicon (Kelm 1964), which shows remarkable differences from that of Chamacoco (Bertinetto 2014; Ciucci 2016). Recent research has shown that Ayoreo and Old Zamuco share some cultural similarities (Ciucci 2019), but also that Old Zamuco and Chamacoco have at times common morphological features not found in Ayoreo (Ciucci & Bertinetto 2015; 2017). Existing contributions on the Ayoreo lan-guage include dictionaries (Barrios et al. 1995; Higham et al. 2000)4 and grammatical sketches (Morarie 1980; Bertinetto 2014). Ciucci (2016) is an analysis of the inflectional morphology of the language. There are many anthropological studies on the Ayoreo. Among them one can mention (without any pretense to be exhaustive): Zanardini 2003; Bórmida 2005; Pia 2006; Bessire 2014 and Otaegui 2014. An ongoing long-term project was the Diccionario antropológico ayoreo ('Ayoreo anthropological dictionary') by Erica Pia. This work systematised the data collected over many years of fieldwork by its author.

Item ID:	59948
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2513-101X
Keywords:	Ayoreo, linguistic taboos, Zamucoan,
Copyright Information:	All published contributions are available as open access publications. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication.
Date Deposited:	14 Oct 2019 00:31
FoR Codes:	47 LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE > 4704 Linguistics > 470409 Linguistic structures (incl. phonology, morphology and syntax) @ 100%
SEO Codes:	97 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 970120 Expanding Knowledge in Language, Communication and Culture @ 100%
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