Aymara language

Aymara is the language of the Aymara people of the Andes. It is one of only a handful of Native American languages with over 1 million speakers, and is one of the official languages of Bolivia.

Many linguists believe that it is related to its more widely-spoken neighbour, Quechua. This claim, however, is disputed - although there are indeed similarities, critics say that these may simply be the result of prolonged interaction between the two languages, not a shared origin.

The Aymara language is an Inflecting language, and has a subject-object-verb word order.

Aymara is cited by the author Umberto Eco in The Search for the Perfect Language as a language of immense flexibility and capable of accommodating many neologisms. Ludovico Bertonio published Arte de la lengua Aymara in 1603. He remarked the language was particularly useful for expressing abstract concepts. In 1860 Emeterio Villamil de Rada suggested it was the language of Adam, (La Lengua de Adán).

Aymara is based on a three value logic system giving a capability of expressing modal subtleties which many other languages can only express clumsily. Guzmán de Rojas has suggested that it be used as an intermediary language for computerised translation.

External links

• http://aymara.org/index.php
• Encyclopedy in Aymara
• Aymara - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition.