Welcome to an ongoing project analyzing the surviving Taino corpus for cognates through comparison.
03/15/2026
Some more updates on the book!
Thank you to everyone who has supported me in this effort. I hope to provide more updates soon, but I am doing this while going to school and working. I am grateful that most of the response has been supportive, but of course I have heard some opposing positions, which I hope to provide a suitable rebuttal for with this effort. Bless! 👋
Updates:
- Overhaul of the general structure of the book
- "-buré" was moved from the Nouns chapter
- New words added to Dictionary
Hey, everyone! The effort is still ongoing. I hope to be able to share with y'all a few more Tayno Words of the Day soon. I strive to make sure that the information I provided is accurate and founded in a good understanding of Arawakan linguistics. But I also want to make sure that what I say is easy to understand, rather than academic jargon 😅😂 so thank you all for the patience!
¡Bienvenidos a otra Palabra Yucayo del Día! La palabra de hoy es "flor" or "fruta". Esta palabra fue escrito por Pichardo en su Diccionario Provincial referiendo a la varilla o pendón de una planta (principalmente a la de la caña)
¡Recursos estarán en los comentarios!
Welcome to another Tayno Word of the Day! Today's word is "flower" or "fruit". This word was recorded by Pichardo in his Diccionario Provincial as referring to the stem or rod of a plant.
Sources will be posted in the comments!
04/29/2025
Today's is SA which means “good” or “proper”. It appears in a number of words, but today we are focusing on its use in SABANA and SAO. I have included Kalípona ICHALI “garden” to show an example of how this root is used to make words related to land that is cleaned or weeded. There is also Lokono SAUKILI “cleared space, such as a lawn” and ISAUKA “kingdom, realm”.
Sources:
Breton's 1665 Dictionnaire caraïbe-français
Ramirez's Dicionário Baniwa-Português
Patte's La langue arawak de Guyane
SIL's Wayuu Dictionary on Webonary
04/28/2025
Today's post goes over the complicated history of the word , focusing on its origins within Arawak, how it has come to be used today, and where we can go from there. I hope this poster is helpful to people trying to learn more about their heritage. I will be posting a Spanish translation soon.
- Yadiel Nieves
03/04/2025
Alongside studying the Classical Taíno language, it is also important to consider how Taíno fits into the greater context of the Caribbean Arawakan branch. I started keeping track of these shared cognates, and I hope to update this list soon!
09/25/2024
Probably my favorite set of cognates. Although Lokono has konoko for "forest," Taíno konuko is closer in meaning to Baniwa keníke and Maragua kunukú "farmland". They all came from the same root in Proto-Arawakan (probably kïnikï).
08/16/2024
Updates:
- 2nd Draft started
- Citations and References have been moved to footnotes, with elaboration.
- Chapter on Noun Morphology mostly complete
05/28/2024
Lucayan WOTD:
Today's word of the day is [kiwa] and [siwa].