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Vol. 45, no. 3 (Fall 2003)

Contents

Abstracts

Historical-Ecological Influences on the Word for Cacao in Ka'apor

William Balée
Tulane University

Abstract. Factors of historical ecology seem to have affected plant nomenclature in Ka'apor, a Tupí-Guaraní language of eastern Amazonia, specifically the term for cacao. Several languages in at least three different subgroups of Tupí-Guaraní have terms for a widespread nondomesticated species of cacao as well as for domesticated cacao that are superficially similar to reconstructed Mesoamerican terms for domesticated cacao. Ka'apor seems to have borrowed with phonologically conventional methods a term for cacao. Such a borrowing is counterintuitive because cacao was a preexisting plant of Amazonia and it was evidently not significant in aboriginal Ka'apor culture or economy. After the term had been borrowed by Spanish from a Mesoamerican donor language, it arguably followed this path: from Spanish to Portuguese, from Portuguese to Lìngua Geral Amazônica (a Tupian creole spoken widely in the colonial Amazon region at a time when cacao was its major export crop) and from there to Ka'apor. In contrast, an observed similarity of the cacao terms in several other Tupí-Guaraní languages to Mesoamerican terms for cacao does not seem to be the result of borrowing from Lìngua Geral Amazônica, but rather of an autochthonous linguistic process in Amazonia. The borrowing of an ultimately Mesoamerican term for cacao by Ka'apor but not by other Tupí-Guaraní groups supplies evidence of intricate contact between Ka'apor society and colonial Luso-Brazilian society of the eighteenth century. The economic and ecological significance of the cacao export sector of the eighteenth-century colonial Amazon when comprehended together with Lìngua Geral Amazínica as the contact language helps illuminate nuances of Ka'apor vocabulary regarding natural things, the history of Ka'apor migrations, and close connections of the Ka'apor to the geographically distant Wayãpi people.

African Interpreters in the Atlantic Slave Trade

Joan M. Fayer
University of Puerto Rico

Abstract. African linguists, both free and slave, had important functions in the Atlantic slave trade and on Caribbean plantations. They facilitated exploration and trading. On the slave ships they communicated orders and information and helped to suppress slave insurrections. On plantations they served as teachers for the newly arrived slaves. The use of African interpreters provides evidence that African languages were used in these contact situations not only before the genesis of a pidgin language, but also during and after the development of a pidgin.

Language Shift from Mother Tongues towards Fulfulde in Adamawa State, Nigeria: Causes and Consequences

Gbenga Fakuade, Matudi Gambo, and Abdullahi Bashir
Federal University of Technology, Nigeria

Abstract. This article discusses the language shift from mother tongues towards Fulfulde in Girei, Song, and Gombi Local Government Areas of Adamawa State, Nigeria. This study discovers that, even though a language of interethnic communication among the various ethnic groups and the Fulani in the study area already exists (namely, Hausa), there has been a shift towards Fulfulde. It is shown that the language shift affects the function not only of the shifting language, but also of the target language, as Fulfulde has intruded into more domains of life and functions among the different ethnic groups in the study area. The article shows further that other languages are less used and are finally threatened as the languages of the home. While economic, social, political, religious, and contextual factors are identified as some of the causes for the shift, language spread, language endangerment or language decline, additive bilingualism, and code-switching are found to be some of the sociolinguistic implications of the shift.

Archival Phonetics: Tone and Stress in Tanana Athabaskan

Siri G. Tuttle
University of Alaska Fairbanks

Abstract. This article describes the results of an archival experiment carried out in support of a phonological description of the compared prosodies of two dialects of Tanana Athabaskan-Minto and Salcha. Recordings of texts in the two dialects from the 1960s and 1970s were analyzed for vowel duration, fundamental frequency, and amplitude. The results support previous analyses showing the Minto dialect to be sparsely tonal and Salcha to be nontonal. These dialects also show differences in the acoustic correlates of stress for the two grammars.

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