Hixkaryana is one of the Carib languages, spoken by just over 500 people on the Nhamundá river, a tributary of the Amazon River in Brazil. It is one of a few known natural languages that normally use Object Verb Subject word order, and was apparently the first such language to be described (by linguist Desmond C. Derbyshire). However, indirect objects follow the subject, and word order in nonfinite embedded clauses is SOV. [1] (http://www.ling.umd.edu/~soltan/LING419B/Handouts/handout3.pdf). Like most other languages with objects preceding the verb, it is postpositional. The Carib languages are an indigenous language family of South America. ... Length 6,296 km Elevation of the source 5,597 m Average discharge 219,000 m³/s Area watershed 6,915,000 km² Origin Nevado Mismi Mouth Atlantic Ocean Basin countries Brazil (62. ... Object Verb Subject (OVS) is one of the permutations of expression used in linguistic typology. ... A postposition is a type of adposition, a grammatical particle that expresses some sort of relationship between a noun phrase (its object) and another part of the sentence; an adpositional phrase functions as an adjective or adverb. ...
Toto yonoye kamara. Translated as "The jaguar ate the man." Toto means man, yonoye is from the verb meaning "to eat," and kamara means jaguar. Word order is crucial in Hixkaryana for understanding what is meant, as there are no case endings indicating the object and subject roles.
External Links
Hixkaryana Linguistic Overview (http://www.rosettaproject.org/live/search/detailedlanguagerecord?ethnocode=HIX)
Metathesis in Hixkaryana (http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~ehume/metathesis/Hixkaryana.html)
Hixkaryana is one of the Carib languages, spoken by just over 500 people on the Nhamundá river, a tributary of the Amazon River in Brazil.
It is one of a few known natural languages that normally use Object Verb Subject word order, and was apparently the first such language to be described (by linguist Desmond C. Derbyshire).
Word order is crucial in Hixkaryana for understanding what is meant, as there are no case endings indicating the object and subject roles.
Because of this, the exact number of Cariban languages is not known with certainty (current estimates range from 25 to 40, with 20 to 30 still spoken).
The Cariban family is well known in the linguistic world due to Hixkaryana a language with Object-Verb-Subject sentences, previously thought not to exist in human language.
Some years prior to the arrival of the first Spanish explorers, Carib-speaking peoples had invaded and occupied the Lesser Antilles, killing, displacing or forcibly assimilating the Arawakan peoples who inhabited the islands.
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