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How To Say ‘I love you’ In Taino, A Tale Of Comparative Linguistics

Misconceptions

I've come across some claims online, predominantly sourced from the “Let's Talk Taino” video series, that say ‘ro’ is the Taino word for ‘love’. I believe the creator of this video series is not at fault here, though. I believe they source their vocabulary from the book ‘Primario Básico del Taíno-Borikenaiki’, which seems to have taken some liberties filling lexical gaps such as these without doing the requisite comparative analysis.

How I Reconstructed The Word For ‘Love’

There is a crater on Venus named Nanichi, which comes from a name still used in Puerto Rico, Nanichi; Which itself is a shortening of D'nanichi. This name is said to mean ‘my love’. Looking at other surviving fragments of Taino, such as the word warokoel, meaning ‘our grandfather’ we can see it is derived from a root ‘roko’ meaning ‘grandparent’, a masculine suffix ‘el’ and the prefix ‘wa’, which is the first person plural pronoun, like English ‘us’. This word is evidence that the prefixation of the pronoun can be used to form a possessive. Looking back to ‘my love’, we can see that the 1st person singular pronoun ‘da’ could have been the origin of the now lost ‘d’. I also believe that the first ‘n’ is there as a morpheme connector, which is a known infix, perhaps working to clarify it as a possessive rather than the subject of a verb phrase. This means that the root word for ‘love’ is most likely ‘anichi’.

Verification Through Comparison To Cognates In Related Languages

In order to verify this claim, I found the word for ‘love’ in several other closely related Arawakan languages, some suspected cognates I found are listed below, with Lokono ‘anshishi’ being the most obvious, and Palikur ‘amnih’ in a close second. I also made the observation that none of these cognate words start with an initial nasal consonant, lending evidence to my theory that the initial consonant is a remnant of the morpheme connection infix mentioned earlier.

‘anshishi’ - Lokono

‘emejaa’ - Wayuu

‘achaka’ - Paraujano/Añu

‘amnih’ - Palikur

Construction Of The Word/Phrase ‘I love you’

Looking at the attested phrase ‘Dios naboriya daka’, which mean ‘I am God's worker’, we see the obvious loan from Spanish, ‘Dios’, followed by a word translating to ‘worker’, and finally a word translating to ‘I am’. With ‘da’ being the first person singular pronoun and ‘ka’ acting as a copular morpheme like English ‘am’. This shows that we can affix a pronoun to the verb to indicate the subject (This can also be seen in ‘waiba’, which translates to ‘we go’, from ‘wa’ + ‘iba’, for example). Next, we look at the word ‘ahiyakawo’, which translates to ‘speak to us’. This word consists of the noun ‘ahiya’, meaning ‘speech’, the morpheme ‘ka’, and a variant of the 1st person plural pronoun ‘wo’. From this we can deduce that the morpheme ‘ka’ is a sort of verbifying object marker, indicating that whatever comes after in the word/phrase is a direct object (This is also the conclusion of linguists Julian Granberry and Diana Green). Knowing all of this, we can construct the word ‘danichikabu’, and say with some confidence that this would be understood by the ancient Taino people as something analogous to ‘I love you’. The morphemic breakdown (gloss) of this word is included below:

Sources

Harold G. Green & Diana Green - ‘Vocabulário Palikúr-Português-Creole’

Julian Granberry & Gary S. Vescelius - ‘Languages of the Pre-Columbian Antilles’

José Álvarez & María Bravo - ‘Diccionario básico de la lengua añú’

David Captain & Linda Captain (eds.) - ‘Wayuu - English - Spanish Dictionary’

John Peter Bennet - ‘Arawak-English Dictionary’