Tuyuca[2] (also Dochkafuara, Tejuca, Tuyuka, Dojkapuara, Doxká-Poárá, Doka-Poara, or Tuiuca) is an Eastern Tucanoan language (similar to Tucano). Tuyuca is spoken by the Tuyuca, an indigenous ethnic group of some 500-1000 people, who inhabit the watershed of the Papuri River, the Inambú River, and the Tiquié River, in Vaupés Department, Colombia, and Amazonas State, Brazil.
Grammar
Tuyuca is a postpositional agglutinative subject–object–verb language with mandatory type II evidentiality.[3] Five evidentiality paradigms are used: visual, nonvisual, apparent, second-hand, and assumed, but second-hand evidentiality exists only in the past tense, and apparent evidentiality does not occur in the first-person present tense.[4] The language is estimated to have 50 to 140 noun classes.[5][unreliable source]
Phonology
Tuyuca's consonants are /p t k b d ɡ s r w j h/, and its vowels are /i ɨ u e a o/, with syllable nasalization and pitch accent occurring as well.[4]
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i | ɨ | u |
| Low | e | a | o |
Consonants
| Labial | Coronal | Palatal | Velar | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Obstruent | voiceless | p | t | s | k |
| voiced | b ~ m | d ~ n | dʒ ~ ɲ ~ j |
ɡ ~ ŋ | |
| Sonorant | w ~ w̃ | ɺ ~ r ~ r̃ | h ~ h̃ | ||
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'
Variation
- Voiceless plosives /p, t, k/ have aspirated variants that tend to occur before high vowels but 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 variation 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 before nasal vowels: [m, n, ŋ, ɳ, w̃, j̃].
- 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
Tuyuca's two suprasegmental features are tone and nasalization.
Tone
There is a high tone (H) and a low tone (L) in Tuyuca. The phonological word has only one high tone, which may occur in any syllable of the word. The low tone has two variants: a mid-tone, which occurs in words with at least three syllables in free variation, and the low tone, which occurs in internal syllables that have [i] that is contiguous to the high tone but not preceded by a low tone.
- The accent is the same as high tone.
- The tone is contrastive in (C)VV syllables.
- /díi/ 'blood'
- /dií/ 'mud'
- (C)VCV words, except for loanwords, have the tone on the second syllable.
- /eté/ 'parakeet'
- /b̃ésa/ 'table' (← Portuguese 'mesa')
Nasalization
Nasalization is phonemic and operates at the root level.
- /sĩã/ 'to kill'
- /sia/ 'to tie'
Phonetic distribution and syllabic structure
A syllable is any unit that may take tone and has a vocalic nucleus, regardless of whether or not it has a consonant before it.
Restrictions
- /ɡ/ and /r/ do not occur word-initially
- /ɡu/ and /wu/ do not occur.
- No VV string starts with /u/.
- Multisyllabic VVV strings occur, but not all combinations of vowels are attested. /u/ is always last in such strings.
- (C)V may be optionally be pronounced with aspiration, with the same quality as the preceding vowel, when the syllable is both unstressed and before syllables with voiceless onsets.[8]
Morphophonemics
All affixes are in one of the two classes:
- Oral affixes that may undergo nasalization, like the plural morpheme -ri: /sopéri/ 'marks'[clarification needed]
- Affixes that are intrinsically oral or nasal and are not changed.
When a nasal CV suffix occurs and C is a continuant or a vibrant /r/, regressive nasalization is undergone by the preceding vowel.
References
- ^ Tuyuca at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
- ^ [1][dead link]
- ^ de Haan, Ferdinand (2012). "Evidentiality and Mirativity". In Binnick, Robert I. (ed.). Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect. Oup USA. 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. doi:10.1086/465835. JSTOR 1265549. S2CID 143310034.
- ^ "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".
- Tuyuca (Intercontinental Dictionary Series)