| Also Known As: Guahibo Language,Guayba,Goahiva,Sicuani,Wahibo,Guajibo,Goahibo,Guaigua,Guahibo
Description:
Guahibo, the native language of the Guahibo people, is a Guahiban language that is spoken by about 23,006 people in Colombia and additional 8,428 in Venezuela. There is a 40% rate of monolingualism, and a 45% literacy rate.
Guahibo has a unique and complex stress system with both primary and secondary stress. The stress system shows a sensitivity to syllable weight so that heavy syllables are always stressed. Both contrasting trochaic and iambic patterns are found on morphemes in nonfinal morphemes with more than two syllables:
The binary feet are parsed from left to right within each morpheme. Morphemes with an odd number of syllables leave the final syllable unstressed (and unparsed into feet):
Morphemes that consist of two syllables and are also word-final are an exception to the above and only have the trochaic pattern:
These morphemes alternate with an iambic pattern when placed in a nonfinal context. Thus náwa keeps its trochaic pattern with the addition of a single light syllable morpheme like -ta "in":
However, an iambic word show its underlying iamb when it is followed by -ta:
Affixation generally does not affect the stress pattern of each morpheme.
Heavy syllables since..... full article at Wikipedia |
