Tuscarora language

Tuscarora (proper name: Skarohreh ) is a spoken in the U.S. state of New York and the Canadian province of Ontario Iroquois language. It is almost extinct with under 10 speakers, all of which are of advanced age. In the recent past, however, was a language revitalization programs started, children learn the language at school in the frame.

Phonology

Like other Iroquois languages ​​also, Tuscarora has a relatively small phoneme inventory:

Vowels

Consonants

[g ] and [d ] only exist as allophonic variants of / k / and / t / before vowels. Compared to the manageable phoneme itself, there are complex morphophonological processes at the morpheme boundaries.

The stress falls generally on the penultimate, ie the penultimate syllable of the word form.

Orthography

/ ə / and / ə ː / are orthographically by < ę > or < ę · > reproduced / ʧ / by < č >.

Morphology

Tuscarora is typical for North American languages ​​, a polysynthetic language. Such languages ​​are characterized by a high number of morphemes per word. Therefore, a word in the Tuscarora sometimes equivalent to a whole sentence in non- polysynthetic languages ​​such as German, eg Tuscarora ęhskwanęhkwaʔčrę · tyęʔ = ' I need you to make a Medicine' In the field of Pronominalpräfixe also includes the language partially fusional trains on. How to Connect in the example above, for example, the prefix - hsk - a second person singular Agentiv with a first person singular Patientiv (see Polypersonalität ).

"Syntax "

Because of the polysynthetic nature of language, it is very difficult phrasal units, the syntactic structures and the rates would constitute in the sense of European languages ​​to make out. The word order is V.A. controlled by pragmatic factors.