Documentary Linguistics

La documentación lingüística lleva más de un siglo de existencia y tiene una antigua tradición de series monográficas y revistas que fueron locales para la publicación de textos, diccionarios, gramáticas, vocabularios, entre otros. En la última década, sin embargo, la documentación, o ya, la lingüística de la documentación, cambió su perspectiva e incorporó como elementos centrales la diversidad, en cuanto a tipos de lenguas y a tipos de materiales que se registran, la diversidad social y de ideologías sobre la lengua y las prácticas lingüísticas. El activismo de la comunidad de habla ha tenido un profundo efecto en esta nueva perspectiva de la documentación. Este trabajo se enmarca en esta última tendencia de la lingüística de la documentación y se propone presentar experiencias nuevas de documentación y activismo en comunidades wichí del río Bermejo en la provincia de Formosa (Argentina), a fin de discutir y reflexionar sobre sus contribuciones a la práctica lingüística y a la lingüística de la documentación.

Traditional Tiwi is a language isolate within the Australian language group, traditionally spoken on the Tiwi Islands, north of Darwin. This language exhibits the most complex verb structure of any Australian language. Altogether there are 18 distinct verb slots; 14 prefixes and 4 suffixes. They encode subject, object and oblique arguments, they inflect for tense, aspect and mood, the location and direction of events with respect to the speaker, and the time of day that an event takes place. They also take prefixes and suffixes denoting associated motion, can be argument-raised by a causative or detransitivised by derivational morphology, and can take incorporated nominals, incorporated verbs, and incorporated comitative or privative arguments.
Traditional Tiwi has not been adequately described. Previous descriptions are limited and do not cover verb morphology with enough detail. This thesis brings together previous descriptions, early recorded data, and adds newly collected data and findings to produce an updated description of the language, with special reference to the verb morphology.
I focus in particular on two aspects of the verb morphology: agreement and incorporation. The Traditional Tiwi agreement system of inflecting verbs shows a high degree of complexity due to the interactions between subject, object and tense marking. I argue for the occurrence of an otherwise unreported phenomenon by which agreement affixes can shift between various controllers depending on the morphosyntactic context. Incorporation is also highly complex, as with other northern Australian languages that exhibit this feature. There are four distinct types of incorporation including verb incorporation, comitative and privative constructions, body part incorporation and regular nominal incorporation. I describe these with reference to incorporation phenomena in other Australian languages.
Traditional Tiwi however, is no longer spoken; the last two speakers died in 2012. The majority of the data on which this thesis is based was collected with one of these two last speakers, and therefore represents possibly the last documentary linguistic record of this important language.

This dissertation describes two related phenomena in the syntax and semantics of K’ichee’ (Mayan), concentrating on the variety spoken in and around Nahualá.
The first phenomenon is focus, the special discourse status granted to constituents which provide new and important information. The second phenomenon is syntactic movement, which occurs in several different constructions in K’ichee’ — most relevantly, that of focus movement. Across languages, focused constituents are highlighted in one way or another; and in Mayan languages, this highlighting often takes the form of movement to a position immediately before the verb. But I show that the relationship between focus and movement in K’ichee’ is less straightforward than has previously been assumed. In particular, it is often possible for a focused constituent to remain in situ.
Having shown that focus in situ is possible, I turn to the question of when it occurs. I show that focus in situ follows an ergative/absolutive pattern: it is impossible for transi- tive subjects, but possible for all other constituent types. This pattern is compared to erga- tive/absolutive patterns found elsewhere in K’ichee’ grammar, and in other languages.

It is sometimes argued that the language of certain indigenous communities in North America and Australia is no longer the ancestral language, but ‘Indian English’ or ‘Eskimo English’ or ‘Aboriginal English.’ But are these stable, persistent, emblems of community identity, hence ‘languages’ just like English, Navajo, Yupik, or Warlpiri, or are they just transient phenomena, noticeable perhaps to standard-English speakers but lacking in linguistic and sociolinguistic ‘focus’ (LePage and Tabouret-Keller, 1985)? It is a question that really matters when communities and linguists must decide whether to document, teach, and promote these languages alongside, or even in preference to, the ancestral language.
In this paper, I want to discuss the question of just what to document in your own, or somebody else’s community, proposing a series of alternative documentation models and their implications for local and wider communities. In this paper, I want to discuss the question of just what to document in your own, or somebody else’s community, proposing a series of alternative documentation models and their implications for local and wider communities.

In the last fifteen years, we have seen the emergence of a branch of linguistics which has come to be called Documentary Linguistics. It is concerned with the making and keeping of records of the world’s languages and their patterns of use. This emergence has taken place alongside major changes in the technology of linguistic data representation and maintenance; alongside new attention to linguistic diversity; alongside an increasing focus on the threats to that diversity by the endangerment of languages and language practices around the world, especially in small indigenous communities; and perhaps most importantly of all, alongside the discipline’s growing awareness that linguistic documentation has crucial stakeholders well beyond the academic community; in endangered language communities themselves, but also beyond. The purpose of this paper is to discuss documentary linguistics, how it has been emerging, and where it may be headed.

This dissertation is a description of aspects of the phonetics, phonology and morphology of Teotepec Chatino (ISO 639-3 identifier: cya; here abbreviated as TEO), an indigenous language spoken by approximately 3800 people in the Sierra Madre del Sur, Oaxaca, Mexico. This work presents a synchronic description of the language based on data collected in the eld over the course of six eld trips totaling eighteen months. This investigation is based on a corpus of thirty hours of transcribed and analyzed texts of naturally occurring speech, narratives, data gathered during elicitation sessions, and an expansion of my earlier grammatical sketch (2011). The final result is a description of the phonology and phonetics of tone and some of the morphological processes that exist in the grammar. The focus of this work is to describe the structure of the language produced by native Teotepec speakers and how it is used in an array of contexts. This is reflected in a rich body of procedural texts, conversations, speeches, rants, polemics, prayers, and narratives. These texts are the basis for the description of how the language encodes speakers' knowledge about the world and their greater context. This work arrives at a description of the details of the language while also making broader generalizations about these details. It is not possible that this work cover all aspects of the phonology, phonetics, morphology and so part of the focus has been to capture particular facets of the language and explain them in a way that is detailed while broad enough to be useful to as many as audiences as possible. This includes scholars interested in typology, tone languages, historical linguistics of Otomanguean, linguistic anthropology, anthropology, and the history and culture of the Chatinos, southern Oaxaca and Mesoamerica. The dissertation is written in English; however, I often create grammatical write-ups and practical pedagogical materials for a Spanish literate audience. Materials for TEO have been and will continue to be made available to Spanish and English speakers in order to reach an audience that includes, but is not limited to, members of the community, local and regional educators and literacy efforts, and scholars engaged in the study of Chatino language and linguistics. The approach to this work is data-driven and text-based. It is written in basic descriptive terms, as outlined in Payne (1997); Shopen (2007); Dixon (2010), and Haspelmath (2010). In this way the writing is carried out with fewer aprioristic notions about the language. The goal is to describe the language in its own terms. Thus the researcher is open to discover completely new, unexpected phenomena, can be guided by the data and their own thinking (Haspelmath, 2010).

Many scholars believe film pioneer John Grierson "coined the term" documentary when he first used it in a film review for the New York Sun in 1926. This paper provides documentary evidence that another film pioneer - namely, Charles Urban - used the word in film terms and in English in 1907, nearly 20 years before Grierson.

This paper examines the endeavour to identify fundamental characteristics of all documentary work regardless of the form it takes. Each chapter of this paper describes a different step in the evolution of research project to documentary installation work and is chronologically organized to reflect this process. This paper not only sets forth fundamental requirements of a documentary work as supported by various scholarship on a multitude of documentary forms, but also outlines the process of translating the fundamental requirements and relative supporting scholarship into a physical documentary installation work.

The Genius of Mocho’ (Mayan): Morphosyntactic Alignment and its Interaction with Grammatical Aspect and Information Structure

Jaime Pérez González, Ph.D
The University of Texas at Austin, 2021

Supervisor:  Nora C. England

This dissertation offers a refined account of person marking in Mocho’, a highly endangered Mayan language spoken by around 50 people in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. In previous research, Mocho’ has been described as having two sets of person markings (Set A and B), but here, as one of the main contributions of this research, I show evidences of a third set (Set C). This new finding offers a whole new analysis of the grammar of this language. Thus, this dissertation exhibits the interaction of these three sets of person markings with grammatical aspect, voice, and information structure. To disentangle these person markings, I offer a detailed description of the grammatical aspect, and as a result, aside of the evidence to demonstrate the existence of Set C, I propose an alternative analysis where Mocho’ exhibits a split aspectual system based on the type of verbal predicate that heads the clause: direct vs “reverse”. To this fact, I also propose that Mocho’ has two types of transitive verbs: direct vs “reverse”, and that they are used complementarily depending on two main constraints that target the A [familiar, animate]. This leads us to propose the existence of four different types of voice in Mocho’: passive vs antipassive, direct vs “reverse” voice. To conclude, I offer a whole picture of the reanalysis of the morphosyntactic alignment of these person markings in these two transitive constructions. I exhibit a tripartite alignment motivated by aspect, an active-stative alignment depending on verbal vs non-verbal predicates, and split ergative “reverse” marking where SAPs align ergative alignment and third person becomes neutral. To comprehend this interaction, it is crucial to look at the naturalistic use of the language to capture the nature of the information flow. Therefore, another contribution of this research is the description of the information structure that Mocho’ utilizes to convey certain types of information (focus, contrastive-focus, and topic).

Material de clase o diario de aprendizaje que actualizo cada cierto tiempo.

En el capítulo 1, delimito qué se entiende por arte verbal mientras explico por qué este término en particular tiene mayores beneficios analíticos que, por ejemplo, folklore; asimismo, propongo comprender el arte verbal desde el canto y como objeto de estudio lingüístico. De hecho, esta última afirmación es la columna vertebral de todo mi escrito. Luego, en el capítulo 2, discuto una serie de conceptos que considero necesarios para empezar a estudiar y comprender el arte verbal. Así, me apoyo en los siguientes cuatro trabajos: la aproximación a la lengua y la cultura a través el discurso, la Teoría Oral Formulaica, la función poética del lenguaje del estructuralismo jakobsoniano, y una comparación de la teoría musicológica de Curt Sachs y las ideas de sobre la oralidad de Walter Ong. En el tercer capítulo, ofrezco un esbozo de análisis comparativo de un conjunto de formas poéticas que van desde sistemas de versificación o sílabas sin sentido al paralelismo semántico, repetición, encabalgamiento, entre otros; además, finalizo dicho capítulo proponiendo un análisis de la combinación de estas formas poéticas situado en mi experiencia de trabajo con el canto kakataibo y propongo un continuo de productividad para fines comparativos. En el cuarto capítulo, me aboco a estudiar el mapeo del texto a estructuras musicales desde los estudios de textsetting; además, también discuto otros temas de interés como lenguas percusionadas, vocales musicales y escalas, etc. Finalmente, en el quinto capítulo doy un breve recuento histórico sobre el registro de la música y el canto de los grupos indígenas de la Amazonía, y presento tendencias y características del canto amazónico, tanto formales como socioculturales en las que relaciono las mismas con los capítulos anteriores.

This study reexamines colour expressions and "basic colour terms" in Ẹdo language. It analyzes synchronic data against the eight (08) principles articulated by Berlin and Kay (1969) for identifying basic colour terms in languages, and demonstrates that what existing studies have established as basic colour terms for Ẹdo do not exhibit the set of features outlined in the principles and it will, therefore, be misleading to continuously consider them as basic. This paper argues that the so called colour terms in Ẹdo are derived forms that are either adaptations of verbs and descriptive Ẹdo idiophones or loaned words from English. Contrary to previous assumptions, this paper argues further that the Ẹdo language has no particular word in its lexicon for any colour. It concludes that the language adapts other terms, within or outside its lexicon, for the purpose of expressing colour concepts.

Ganza is a previously undescribed Omotic language of the Mao subgroup, and is the only Omotic language found primarily outside of Ethiopia. This paper presents the results of nearly a year of phonological fieldwork on Ganza in the form of a descriptive phonology. Included are presentations of the consonant and vowel phonemes, syllable structure and phonotactics, notable morphophonemic processes, and an overview of the tone system. Some interesting features of the phonology highlighted in this paper include the existence of a nasalizing glottal stop phoneme, lack of phonemic vowel length, a lexically determined vocalic alternation between ja~e, and the existence of "construct melodies" in the tone system. Given that both Omotic languages in general and especially the Mao subfamily are understudied, this paper provides much-needed data and analysis for the furtherance of Omotic linguistics.

Smolders, Joshua A. G. 2016. A Phonology of Ganza (Gwàmì Nánà). Linguistic Discovery 14(1):86-144.

The Munda languages of South Asia exhibit sound symbolism in their use of mimetic reduplication, to which they devote a surprisingly large percentage of their lexicons, typically upwards of ten percent. We present an extensive empirical typology of mimetic reduplication in seven Munda languages: Ho, Kera Mundari, Kharia, Mundari, Remo (Bondo), Santali, and Sora (Savara). Munda Mimetic forms can depict sensory qualities of sound, space, movement, texture, smell, taste, temperature, feelings, and sensations. The typology of mimetic reduplication in Munda varies across syntactic class, semantic domain and phonological form. This can shed light on the breadth of diverse structures in Munda languages, and may also be extrapolated to other languages and other examinations of reduplication and/or mimesis. This work provides a wealth of data to researchers of mimesis and reduplication, challenging the definition of what it means for forms to be sound-symbolic or reduplicated.

Mindanao is the Philippine's second largest island in the south. Identifying Mindanao-based documentaries that have development themes remain unknown or unacknowledged. Using Phenomenology as theoretical framework and method, as a result, the researcher found out that similar to other documentary films in other parts of the country and the world, the themes showed by Mindanao-based documentaries reflect  in agriculture, health, women and children, environment and population.
However unlike its other foreign and local counterparts, a number of Mindanao-based documentaries anchor the mentioned development themes under the context of peace and conflict situation, human rights, indigenous peoples and their ancestral domains.

This paper offers an account of two Documentary Linguistics Workshops held in Tokyo based on the author's personal experience. The workshops have been held for nine consecutive years at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS). The advantages and disadvantages of the courses are discussed in detail, and recommendations to students seeking similar programs are given.

Credits This is the written version of my speech at the international scientific conference on "Electronic Writing of RF Peoples". It builds on my ongoing projects, which are carried out in very close collaboration with several colleagues 1 and the preliminary results of which are published (or are prepared to be published) in [1, 2, 3, 4].

We describe our own experience of linguist-community collaboration over the last ten years in our Chatino Language Documentation Project, focused on the Chatino languages (Otomanguean; Oaxaca, Mexico). We relate episodes in the emergence and evolution of the collaboration between ourselves, and of the collaboration among ourselves and the Chatino communities with which we have worked. Our experience has several special features. First, our own collaboration began as native Chatino-speaking Ph.D. student and her teacher in a program focused on training speakers of Latin American indigenous languages in linguistics and anthropology, and developed into a larger collaboration among students and faculty where the student had a major leadership role. Second, our approach was documentary-descriptive and comparative, but it was also socially engaged or ‘activist,’, in that we sought to promote interest, awareness, and respect for the Chatino languages, to teach and support Chatino literacy, and to preserve and offer access to spoken Chatino, especially traditional verbal art. Our approach had synergies with local interests in writing and in honoring traditional speech ways, but it also led to conflicts over our roles as social actors, and the traditionally activist roles of indigenous teachers. Third, we experienced plasticity in the collaborative roles we played. Between ourselves, we were student and teacher, but also initiator and follower as we became engaged in revitalization. At the same time, the native speaker linguist found herself occupying a range of positions along a continuum from “insider” to “outsider” respect to her own community.

This article presents a phonological description of the Palu'e language variants and reflects on the problems of representing the language in writing. Verifiable lexical and phonological data are made available and an orthography is introduced. Data and analysis is drawn from a comprehensive documentation, and specific recordings of three speakers/language variants reading the same wordlist, available in an online audio collection. The phonetically transcribed recording of one speaker is compared with the other two and the corpus-based phonological description, and provided in an annotated appendix. The annotated recordings support the estimate of >99% lexical congruence and mutual intelligibility between variants. From a multi-variant perspective several phonemes are in free variation with each other. /tʃ/ does not occur mid-word/second syllable in the interior variants that use the initial PMP *c instead of the coastal /s/, but is in complementary distribution with mid-word /dʒ/. /s/ is neither in complementary distribution with /tʃ/ nor /dʒ/ in the coastal variants. Several Palu'e variants exhibit sufficient specific features to be referred to as dialects, including two of the recorded samples, whereas the speech patterns of the phonetically transcribed speaker make sense from the perspective of the surrounding variants.

The analysis of systems of tone, stress, and intonation in the world’s languages is a center of debate in modern phonology. While prototypical cases of stress languages such as English and tone languages such as Yòrúbà are well understood, languages on the peripheries of these prototypes, especially those with interactions between tone and stress systems, often pose challenges to researchers and theorists. The interaction between stress and tone in Huichol (Uto-Aztecan) language of western Mexico, can be understood using van der Hulst’s (2014) concept of accent, a lexically underlying mark of prominence. This analysis is based on both published and original Huichol-language data that Huichol is an accentual language with one accented mora per word. Huichol has privative tone that interacts with the accentual system: accented moras are assigned high tone. Thus, Huichol should be classified as a tone-accent language.

Throughout human history and to not expose himself to any risks, avoiding fears, premonition, and his apprehension, human being have been in a constant struggle to understand his surroundings and the secrets of natural phenomena, following his advantages and making it a method and principles for his daily life and survival. concurrently rejecting hostile forces as evil in order to overcome the disadvantages, this reflects into the sphere of the history of mythology and cosmology, In addition to language development. At first their thoughts revolve around things that caught their eyes like the phenomenon of night and day, through their occurrence and their resulting qualities, they felt the advantages and the disadvantages. So they began to realize that the night and its darkness bring fear, distress and discomfort, unlike the light of the day, which brings tranquility, happiness and joy. So when the sun rises and spreads its rays, they used the adjective mono, the first rank, and the adjective of prominence to it.

In this paper, we will introduce a general purpose and comprehensive documentation activity which we carried out between 2014 and 2015 on Chuvash, whose speakers are constantly decreasing in number and which is constantly declining against Russian.

This article seeks to establish a dialogue between the methodological proposals that have been put forward for linguistic fieldwork and the growing experiences of Indigenous linguists. It is well known that the theorizing of the methodologies that dictate linguists' interactions in their communities of study is carried out from a perspective foreign to both the language and the community. These methodologies are designed for and guided by non-Indigenous academics, predominantly academics from different countries than those of the language and its speakers. This paper argues that the challenges faced by insider and insider-outsider linguists are not the same challenges as those faced by outsider linguists. Thus, this article contributes to a reevaluation of the universality of ethical methodological principles of fieldwork behavior in contemporary linguistics and promotes a local, Indigenous perspective that implies the decolonization of fieldwork methodologies designed by and for foreigners and uncritically adopted by insider and insider-outsider linguists.

Let us suppose that you are a research linguist, tormented by some doubts and questions about the state of your profession, and not constrained by having to repeat a catechism of "known truths" to Linguistics 101 students, and not worried about employment tenure. How would you actually go about tackling "the central problem of linguistics", namely how we acquire and maintain knowledge of the probability of systemic relationships in a language?

This paper reflects on the language documentation carried out on Palu’e Island in eastern Indonesia, its results, and how it can be developed further. It is framed in the wider context of endangered languages documentation, which, arguably should be directed toward usage and revitalization. After a brief survey of the Palu’e language situation, a survey of the results and experiences is provided with the intent directed at future usage. Issues as community participation, capacity building, and motivation, are discussed and compared with recent and relevant scholarly analysis of the same issues. The project produced the intended results, and more, but at pains and after longer time than planned due to field-specific issues, and the further curating of the results, as well as the revitalization of the Palu’e language and oral traditions, are unclear if committed locals or the principal researcher are not involved. In conclusion, the author gives suggestions for the further work and curating of the Palu’e language, including an example of a recent attempt, and how the Palu’e experiences and results can be of use for near-future projects in eastern Indonesia and beyond. In the same vein it is argued that language communities should be informed about language shift and its consequences, and be provided with necessary consultancy and the minimum funding to be able to carry out as much as possible by themselves.

European cultural heritage and identity has been partially shaped through the discourse of the oral histories and traditions of its native populations. These have served not only as markers of historical and cultural continuity but also as vehicles of transmission of ancestral knowledge, beliefs and values. Apart from their internal pedagogical function, they are fundamental in understanding the construction of a complex and multi-faceted concept of European identity. Underrepresented local populations, often without a codified language and now threatened by assimilation, need to be documented in order to construct a more complete understanding of the true diversity of Europe's cultural and linguistic heritage. An example of one of Europe's oldest, native populations are the Arvanites whose transhumant pastoral lifestyle since ancient times led to a transnational population today situated mainly in southern Greece, southern Italy, southern Albania, parts of the Balkans and the diaspora. These small, rural, communities have managed to preserve their old way of life along with their language due to the fact that they were isolated, remote and endocentric and therefore not affected by modernization until recently. Their sole reliance on the land for subsistence makes them models of autonomy, solidarity and sustainable development characteristic of villages throughout the European periphery. Of interest is how their close relationship to the land has played a fundamental role in the construction of their strong and distinctive spatial identity. This spatial identity is composed of values and beliefs which are intrinsically and inextricably tied to the land's characteristics, functions and symbols. This paper will report on the results of a field study being carried out with the last speakers of Arvanitic in the community of Zarakas, Laconia, Greece which has been chosen as a Site of Community Importance and designated as a Special Area of Conservation under the Directive on the Conservation of Natural Habitats and of Wild Fauna and Flora of Natura 2000, a network of nature protection areas in the European Union. Texts collected through ethnographic research in the framework of documentary linguistics are analyzed via discourse analysis. Texts include interviews, dialogs, narratives, descriptions, songs and poems collected both through field work and library and archival research. I argue that that Arvantic cultural identity is intimately based in spatial values produced and transmitted through interaction in social-spatial spheres, and rooted in the cultural landscape; subsistence economy; ethno-biological knowledge systems; land based rituals, activities, sequences and rhythms of life; and a history of spatial mobility. I use this micro-level, bottom-up, descriptive analysis to shed light on how one dimension of European identity has been shaped at the grassroots and to suggest that this approach may be productive for understanding similar communities throughout Europe. Land is the concrete –but also symbolically constituted-source of a collective sense of identity which could provide a viable model of identity construction at the macro level useful for European policy making and sustainability.

We describe our experiences training speakers of indigenous languages of Latin America in documentary linguistics at a major US university. We feel that it has had and will have benefits for community language preservation efforts, for documentary linguistics, for linguistics more generally, and for our university. We hope here to make this case; and we hope it will encourage those in other universities contemplating such a programme for themselves in a way that suits their own interests, needs, and world position.

This paper takes on two main objectives. The first is to present and depict the project Frontespo-Frontera hispano-portuguesa: documentación lingüística y bibliográfica [Spanish-Portuguese frontier: linguistic and bibliographic documentation], which aims at producing a comprehensive linguistic documentation of the frontier area between Portugal and Spain. The second objective is to study the stressed vowel systems of a specific border area located in the central interior part of Portugal, which, despite not having been subject to a detailed depiction up to this day, is decisive in understanding the constitution of Portuguese central-southern dialects as a whole, as recent studies have shown. The results are clear in (i) allowing for the description of the area's vowel systems and (ii) improving our view on the history of central-southern Portuguese. This study therefore exemplifies the type of linguistic approach that a project like Frontespo allows for and, more importantly, the need for new, comprehensive language documentation projects in Portugal.

This article gives a first overview of the sign language situation in Mali and its capital, Bamako, located in the West African Sahel. Mali is a highly multilingual country with a significant incidence of deafness , for which meningitis appears to be the main cause, coupled with limited access to adequate health care. In comparison to neighboring countries, the first school for deaf children was established relatively late—in 1995. Various sign languages have been used in Malian deaf education, but, following the regional trend, the schools for deaf children eventually settled for a variety of ASL adapted to French. The vast majority of Malian signers have not received formal education , however, and have no or only limited command of ASL. They use various forms of the local sign language, Malian Sign Language (LSM). The best-documented variety of LSM is the one used in Ba-mako, for which a dictionary and an annotated corpus exist. Another annotated corpus has been compiled for several varieties found in the Dogon area. Ambivalent attitudes are found in the deaf community with regard to the value and linguistic status of LSM and ASL, which pose a threat to the continued use of LSM, and deaf Malians are found to switch to ASL in areas in contact with deaf education or with formally educated signers.

throughout human history and to not expose himself to any risks, avoiding fears, premonition, and his apprehension, human being have been in a constant struggle to understand his surroundings and the secrets of natural phenomena, following his advantages and making it a method and principles for his daily life and survival. concurrently rejecting hostile forces as evil in order to overcome the disadvantages, this reflects into the sphere of the history of mythology and cosmology, In addition to language developmenty. At first their thoughts revolve around things that caught their eyes like the phenomenon of night and day, through their occurrence and their resulting qualities, they felt the advantages and the disadvantages. So they began to realize that the night and its darkness bring fear, distress and discomfort, unlike the light of the day, which brings tranquility, happiness and joy. So when the sun rises and spreads its rays, they used the adjective mono, the first rank, and the adjective of prominence to it.