Ventureño
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Ventureño is one of the extinct Chumash languages, a group of Native American languages previously spoken along the coastal areas of Southern California from as far north as San Luis Obispo to as far south as Malibu. Ventureño was spoken from as far north as present-day Ventura to as far south as present-day Malibu.

Ventureño, like its sister languages, is a polysynthetic language, having larger words composed of a number of morphemes. Ventureño has separate word classes of verb, noun, and oblique adjunct (Wash 2001); with no separate word class of adjective or adposition. Nouns and verbs are often heavily affixed (prefixed mostly) in Ventureño, affixing being a way to denote those meanings often conveyed by separate words in more analytic languages. Verbs play a primary role in Ventureño with utterances often composed only of a verb with clitics. Chumash word order is VSO/VOS, or VS&VO (as per Dryer 1997).

Sounds

Ventureño has a similar phonemic inventory to its sister language, Barbareño. Ventureño consists of 30 consonants and 6 vowels.

Vowels

Ventureño consists of a regular 5-vowel inventory with a sixth vowel that Harrington transcribes as <ə>. In Barbareño transcriptions,<ɨ> is used. It is not known whether these two phones are the same in both languages (and the difference in transcription is merely one of convention), or whether the sounds were in fact different enough for Harrington to use different symbols.

Consonants

1. Ventureño has only one lateral, /l/. However, /l/ has a distinct allophone [ɬ] that Harrington includes in his transcriptions.

Orthography

Ventureño has been written several different ways by different linguists. John Peabody Harrington, who compiled the most data on Ventureño, used a modified version of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Harrington differed from the International Phonetic Alphabet in the following symbols: a kappa /к/ (small caps 'k') for [q], /q/ for [x], slanted bar /ł/ for [ɬ], a reversed apostrophe /‘/ for aspiration, and a right-turned (standard) apostrophe /’/ for a glottal stop (this symbol was also used for ejectives and glottalized sonorants).

The Buenaventura Band of Mission Indians has adopted an Americanist form of transcription for Ventureño based on the work done by Harrington: /š/ for [ʃ], /ł/ for [ɬ], /x/ for [x], /ʰ/ for aspiration, /y/ for [j], and /q/ for [q]. A standard apostrophe /’/ continues to be used for a glottal stop [ʔ] and for denoting ejectives. Glottalized sonorants [m, n, w, y] are written with a combining apostrophe over the symbol. This transcription is in keeping with most current Chumashists (such as Wash below) except that aveolar affricates [ts] are written /ts/ in Ventureño, where other Chumashists write them as /c/. Likewise, Ventureño writes post-alveolar affricates as /tš/, where other Chumashists write this sound as /č/.

Sample Vocabulary

(see citation below for Harrington)

'ałhašə'əš;: n. language; word

kuku'u: n. people

k'uwe: conj. but

References

• Dryer, Matthew S. 1997. "On the Six-Way Word Order Typology," Studies in Language 21(1): 69-103.
• Harrington, John Peabody. 1981. The Papers of John Peabody Harrington in the Smithsonian 1907-1957: A Guide to the Field Notes: Native American History, Language, and Culture of Southern California/Basin, vol. 3. Elaine L. Mills and Ann J. Brockfield, eds. Microfilm reels 69, 89, and 94 on Ventureño.
• Wash, Suzanne. 2001. Adverbial Clauses in Barbareño Chumash Narrative Discourse. PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara.

External links

• Ventureño language at Ethnologue