Tuyuca language

Tuyuca
Spoken in	Colombia, Brazil
Native speakers	570 (Etnias de Colombia); 810 (SIL)  (date missing)
Language family	Tucanoan Eastern Tucanoan Central Bara Tuyuca
Language codes
ISO 639-3	tue

Tuyuca (also Dochkafuara, Tejuca, Tuyuka, Dojkapuara, Doxká-Poárá, Doka-Poara, or Tuiuca) is an Eastern Tucanoan language (similar to Tucano) spoken by the Tuyuca people. The Tuyuca are an indigenous ethnic group of some 500-1000 people who inhabit the watershed of the Papuri, Inambú and Tiquié rivers in the Colombian department of Vaupés and the Brazilian state of Amazonas.

Grammar

Tuyuca is a postpositional agglutinative SOV language with mandatory type II evidentiality. Five evidentiality paradigms are used: visual, nonvisual, apparent, secondhand, and assumed, though secondhand evidentiality exists only in the past tense and apparent evidentiality does not appear in the first person present tense. The language is estimated to have 50 to 140 noun classes.

Phonetics & Phonology

The consonants in Tuyuca are /ptkbdɡsrwjh/ and the vowels are /iɨueao/, plus syllable nasalization and phonemic stress.

Vowels

	Back	Central	Front
High	i	ɨ	u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Consonants

	bilabial	alveolar	palatal	velar
voiceless plosives	p	t		k
voiced plosives	b	d		g
voiceless Spirant		s
Rhotic		r
Semi-vowel	w		j	h

Consonantal contrasts

The following words show some of the consonant contrasts.

Bilabial contrasts

/pakó/ 'mom'

/bapá/ 'plate'

/wapá/ 'payment'

Alveolar contrasts

/botéa/ 'a fish'

/bodé/ 'dragonfly'

/bosé/ 'party'

/boré/ 'whitening'

Velar and palatal contrasts

/bɨkó/ 'ant-eater'

/bɨgó/ 'aunt'

/hoó/ 'plantain'

/yoó/ 'thread'

Consonantal variation

• The voiceless plosives /p, t, k/ have aspirated variants that tend to occur before high vowels and not near voiceless vowels. There are a few degrees of the amount of aspiration.
• Preglottalized variants of /b, d/ occur together at the onset.
  • Preglottal forms of [m, w, ~w, y, ~y, ɲ, dʒ] occur in the onset and are in free variations with their plain counterparts.
• Prenasal variants of /b, d, g/ occur after nasal vowels and before oral vowels: /kĩĩbai/ [kʰĩĩmbaiʰ].

Nasal Assimilation

• Voiced consonants /b, d, g, r, w, y/ have nasal variants at the same place of articulation [m, n, ɳ, ŋ, ~w, ~y] before nasal vowels.
  • The /y/ can also surface as ɲ before high nasal vowels.
• The [h] also has a nasalized variant that occurs before nasal vowels.

Nasal Harmony

Segments in a word are either all nasal or all oral.

/waa/ 'to go'

/ɯ̃ãã/ 'to illuminate' (the /w/ is nasal)

Note that voiceless segments are transparent.

/ãkã/ 'choke on a bone'

/ɯ̃ãtĩ/ 'demon'

See further remarks regarding the oral/nasal nature of affixes in the Morphophonemics section.

Suprasegmental features

The two suprasegmental features in this language are tone and nasalization.

Tone

There is a H-tone and a L-tone in Tuyuca. The phonological word has one and only one high tone which may occur in any syllable of the word. The low tone has two variants: a mid-tone that occurs in words that have at least three syllables in free variation with the low tone in internal syllables that have an [i] vowel contiguous to the H-tone and not preceded by a low-tone.

• Accent is the same as high tone.
• Tone is contrastive in (C)VV syllables

/díi/ 'blood'

/dií/ 'mud'

• Words of type (C)VCV have tone on the second syllable (but not in loanwords)

/eté/ 'parakeet'

/b~ésa/ 'table' (< Portuguese 'mesa')

Nasalization

Nasalization is phonemic and operates on the root level:

/sĩã/ 'to kill'

/sia/ 'to tie'

Phonetic distribution and syllabic structure

A syllable is considered any unit that may take tone and is comprised of a vocalic nucleus with or without a consonant before it.

Restrictions

• /g/ and /r/ never occur word-initially
• The strings /gu/ and /wu/ are absent.
• A VV string can be made up of any two vowels, either of which may occur first, except for /u/ which always occurs last.
• Multi-syllabic VVV strings occur, but not all combinations of vowels are attested. /u/ is always last in such strings.
• (C)V may be optionally realized with aspiration (having the same quality as the preceding vowel) when the syllable is unstressed and precedes syllables with voiceless onsets ..

Morphophonemics

All affixes fall into one of two classes:

1. Oral affixes which may undergo nasalization, like the plural morpheme -ri: /sopéri/ [sòO'pe~rĩh] 'marks'
2. Affixes that are intrinsically oral or nasal and cannot be changed.

When a nasal CV suffix occurs where C is a continuant or a vibrant /r/, the nasalization spreads regressively to the preceding vowel.

Difficulty

The Economist has described Tuyuca as the world's "most difficult" language because of its many noun classes and its evidentiality: something which requires that all sentences be supported by evidence which the speaker must give in the form of verbal suffixes.

External links

• Tuyuca language dictionary online from IDS (select simple or advanced browsing)
• Ethnologue entry