A brief overview of Agutaynen grammar

SIL Philippines
Publisher Place:
Manila, Philippines
53 pages
from the Preface: This brief overview of the grammar of the Agutaynen language is written with an Agutaynen audience in mind. It is aimed at speakers of Agutaynen who also understand English well, and who wish to explore on a more conscious level the grammatical patterns of their own language. It is written to accompany an Agutaynen-English dictionary, which has been in process over the past two decades. The dictionary is meant to capture something of the wealth of the Agutaynen lexicon—its individual words and their meanings. This grammatical overview is meant to give a better idea of how those words fit together to form sentences. Even a large book could not fully document the beauty and complexity of the Agutaynen language. This overview is offered as a small window through which one can glimpse some of its main contours. Sometimes people believe that the only “real languages” are those with an extensive written literature and a history of use on a national or international scale. Other people, they say, just speak “dialects” that do not have any “real grammar” at all. Such is not the case. Even unwritten languages spoken by small populations have their own patterns and regularities—their own unique grammars—the intricacies of which are waiting to be discovered by those who care to investigate. This brief overview is offered in the hopes that it will both illuminate and inspire—illuminate a small part of what every Agutaynen already knows, and inspire Agutaynen speakers to take even greater pride in what is most beautifully and uniquely theirs.
Paper published on SIL Philippines web site
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Table of Contents:
Contents: Tables / Map / 1. Agutaynen in relation to other languages / 2. The sounds and spelling of Agutaynen / 3. The grammar of Agutaynen / 4. Conclusion / Appendix 1: Some Agutaynen sound patterns / Appendix 2: Some Agutaynen verb affix sets / Appendix 4: Publications
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