Timote–Cuica At the time of the arrival of the Spaniards, the area of the present-day Venezuelan high mountain states of Merida and Trujillo was inhabited by relatively highly developed agriculturalists,whowere speakers of the Timote–Cuica language family. They produced a diversity of cultivated plants, such as maize, potatoes and cotton on agricultural terraces situated on the high Andean slopes. The chronicler Juan de Castellanos (1589) described some of the customs and religious practices of these people in his Elegıas de Varones Ilustres de Indias (Part II: Elegıa III) in an account of the conquest of the Trujillo area. The area was first penetrated by Spaniards in 1548, and the main city Merida was founded in 1558 (Wagner 1967). According to tradition, the Cuica people of the Trujillo region received the newcomers peacefully, in contrast with the more warlike Timote, who inhabited the area of Merida. There is no certainty about the question whether Timote and Cuica were different languages or dialects of one language. In view of the geographic situation some local variation could be expected. Cuica was spoken in the Andes from Humocaro in the state of Lara to Jaj´o at the Trujillo–Merida state border. In the southeast it included the area of Bocon´o and Niquitao, and in the northwest it included the area west of Valera (Betijoque, Escuque), not far from Lake Maracaibo. The Timote language occupied the central valley of the Motat´an and Chama rivers from the town of Timotes to the area of La Grita in Tachira state. In the northwest Timote place names can be found on the slopes descending towards Lake Maracaibo (Mucujepe, Torondoy). South of Merida, the Timote area included the area of Mucutuy and Mucuchachi. After the Spanish occupation, the remaining Indian population was concentrated in a number of special villages. Their descendants have survived until today, but their languages were gradually lost until they became extinct at some moment in the first half of the twentieth century. Most of the information on the Timote and Cuica languages was gathered by local scholars, such as Tulio Febres Cordero, Amılcar Fonseca and Jose Ignacio Lares at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was brought together and discussed in an insightful article by Rivet (1927). Jahn (1927) provides ample anthropological data on the area, including more word lists. Some of Jahn’s vocabulary and sentences correspond quite closely to Fonseca’s Cuica examples, reproduced in Rivet (1927). Jahn (1927: 326), however, identifies his own data as Timote, insisting that Cuica and Timote were in fact one language. Although the Timote and Cuica languages are considered extinct, information dated 1977 (from Merrill Seely) that has appeared in recent editions of the Ethnologue (e.g. Grimes 1996) refers to a language allegedly spoken in the locality of Mutus above Pueblo Llano in the state of Barinas. Pueblo Llano is a high mountain town, situated in the state of Merida (not Barinas), off the Merida–Barinas road. The matter calls for urgent action because an indigenous language preserved in that area would almost certainly be a variety of Timote, originally the dominant speech in the region. The word Mutus is reminiscent of the prefixed root Mucu, a characteristic element of Timote toponymy (e.g. Mucuchıes, Mucubajı, Mucuruba, Mucujun, etc.). It may have been a word for ‘people’,‘community’ or ‘village’, and it is so frequent that a well-known Venezuelan scholar, Julio C. Salas, saw it as a suitable replacement for the name Timote (Rivet 1927: 140). Even though the Timote and Cuica materials are very limited and mainly lexical in nature, a thorough analysis of what is available and a comparison with other languages of the area could be rewarding. At first sight, there is no similarity whatsoever with the surrounding Arawakan, Cariban and Chibchan languages. Rivet attempted to compare Timote and Cuica vocabulary items with Paez and a series of highly divergent languages of the Chibchan family. Some interesting lexical similarities emerge, but no overall picture. Rivet (1927: 148) himself emphasises that Timote–Cuica must be considered to be an independent family. Rivet also traced some of the morphological characteristics of Timote and Cuica. A striking feature of these languages is the existence of a set of prefixes that seem to convey gender and number distinctions. These prefixes appear to function in an agreement system. Consider the following examples from Mucuchı and Mirripu Timote. mi-snun mi-ndok CL-woman CL-old ‘old woman’ The prefix mi- is interpreted by Rivet as a generic or collective prefix. The form mi-snún can be compared to chu-snú ‘woman’. The latter form contains a prefix chu-, which may have an individualising function since it is opposed to ti- ‘plural’. Extracto del libro Languages of the Andes (Willeen Adelaar) Cambridge Language Surveys.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Feb 2014 02:46:58 +0000
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