Cholón language

Cholón
Seeptsá
Spoken in	Peru
Region	Huallaga River valley
Extinct	ca. 2000
Language family	Hibito–Cholon Cholón
Language codes
ISO 639-3	cht
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Cholón, also known as Seeptsá and Tsinganeses, is a recently extinct language of Peru.

Phonology

Due to the amateur Spanish pronunciation spellings used to transcribe Cholon, its sound inventory is uncertain. The following is an attempt at interpreting them (Adelaar 2004:464).

	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m	n	ɲ	ŋ
Plosive	p	t		k	ʔ
Affricate		ts	tʃ
Fricative		s	ʃ	h
Approximant	w	l	ʎ, j

The vowels appeared to have been similar to Spanish [a e i o u].

Grammar

Cholon distinguishes masculine and feminine grammatical gender in the second person. That is, one used different forms for "you" depending on whether one was speaking to a man or a woman:

katsok	'house'
aktsok	'my house'
miktsok	'your house' (speaking to a man)
piktsok	'your house' (speaking to a woman)
intʃamma	'what did you say?' (speaking to a man)
intʃampa	'what did you say?' (speaking to a woman)

References

• Adelaar, Willem (2004). The Languages of the Andes. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-36275-7. 
• Fabre, Alain. 2005. Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos: Cholón