Resumen

OQUENDO, Luís. The Voiced Uvular and the Labio-Dental Approximant in the Japreria Language as Phonological Culture. Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales [online]. 2004, vol.20, n.45, pp.33-46. ISSN 1012-1587.

Strauss (1993) and other anthropologists have classified Japreria as a dialect of the Yukpa language. From the linguistic viewpoint, Durbin and Seijas (1972) and Mosonyi (2000) have suggested that Japreria is a dialectal variation. In Oquendo (1998), through a submorphemic unit analysis both of the pronominal system and of the kinship system, proves Japreria to be a Cariban language distict fron Yukpa. The aim in this paper is to demonstrate that the voiced uvular[R] and the voiced labio-dental approximant [í] constitute phenomena of "phonological culture" in Palmer’s (1996) sense, which allow the differenciation ofl Japreria from Yukpa. This paper analyzes different types of syllabic structures both in Japreria and in Yukpa and finds that the syllabic group cvc with post-alveolar fricative [š] in final position followed by cv generates the voiced uvular, while the voiced bilabial fricative of Yukpa becomes a labio-dental approximant in Japreria. These features are not in accordance of the foundations of Mattéi- Müller and Hendley’s (1990) approach, which characterized caribe languages. It is supposed the these differences between authors is due to the proto of these Caribe lanbguages in the north-west.

Palabras clave : Voiced uvular; labio-dental approximant; phonological; culture; japreria.