Abstract :
[en] This paper examines hypotheses about the genealogical relationship between the Harakmbut, Katukinan and Arawan language families put forward in the past two decades. Adelaar (2000) was the first to propose a genetic link between the Katukinan and Harakmbut families, adducing mainly lexical evidence (viz. 53 (near-)cognate lexical items and a handful of cognate grammatical items). In his (2007) paper, Adelaar added data on Katawixí to the picture, also drawing on lexical evidence. Subsequently, Jolkesky (2016) proposed the addition of one more family to the genetic grouping, viz. the Arawan family, again on the basis of lexical correspondences.
This paper approaches these hypotheses from the perspective of Harakmbut, which has been considered a language isolate comprising a number of mutually intelligible varieties, all spoken in the Madre de Dios and Cusco districts of Peru (Tovar 1961; Loukotka 1968; Lyon 1975; Wise 1999: 307; Van linden 2023). It addresses the question of whether the Harakmbut oral literature, passed on from one generation to the next for centuries, contains any clues to a shared ancestry with peoples now living north-east from them, in the Brazilian states Acre and Amazonas. In addition, it also brings morpho-syntactic evidence to the table, showing that the three families concerned differ considerably in core areas of grammar, such as the marking of grammatical relations on verbs and on dependents, adnominal possession, and noun incorporation (Van linden & Ferraz Gerardi 2023). Finally, it also compares ethnographic information on the Harakbut (Gray 1996, 1997a, 1997b) and the Katukinan peoples (Deturche 2009, 2022), focusing on mythology and social organisation.
Taking together the various strands of comparative evidence, this paper proposes that the lexical similarities adduced in favour of genealogical relatedness should rather be explained through language contact, probably at the time of the rubber boom.
References
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