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Taino |
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Taíno, an Arawakan language, was the principal language of the Caribbean islands at the time of the Spanish Conquest, including
the Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Florida Keys, and the Lesser Antilles. The Taíno had largely displaced
the non-Arawakan Ciboney, of which only pockets remained in the Greater Antilles (the Guanajatabey in western Cuba, the Ciguayo
and Macorix in eastern Hispaniola), and in turn had been conquered by the Caribs in the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico. As
the language of first contact, Taíno was one of the most important sources of Native American vocabulary in Spanish, involving
hundreds of words for unfamiliar plants, animals, and cultural practices, and through Spanish to other European languages
such as English. English words of Taíno derivation include canoe, potato, cay/key, barbecue, hurricane, hammock, maize, cassava,
Caribbean, cannibal, Cuba, Jamaica, Bahamas, iguana, savannah, papaya/pawpaw, guava, yucca, maguey, manatee, mangrove, and
maybe tobacco. In the Lesser Antilles, the Carib conquest (which had advanced to Puerto Rico by the time of the Spanish conquest,
and is still occurring to some extent among the Carib and Arawak in South America) created a sociolingistically interesting
situation. Carib warriors invading from South America took Taíno wives, or raided north and took female Taíno captives back
to the southern Antilles. The women continued to speak Taíno, but the men taught their sons Carib. This resulted in a situation
where the women spoke an Arawakan language and the men an unrelated Cariban language. However, because boys' maternal language
was Arawak, their Carib became mixed, with Carib vocabulary on an Arawak grammatical base. Over time the amount of distinct
male Carib vocabulary was eroded, both as boys retained more and more Arawak from their first language and as women adopted
male Carib words, so that both sexes came to speak Arawak (Taíno) with a strong Carib component and a decreasing amount of
exclusively male Carib vocabulary. In the interiors of the Lesser Antilles, escaped slaves bolstered the remnant Taíno–Carib
population, gradually changing the racial makeup but retaining the language. This mixed population, called Black Carib, took
their Arawakan language (now pronounced Garifuna, from Galibi 'Carib') with them when the Saint Vincent population was deported
to the Bay of Honduras by the British in 1796. The Taíno language is now extinct in the Lesser Antilles, but Garífuna is the
most numerous indigenous language in Central America. It retains the gender distinction in vocabulary, though to a minimal
extent, primarily in the personal pronouns and in the choice of grammatical gender agreement of abstract words. |
Names (more)[en] Taíno language[nn] Taino [es] Idioma taíno |
Language type : Extinct
Technical notes
This page is providing structured data for the language Taino. |
ISO 639 CodesISO 639-3 : tnqLinked Data URIshttp://lexvo.org/id/iso639-3/tnqhttp://dbpedia.org/resource/ISO_639:tnq More URIs at sameas.org SourcesAuthority documentation for ISO 639 identifier: tnqFreebase ISO 639-3 : tnq GeoNames.org Country Information Publications Office of the European Union Metadata Registry : Countries and Languages |