Tuyuca language
| Tuyuca | |
|---|---|
| Docapúaraye | |
| Native to | Colombia, Brazil |
Native speakers | (1,000 cited 1983–2006)[1] |
Tucanoan
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | tue |
| Glottolog | tuyu1244 Tuyuca |
| ELP | Tuyuka |
Tuyuca[2] (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.[3] 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.[4] The language is estimated to have 50 to 140 noun classes.[5]
Phonetics & Phonology
The consonants in Tuyuca are /p t k b d ɡ s r w j h/ and the vowels are /i ɨ u e a o/, plus syllable nasalization and pitch accent.[4]
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i | ɨ | u |
| Low | e | a | o |
Consonants
| Labial | Coronal | Palatal | Velar | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop | voiceless | p | t | s | k |
| voiced | b ~ m | d ~ n | dʒ ~ j ~ ɲ |
ɡ ~ ŋ | |
| Continuant | w ~ w̃ | ɺ ~ r ~ r̃ | h ~ h̃ | ||
Consonantal contrasts
The following words show some of the consonant contrasts.[6]
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'
- /bɨɡó/ 'aunt'
- /hoó/ 'plantain'
- /joó/ '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.
- Preglottalized forms of [m, w, w̃, j, j̃, ɲ, dʒ] occur in the onset and are in free variations with their plain counterparts.
- Prenasal variants of /b, d, ɡ/ occur after nasal vowels and before oral vowels: /kĩĩbai/ [kʰĩĩmbaii̥].[7]
Nasal Assimilation
- Voiced consonants /b, d, ɡ, r, w, j/ have nasal variants at the same place of articulation, [m, n, ŋ, ɳ, w̃, j̃], before nasal vowels.
- The /j/ 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'
- /w̃ãã/ 'to illuminate' (the /w/ is nasal)
Note that voiceless segments are transparent.
- /ãkã/ 'choke on a bone'
- /w̃ãtĩ/ '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 high tone (H) and a low tone (L) 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'
- /b̃ésa/ '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 consists of a vocalic nucleus with or without a consonant before it.
Restrictions
- /ɡ/ and /r/ never occur word-initially
- The strings /ɡu/ and /wu/ are absent.
- No VV string starts with /u/.
- 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.[8]
Morphophonemics
All affixes fall into one of two classes:
- Oral affixes which may undergo nasalization, like the plural morpheme -ri: /sopéri/ 'marks'[clarification needed]
- 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.
References
- ^ Tuyuca at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- ^ http://cdmbuntu.lib.utah.edu/utils/getfile/collection/etd2/id/1431/filename/184.pdf
- ^ de Haan, Ferdinand (2012). "Evidentiality and Mirativity". In Binnick, Robert I. (ed.). Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect. ISBN 9780195381979. Retrieved 21 April 2018.
- ^ a b Barnes, Janet (July 1984). "Evidentials in the Tuyuca Verb". International Journal of American Linguistics. 50 (3): 255–271. JSTOR 1265549.
- ^ "Difficult Languages: Tongue Twisters - In search of the world's hardest language". The Economist. 2009-12-17. Retrieved 2009-12-23.
- ^ Barnes, Janet; Silzer, Sheryl (1976). "Fonología del tuyuca". Sistemas fonológicos de idiomas colombianos. 3. SIL: 125.
- ^ Barnes, Janet; Silzer, Sheryl (1976). "Fonología del tuyuca". Sistemas fonológicos de idiomas colombianos. 3. SIL: 127.
- ^ Barnes, Janet; Silzer, Sheryl (1976). "Fonología del tuyuca". Sistemas fonológicos de idiomas colombianos. 3. SIL: 134.
External links
- Tuyuca language dictionary online from IDS (select simple or advanced browsing)
- ELAR archive of Brazilian Tuyuka language documentation materials
- Barnes, Janet; Silzer, Sheryl (1976). "Fonología del tuyuca". Sistemas fonológicos de idiomas colombianos (SIL) 3
- Barnes, Janet (1974). "Notes on Tuyuca discourse, paragraph and sentence".