Ebook: Bora loans in Resígaro (Arawakan): Massive morphological and little lexical borrowing in a moribund Arawakan language

This study analyzes the influence of Bora (Boran) on Resígaro (Arawakan), two
languages of the Colombian-Peruvian Amazon region, using a newly discovered
Resígaro wordlist from the 1930s (Manuel María de Mataró no date), another
wordlist from the late 1920s (Rivet & Wavrin 1951), and another from the early
1970s (Allin 1976:382-458). It shows that despite heavy structural and
morphological influence (Aikhenvald 2001:182-190) Resígaro has borrowed
relatively few lexical items, around 5% in all three sources. It also shows that the
borrowing of entire sets of grammatical morphemes, including classifiers,
number markers, and bound grammatical roots that is observable in
contemporary Resígaro (Seifart 2011) goes back to at least the early 20th century.
This suggests that this remarkable case of massive morphological borrowing is
not merely an effect of language decay, linked to the current language
endangerment situation of Resígaro, with only two surviving speakers