RAPID: Muniche Rapid Documention Project

慕尼黑快速文献项目该项目将记录慕尼黑语，这是秘鲁亚马逊地区几乎灭绝的语言。由于剩下的讲者年事已高，最多还剩下几年的时间来记录这门语言，这推动了这个快速的基于团队的语言文档项目。慕尼黑语目前被认为是一种孤立的语言（一种与任何其他语言没有明显联系的语言），这使得对这种语言的记录尤为重要，因为孤立通常是过去深层语言学中语言分化的结果。一个由五名语言学家组成的研究小组将与最后一批说这种语言的人密切合作，收集一个数据库：1)1500个词根，涵盖所有核心语义领域，并带有相关的例句；2)所有主要语法结构类型的例子；3)一系列日常交流互动的对话。此外，将对所有例句和对话进行录音。由此产生的材料将以文本和音频词典以及对话集的形式提供给其他语言学家和慕尼黑社区成员。该项目还将编写一套该语言的教学语法，供社区语言强化班使用。研究小组随后将利用这些材料编写一份关于这种语言的技术性语言描述，与词典和录音一起，将成为慕尼黑人民、语言学家、人类学家和历史学家对这种语言的持久记录。我们的物种目前正经历着语言多样性的迅速而剧烈的丧失。濒危语言的文献记录对使用这些语言的社区和语言学家都很重要。对于这些社区来说，这类文献提供了与他们的历史的联系，并且经常在重新振兴以前被压制的文化身份方面发挥重要作用。慕尼黑快速文献项目将向社区提供广泛的教学和参考材料，这些材料将用于在社区开办的语言强化班。对语言学家来说，记录人类语言多样性是至关重要的：1)重建语言历史，这往往对我们对文化史的理解产生影响；2)作为形成关于人类语言能力的社会和认知基础的适当广泛理论的经验基础。特别是在慕尼黑的案例中，该项目产生的数据和材料将有助于语言学家了解南美洲的语言历史，包括该地区语言之间的遗传关系以及语言由于长期接触而相互影响的方式。有人认为慕尼黑语是横跨大陆的阿拉瓦克语家族的一员，如果这是真的，将对我们对亚马逊史前的理解产生重要影响。特别是，阿拉瓦克人已经被确定为木薯的驯化者，木薯是主要的新热带植物之一，如果慕尼黑是这个家族的远亲，那么阿拉瓦克人在亚马逊地区的扩张将具有重大意义。这个项目收集的数据将使我们能够评估这个假设。此外，还有人认为，由于长期的社会互动和多语使用，亚马逊语言表现出相当程度的基本语法相似性。评估这一假设需要来自所有主要地理分区的语言数据，而慕尼黑语是历史上重要的瓦拉加河流域少数幸存的语言之一。因此，慕尼黑的文献将有助于了解地球上语言研究最少的地区之一的大规模语言模式。

Muniche Rapid Documentation ProjectThis project will document Muniche, an almost extinct language of Peruvian Amazonia. Due to the advanced age of the remaining speakers, at best a few years remain to document this language, motivating this rapid team-based linguistic documentation project. Muniche is currently considered a linguistic isolate (a language with no demonstrated connections to any other language), making documentation of this language especially important, since isolates are generally the consequence of linguistic differentiation in the deep linguistic past. Working closely with the last speakers of this language, a research team of five linguists will collect a database of : 1) 1500 lexical roots covering all core semantic domains, with associated example sentences; 2) examples of all major grammatical construction types; and 3) a collection of dialogues exemplifying a range of everyday communicative interactions. Additionally, audio recordings will be made of all example sentences and dialogues. The resulting materials will be made available both to other linguists and to Muniche community members in the form of textual and audio dictionaries and dialogue collections. The project will also prepare a pedagogical grammar of the language which will be used in community language enrichment classes. The research team will subsequently employ these materials to prepare a technical linguistic description of this language that, in conjunction with the dictionaries and recordings, will serve as a durable record of this language for the Muniche people, linguists, anthropologists, and historians. Our species is currently experiencing a rapid and drastic loss of linguistic diversity. Documentation of endangered languages is important both to the communities in which they are spoken and to linguists. For the communities, documentation of this sort provides a tie to their history, and often plays an important role in revalorization of formerly suppressed cultural identities. The Muniche Rapid Documentation Project will provide extensive pedagogical and reference materials to the community, which will be used in language enrichment classes being started in the community. For linguists, documentation of human linguistic diversity is crucial: 1) in reconstructing linguistic history, which often has consequences for our understanding of cultural history, 2) as the empirical basis for forming suitably broad theories about the social and cognitive bases of the human language faculty. In the Muniche case in particular, the data and materials that will result from this project will contribute to linguists' understanding of the linguistic history of South America, including the genetic relationships between the languages of the region and the ways in which languages have mutually influenced each other due to prolonged contact. It has been suggested that Muniche is a member of the continent-spanning Arawak language family, which if true, would have important consequences for our understanding of Amazonian prehistory. In particular, the Arawak peoples have been identified as the domesicators of manioc, one of the major Neotropical cultigens, and if Muniche is a distant member of this family, the implications for the Arawak expansion in Amazonia would be significant. The data collected by this project will allow us to evaluate this hypothesis. In addition, it has been suggested that Amazonian languages exhibit a considerable degree of basic grammatical similarity due to prolonged social interaction and multilingualism. Evaluating this hypothesis requires linguistic data from all major geographical subregions, and Muniche is one of the few surviving language of the historically important Huallaga River valley. Documentation of Muniche will thus contribute to this effort to understand large-scale linguistic patterns in one of the linguitically least-studied areas on Earth.