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Chamorro language

 

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Chamorro language



 
 
It is an agglutinative language
Agglutinative language

An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphology point of view....
, grammatically allowing root words to be modified by an unlimited number of affixes. For example, masanganenñaihon "talked awhile (with/to)", passivizing prefix ma-, root verb sangan, directional suffix i "to" (forced morphophonemically to change to e) with excrescent consonant n, and suffix ñaihon "a short amount of time". Thus "Masanganenñaihon gue' ": "He/she was told (something) for a while".

Chamorro has many Spanish
Spanish language

Spanish or Castilian is a Romance languages that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade....
 loanword
Loanword

A loanword is a word directly taken into one language from another with little or no translation. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept whereby it is the Meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself....
s and other words have Spanish etymological roots (e.g.






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Encyclopedia


It is an agglutinative language
Agglutinative language

An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphology point of view....
, grammatically allowing root words to be modified by an unlimited number of affixes. For example, masanganenñaihon "talked awhile (with/to)", passivizing prefix ma-, root verb sangan, directional suffix i "to" (forced morphophonemically to change to e) with excrescent consonant n, and suffix ñaihon "a short amount of time". Thus "Masanganenñaihon gue' ": "He/she was told (something) for a while".

Chamorro has many Spanish
Spanish language

Spanish or Castilian is a Romance languages that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade....
 loanword
Loanword

A loanword is a word directly taken into one language from another with little or no translation. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept whereby it is the Meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself....
s and other words have Spanish etymological roots (e.g. tenda "shop/store" from Spanish tienda), which may lead some to mistakenly conclude that the language is a Spanish Creole
Spanish-based Creole languages

A number of creole languages are based on the Spanish language....
: Chamorro very much uses its loan words in a Micronesian way (eg: bumobola "playing ball
Ball

A ball is a round object with various uses. It is usually sphere but can be ovoid. It is used in ball games, where the play of the game follows the state of the ball as it is hit, kicked or thrown by players....
" from bola "ball, play ball" with verbalizing infix
Infix

An infix is an affix inserted inside a stem . It contrasts with adfix, a rare term for an affix attached to the outside of a stem, such as a prefix or suffix....
 -um- and reduplication
Reduplication

Reduplication, in linguistics, is a morphology process by which the root or Stem of a word, or part of it, is repeated.Reduplication is used in inflections to convey a grammatical function, such as plurality, intensification, etc., and in lexical Derivation to create new words....
 of first syllable of root).

The numbers of Chamorro speakers have declined in recent years, and the younger generations are less likely to know the language. The influence of English has caused the language to become endangered. On Guam (called "Guåhan" by Chamorro speakers, probably from either the word guaha, meaning "have", or the word guihan, meaning "fish", or perhaps a portmanteau of both), the number of native Chamorro speakers have dwindled in numbers in the last decade or so while in the Northern Mariana Islands, young Chamorros still speak the language fluently. Various representatives from Guam have unsuccessfully lobbied the United States to take action to promote and protect the language.

There are approximately 50,000 to 75,000 Chamorro speakers throughout the Marianas archipelago. It is still common among Chamorro households in the Northern Marianas, but fluency has greatly decreased among Guamanian Chamorros during the years of American rule in favor of (a largely pidgin
Pidgin

A pidgin is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common, in situations such as trade....
ized) American English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
, which is commonplace throughout the inhabited Marianas.

Alphabet

Letterpronunciation
glottal stop
Glottal stop

The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound which is used in many Speech communication languages....
)
A
A

The letter A is the first letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is a ; the plural is aes or, more commonly, a's....
Å
Å

The Letter ? represents various sounds in the Swedish alphabet, Finnish alphabet , Danish alphabet, Norwegian alphabet, North Frisian language, Walloon language, Chamorro language, and Istro-Romanian language alphabets....
B
B

For technical reasons, B# redirects here. For the musical note, see C B is the second letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled bee , plural bees....
Ch
CH

CH can mean:Business* Bemidji Airlines IATA code* Carolina Herrera , a fashion designer based in New York City.Entertainment and sports...
D
D

D is the fourth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled dee , plural dees....
E
E

E is the fifth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled e , plural ees . The letter E is the most commonly used letter in the Czech language, Danish language, Dutch language, English language, French language, German language, Hungarian language, Latin language, Norwegian language, Spanish language...
F
F

F is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled ef or eff ....
G
G

G is the seventh letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled gee....
Gu
H
H

H is the eighth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in both British English and American English is aitch , though it is also pronounced haitch in some dialects ....
I
I

I is the ninth Letter of the Latin alphabet. Its English language name is i ....
K
K

K is the eleventh letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled kay ....
L
L

L or l, described in English language as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish alphabet, Kashubian alphabet, Sorbian alphabet, Lacinka alphabet , Wymysorys, Navajo language, Dene Suline language, Inupiaq language and Dogrib language alphabets, and of several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language....
M
M

M is the thirteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled em ....
N
N

N is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled en ....
Ñ
N

N is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled en ....
Ng
Ng (digraph)

Ng is a digraph of the Latin alphabet. In English language and several other European and English-derived orthographies, it generally represents the velar nasal, International Phonetic Alphabet ....
O
O

O is the fifteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled o , plural oes ....
P
P

P is the sixteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is pronounced pee ....
R
R

R is the eighteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled ar ....
Rr
S
S

S is the nineteenth letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled ess or generally es- when part of a compound word, plural esses....
T
T

T is the twentieth letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled tee . It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in the English language....
U
U

U is the twenty-first letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled u ....
Y
Y

The letter Y is the twenty-fifth letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled wye or occasionally wy' , plural wyes....


Note that the letter Y is pronounced more like 'dz' (an approximation of the regional Spanish
Spanish language

Spanish or Castilian is a Romance languages that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade....
 pronunciation of "Y"/"LL" as ; nor are N and Ñ always distinguished. Thus the Guamanian place name spelled Yona
Yona, Guam

Yona is a Villages of Guam on the east coast of Guam....
 is pronounced 'dzo-nia', not 'yo-na' as might be expected. Note also that Ch is usually pronounced like 'ts' rather than 'tsh' and that A and Å are not always distinguished in written Chamorro (often being written simply as 'A'). R in Chamorro is pronounced like [] like Spanish and Chamorro also has a trill [r] which is spelled RR.

Chamorro has geminate consonants which are written double (GG, DD, KK, MM, NGNG, PP, RR, SS, TT), native diphthong
Diphthong

In phonetics, a diphthong, or , is a contour vowel?that is, a unitary vowel that changes vowel quality during its pronunciation, or "glides", with a glissando of the tongue from one articulation to another, as in the English words eye, boy, and cow. This contrasts with "pure" vowels, or monophthongs, where the tongue is held s...
s AI and AO, plus OI, OE, IA, IU, IE in loanwords; penultimate stress, except where marked otherwise with an acute accent
Acute accent

The acute accent is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet and Greek alphabet writing systems....
, as in asút "blue" or dángkulo "big". Unstressed vowels are limited to , though they are often spelled A E O. Syllables may be consonant-vowel-consonant, as in che’lu "sibling", diskatga "unload", mamahlao "shy", or oppop "lie face down", gatus (old word for 100), Hagatña "Agana", though B D G are not distinguished from P T K in that position.

Chamorro basic phrases

Håfa Adai Hello.
Memorias Greetings
Kao mamaolek ha' hao? How are you? [lit.: Are you doing well?][informal]
Håfa tatatmånu hao? How are you?[formal]
Håyi na'ån-mu? What is your name?
Na'ån-hu si Chris My name is Chris.
Ñålang yu' I'm hungry.
Må'o yu' I'm thirsty.
Ådios [Spanish introduced] Good bye.
Put Fabot [Spanish introduced] please
Fanatåtte[Indigenous] And so you will follow
Buenas dihas [Spanish introduced] Good morning.
Buenas tåtdes [Spanish introduced] Good afternoon.
Buenas noches [Spanish introduced] Good night.
Esta ågupa' Until tomorrow
Si Yu'os ma'åse' (: Thank you (lit: God have mercy)
Buen probecho [Spanish introduced] "You're Welcome"


Numbers

Current common Chamorro uses only number words of Spanish origin: unu, dos, tres, etc. Old Chamorro used different number words based on categories: "Basic numbers" (for date, time, etc), "living things", "inanimate things", and "long objects".

English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 
Modern Chamorro Old Chamorro: Basic Numbers Old Chamorro: Living Things Old Chamorro: Inanimate Things Old Chamorro: Long Objects
one unu/una (time) hacha maisa hachiyai takhachun
two dos hugua hugua hugiyai takhuguan
three tres tulu tato to'giyai taktulun
four kuåttro' fatfat fatfat fatfatai takfatun
five singko' lima lalima limiyai takliman
six sais gunum guagunum gonmiyai ta'gunum
seven sietti fiti fafiti fitgiyai takfitun
eight ocho' gualu guagualu guatgiyai ta'gualun
nine nuebi sigua sasigua sigiyai taksiguan
ten dies manot maonot manutai takmaonton
hundred siento gatus gatus gatus gatus/manapo
  • The number 10 and its multiples up to 90 are: dies(10), benti(20), trenta(30), kuårenta(40), sinkuenta(50), sisenta(60), sitenta(70), ochenta(80), nubenta(90)
  • similar to Spanish terms.


External links

  • , partially available at Google Books.
  • A , partially available at Google Books.