Language name and locationː Jaruára (Jarawara), Brazil [Refer to Ethnologue]

语言名称和分布地区: 雅拉瓦拉语, 巴西

1. ohari

2. ɸama  

Linguist providing data and dateː Dr. Alan Vogel, Summer Institute of Linguistics, Brazil, December 16, 2008.

提供资料的语言学家: Dr. Alan Vogel, 2008 年 12 月 16 日.

Other comments: Jarawara is spoken by about 190 people living on a reservation in the municipality of Lábrea, in the state of Amazonas, Brazil. Jarawara is mutually intelligible with Jamamadi and Banawá, so that the three can be considered dialects of a single language (Dixon 2004). The Jarawara words in what follows are orthographic, but where necessary I provide phonetic information. There are only really two numbers in Jarawara, ohari 'one' and fama [ɸama] 'two'. These are verbs, so the meanings are more precisely 'be one' and 'be two', respectively. Ohari also has a more general meaning, which is 'be alone/be the only one'. Examples with these can be found in the online Jarawara dictionary (Vogel 2006). There was a traditional way of expressing quantities beyond two that involved combinations of one and two and the word for 'hand' for five, but this system is hardly used nowadays. Mostly people use Portuguese numbers for anything above two. The Portuguese words are assimilated into Jarawara in two ways. For lower numbers, the Portuguese numbers become verbs in Jarawara, with the addition of the auxiliary na (many Jarawara verbs require this auxiliary). For higher numbers, the Portuguese numbers become adjectives in Jarawara. As for the traditional way of counting, the following sentence from a traditional story is an example of how it can be used.