Old Tupi language

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Old Tupi is an extinct Tupian language which was spoken by the native people from Brazil, mostly those who lived close to the sea. The language belongs to the Tupi-Guarani language subfamily. It enjoyed a brief period of literacy, in the 16th, 17th and early 18th centuries but was later suppressed to extinction, leaving only one modern descendant: Nhengatu.

The names Old Tupi and Tupi Antigo are used for the language in English and Portuguese, respectively, but the speakers of the language called it variously ñe'engatú ("the good language"), ñe'endyba ("the language of us all") or abáñe'enga ("human language").

Most of the available data about Old Tupi are based on the Tupinamba dialect, spoken in what is now the Brazilian state of São Paulo but there were other dialects as well.

Contents

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History

Tupi was spoken by an illiterate people, living under cultural and social conditions very unlike those found in Europe. It is quite different from Indo-European languages both in phonology, morphology and grammar.

Tupi belonged to the the Tupi-Guarani language family, which stood out among other South American languages for the huge territory it covered. Until the XVI century these languages were found throughout nearly the entirety of the Brazilian coast, from Pará to Santa Catarina, and the River Plate basin. Today Tupi languages are still heard in Brazil (states of Maranhão, Pará, Amapá, Amazonas, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Goiás, São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul, Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo) as well as in French Guyana, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina.

It is a common mistake to refer to a "Tupi-Guarani" language, which is incorrect: Tupi, Guarani and a number of other minor or major languages all belong to the "Tupi-Guarani" language family, in the same sense that English, Romanian and Sanskrit belong to the Indo-European language family. However, the level of similarity between Tupi and Guarani is considered much higher than that of any given two existing European languages. The main difference between the two languages was the replacement of the Tupi Template:IPA by the glottal fricative /h/.

The first accounts of the Old Tupi language date back from the early XVI century, but the first written documents containing actual information about it are produced from 1575 onwards -- when Jesuits like Andre Thevet and Jose de Anchieta started to translate Catholic prayers and biblical stories into the language. Another foreigner, Jean de Lery, wrote the first (and possibly the only) Tupi "phrasebook", in which he transcribed entire dialogues. Lery's work is very important because it is the closest thing we have as to how Tupi was actually spoken.

In the first two or three centuries of Brazilian history, nearly all colonists coming to Brazil would eventually learn Tupi (the Tupinamba variant) as a means of communication with both the indians themselves and early colonists who had adopted the language of the indians.

The Jesuits, however, not only learned to speak Tupinamba but also encouraged the indians to keep it. As a part of their missionary work they translated a lot of literature into it and also produced some original work written directly in it. Jose de Anchieta reportedly wrote more than 4,000 lines of poetry in Tupinamba (which he called Lingua Brasilica) and the first Tupi grammar. Luis Figueira was another important figure at this point, writing the second Tupi grammar, published in 1621. In the second half of the XVIII century the works of Anchieta and Figueira were republished and a new and more complete cathecism, by Father Bettendorf, was written. By that time the language had made its way into the clergy and was the de facto national language of Brazil -- though it was probably seldom written, as the Catholic Church held a near monopoly of literacy.

When the Portuguese prime-minister Marquis de Pombal expelled the Jesuits from Brazil, in 1759, the language started to wane as few Brazilians were literate on it. It survived as a common language (spoken by whites and indians alike), mostly in isolated inland areas, for more than a century.

The influence of Tupi lasts today.

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Tupi Research

The first studies on Tupi were not made by trained linguists, but by Catholic missionaries imbibed with the will of understanding and converting to christendom those "wild savages" whose habits (like cannibalism, polygamy, body piercing, free love and the absence of clothing) strongly scandalised the European men of faith.

Therefore, the first (and the only contemporary) grammar of Tupi reflected the conditioning and the prejudices of both the religion and the science of Europe: despite the sheer inacuracy of Indo-European terminology to describe the categories of words in Tupi, they are used (and there was an apparent tendency towards regularising or grammaticalising the language). A good evidence of how inaccurate Indo-European "parts of speech" are is the fact that in Tupi it is the adjective (i.e. the word that expresses characteristics of the subject) instead of the verb (i.e. the word that expresses the actions of the subject) that bears the inflection of tense (past or future).

The first scholar to research Tupi was the Spanish Jesuit Jose de Anchieta --- who wrote a grammar and a glossary containing the vast majority of the few thousands of words (not all of them roots) that are known to us. He also demonstrated his mastering of the language (and the efficacy of his works) by translating copiously Catholic prayers, lives of saints and portions of the Bible. He even composed his own poems and plays in Tupi --- and his works are almost everything of Tupi that was left.

It is clear, then, that the research of Tupi is hampered by the scarcity of the surviving vocabulary, the inaccuracy of contemporary scholarship and the interference of the colonial view. Considering this, we can agree on the following characteristics of Tupi.

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Phonology

Tupinamba phonology had some interesting and unusual features. For instance, it has only two fricatives, /s/ and Template:IPA and does not have the liquid lateral (/l/) or the multiple vibrant rhotic consonant /R/. It also had a rather small inventory of consonants and an unusually large amount of pure vowels (12).

This leaded to a Portuguese pun on the language saying that the Brazilians não têm fé, nem lei, nem rei (have not faith, nor law, nor king) as the words fé (faith), lei (law) and rei (king) could not be pronounced by a native Tupi speaker (they would pronounce them pé, re'i and re'i).

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Vowels

Tupi has twelve vowel phonemes, oral and nasal variants of six basic vowels. The oral vowels are:

  • A — similar to Spanish, according to Anchieta (IPA Template:IPA).
  • E — similar to the English E in "hell" (IPA Template:IPA).
  • I — like EE in "seed" (IPA Template:IPA).
  • O — like the O of "hot" (IPA Template:IPA).
  • U — like OO in "moo" (IPA Template:IPA).
  • Y — similar to Polish y, or Romanian î (to approximate this sound, pronounce an English "oo" sound (IPA Template:IPA), but further forward in the mouth, with the lips less rounded; IPA Template:IPA). French linguists refer to this sound as being the exact opposite of the French "u".

Each of the six vowels has a nasalised counterpart :

It must be noted that the nasal vowels are fully vocalic, without any trace of a following M or N. They are vowels pronounced with the mouth open and the palate relaxed, not blocking the air from resounding through the nostrils.

These approximations, however, must be taken with a grain of salt, as no actual recording exists and it is known that Tupi had at least seven dialects.

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Semivowels

There are three semivowels, usually written with the circumflex accent to make clear the vowel from which they derive.

  • Î — like Y in English. Often affricate, becoming similar to the French J (IPA Template:IPA or Template:IPA).
  • Û — like W in English (IPA Template:IPA).
  • Ŷ — appears to be unique to Tupi-Guarani languages, it is identic to Y in timbre but is pronounced fast, with the same duration of a semivowel.

This is a wavefile with a sample pronunciation of the /y/ by a native speaker of nhengatu. It must be noted, however, that most of the reported difficulty in the understanding of this sound may be a consequence of the fact that most Tupi researches are native speakers of Portuguese, a language that lacks this specific phoneme.

It is unclear whether Ŷ really existed in all dialects .

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Consonants

The most surprising feature of Tupi was the consonantal system, due to the following characteristics:

  • There are no voiced stops. The voiceless stops (P, T, K) are paired with prenasalised voiced stops (MB, ND, NG) which Anchieta called quite similar to M, N and Ñ.
  • There was a glottal stop, IPA Template:IPA, which was not written, but was automatically inserted between a sequence of two consecutive vowels and at the beginning of vowel-initial words (aba, y, ara, etc.). When indicated in writing today, it is generally written with an apostrophe, '.
  • There are four nasal consonants: M, N, Ñ and NG (IPA Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, as in Spanish ñ, and Template:IPA, as in English ng, respectively).
  • There are only two fricatives, S and X (both unvoiced, one dental and the other palatal, IPA Template:IPA and IPA Template:IPA, as in English sh, respectively). Some authors remark that the actual pronunciation of /s/ was retroflex (though still distinct from Template:IPA).
  • The consonant written B was not pronounced with the mouth fully closed and had a distinctive fricative character (IPA Template:IPA, similar to English v or Spanish b, but articulated using both lips, not the bottom teeth and the top lips); it was not the voiced equivalent of the bilabial stop "P").
  • The glottal fricative (H) is mostly absent and often pronounced S. According to most sources, /h/ and /s/ were interchangeable and the prevalence of either varied from dialect to dialect (/h/ being more common in the southernmost dialects).
  • One rhotic consonant, a tap/flap (like the r of Spanish, or the t in American English city; IPA Template:IPA

The following 16 consonants are identified (with their IPA equivalents in parentheses):

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An Alternative View

According to Nataniel Santos Gomes, however, the Tupi phonetic inventory was simpler:

This scheme does not consider "ŷ" as a separate semivowel, ignores the exitense of "G" (Template:IPA) and does not see any difference between the two types of NG (Template:IPA and Template:IPA), probably because it does not consider MB (Template:IPA), ND ((Template:IPA) and NG (Template:IPA) as independent phonemes, but mere combinations of P, T, and K with nasalization.

Santos Gomes also regards that the consonantal stops shifted easily to nasal consonants, which is atested by the fitful spelling of words like umbu (umu, ubu, umbu, upu, umpu) in the works of the early missionaries and by the surviving dialects.

According to most sources, Tupi semivowels were more consonantal than their IPA counterparts. The "Î", for instance was rather fricative, thus resembling a very slight Template:IPA, while "Û" had a distinct similarity with the voiced glottal stop (/ɡ/), thus being sometimes written "gu". As a consequence of this character, Tupi loanwords in Brazilian Portuguese will replace J for "î" and GU for "û".

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Considerations on the Writing System

It would be almost impossible to reconstruct the phonology of Tupi if it did not have a wide geographic distribution. The surviving Amazonian Nhengatu and the close Guarani correlates (Mbyá, Nhandéva, Kaiowá and Paraguayan Guarani) provide material that linguistic research can make use of in order to achieve an approximate account of the language.

Scientific reconstruction of Tupi suggests that Anchieta largely simplified (or merely overlooked) the phonetics of the actual language when devising his grammar and his dictionary.

The writing system employed by Anchieta is still the basis for most modern scholars, despite its inaccuracy because it is easily typed with regular Portuguese or French typewriters (but not ISO-8859-1, which lacks ẽ, ĩ, ũ, and ỹ).

Its key features are:

  • The use of the circumflex (^) to indicate the semivowel derived from a vowel: I => Î.
  • The use of the tilde to indicate the nasalisation of the vowel: A => Ã
  • The use of the acute accent to indicate the stressed syllable when it can't be inferred from the context: abá ("man").
  • The use of X for the unvoiced palatal fricative (which is strange to most languages, except Portuguese and Old Spanish).
  • The use of hyphens to separate the roots present in a compound is dropped, except in the dictionary.
  • The use of the digraphs "yg" (for Ŷ), "gu" (for /w/), "ss" (to force intervocalic soft S) and of J to represent the semivowel /j/.
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Morphology

Most Tupi words are roots with one or two syllables, usually with double or triple meanings that are explored extensively for metaphoric purposes:

  • kaa = bush / plant
  • y = water / liquid / spring / lake, puddle / river, brook
  • oby = green, greenish / blue, blueish
  • a = round / head / seed

Interestingly, the most common words tend to be monosyllabic:

  • sy = mother / source
  • ã = shadow / ghost
  • y
  • u = food
  • "po" = hand

Most bisyllabic words tend to have an unstressed final vowel (normaly written "a") that is dropped when the word is used to form sentences or compounds. When the final vowel is stressed it never drops.

  • tub[a] = father / origin
  • abá = man (human being, Indian only)
  • ar[a] = day / light / bird
  • itá = stone (or anything hard)
  • akutí = a small rodent, typical of Brazil (Cutia)
  • pak[a] = Paca
  • atã = war
  • ŷar[a] or ygara = boat, ship

Polysyllabic (non-compound) words, thought not as common, are many:

  • irundik[a] = one, lonely
  • jabutí = a tipe of turtle
  • jaûar[a] = jaguar
  • pindó[b][a] = palm tree

Compound nouns are formed in three ways:

  • Simple juxtaposition:
    • arasy = ara + sy (day + mother) = mother of day: the sun
    • yîara = y + îara (water + lord/lady) = lady of the lake (a mithological figure). Portuguese: Iara.
  • Juxtaposition with apocope:
    • Pindorama = pindoba + "rama" (palm tree + future aspect) = where there will be palm trees (this was the name by which some of the coast tribes called their homeland).
    • Takûarusu = takûara + [g]ûasú (bamboo + big) = big bamboo tree. Portuguese: Taquaruçu
  • Complex compounding using prefixes and suffixes:
  • Taubaté = taba + ybaka + ybaté (village + sky + high) = the name of a Brazilian town. Taubaté, which was originally the name of a village on the top of a mountain.
  • "Itákûakesétyba" = "itá + takûara + kesé + tyba" (rock + bamboo + wind + bend, swirl, move, flatten): the rock where the bamboo trees bend with the wind (the name of a Brazilian town: Itaquaquecetuba).

Later, after the colonisation, the process was used to name things that the Indians originally did not have:

  • ñande + îara (our + lord) = a title held by Christ in Catholic worship.
  • Tupã + sy (God + mother) = the mother of God (Mary).

Some writers even extended this further on creating Tupi neologisms for the modern life, in the same vein as New Latin. Mário de Andrade, for instance, coined "sagüim-açu" (saûĩ" + "[g]ûasú) for "elevator", using the name of a small tree-climbing monkey (sagüim).

When used in compounds, roots tended to be changed:

  • ñe'enga + katu (language + good) becomes Ñe'engatu, "Good Language".

This phenomenon has probably had some influence in the Brazilian tendency to produce portmanteau words and is still observed in daily speech, must for slang purposes.

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Grammatical Structure

Unlike most European languages, Tupi was not a fusional language, nor had distinct agglutinating features, though some authors still use the term "agglutinating" to describe its grammar.

As inferred from its complex compounding system, Tupi did not preserve the identity of each morpheme when compounding, which is enough to dismiss its "agglutinating" character and base a claim that it was "incorporating" or even, to some extent, "synthetic".

Template:Expert

It lacked proper verbs, did not know of adverbs, prepositions or articles and had very limited role for adjectives (as they could not be used alone and could not be made into abstract nouns). Tupi had pronouns as markings, not inflections or specific partitional particles.

The Tupi verb (i.e. the noun that appeared with verbal meaning in the sentence) was inflected by prefixation, but this inflection was not relative to "time" or "tense" but to linking the verb to the subject and defining the definiteness of the action.

Verbs were preceded by pronouns which could be subjective or objective. Subjective pronouns, like a- ("I") expressed the person who "did", while objective pronouns, like xe- ("me") meant the person who received the action. The two types could be used alone or combined:

  • a-bebé = I fly ("I can fly")
  • xe-pysyk = catch me ("someone has caught me", or "I'm caught")
  • a-î-pysyk = I him catch ("I have caught him")

Although Tupi verbs are not inflected, a number of pronomial variations did exist and form a rather complex set of aspects regarding who did what to whom. This, together with the temporal inflection of the noun and the presence of time markers, like ko ara (today) made up a fully functional verbal system.

Word order played a key role in the formation of meaning:

  • abá-í taba (man + tiny + our + village) = kid from the village
  • abá taba-í = man from the small village (or "the man from Smallville"...)

However, reduplication was not known.

Tupi had no means to inflect words for gender and used adjectives to do so. Some of these were:

  • apyyaba = man, male
  • kuñã = woman, female
  • kurumĩ = boy, young male
  • kuñãtãĩ = girl, young female
  • mena = male animal
  • kuñá = female animal

Notice that the gender notion also included the notion of age and that of "humanity" or "animality".

The notion of plural was also expressed by adjectives or numerals:

  • abá = man; abá eté = many men

Unlike European languages, the noun was not implicitly masculine, except for those provided with natural gender: "abá" (man) and "kuñã[tã]" (woman/girl); for instance.

Without proper verbal inflection, all Tupi sentences are in the present. When needed, time is indicated by adjectives like "ko ara" (this day).

Adjectives and nouns, however, do have temporal inflection:

  • abáûera (he who was once a man)
  • abárama (he who shall be a man someday)

Regarding word other, Tupi was mostly SOV, but word order tended to be free, as the presence of pronouns made it easy to tell which was the subject which was the object. Nevertheless, native Tupi sentences tend to be quite short, as the indians were not used to complex rhetoric or literary uses.

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Presence of Tupi in Brazil

As the basis for the Lingua Geral, spoken throughout the country by both white and Indian settlers until the early XVIII century and still heard in isolated pockets until the early XX century, Tupi left a strong mark on the Portuguese language spoken in Brazil, being by far its most distinctive source of modification.

Tupi has given Brazilian Portuguese:

  • A few thousands of words (some of them hybrid or bastardised) for animals, plants, fruit and cultural entities.
  • The English-like pronunciation of R in Southern states.
  • The intensification of the difference between rounded and unrounded E and O.
  • The intensification of nasalisation
  • The slang mechanism of producing compounds by assimilation (with both terms changing phonetically).

Tupi is still quite "felt" in Brazil today as about 40% of the Brazilian municipalities have Tupi names:

  • Iguaçu ("y ûasú") : great river
  • Itaquaquecetuba ("itákûakesétyba", from "itá + takûara + kesé + tyba"): the rock where the bamboo trees bend with the wind
  • Pindorama (from "pindó", palm tree): (sth) that will grow like a palm tree someday (this was the name that the tupinikins gave to the place where they lived.
  • Paranaíba ("paranãyba", from "paranã + y + ubá"): where the sea can be sailed by river boats
  • Umuarama ("ũbuarama", from "ũbu + ara + rama"): where the cacti will grow
  • Ipanema ("y panema"): unhealthy water (somehow prophetic).
  • Itanhangá ("itá + añãgá") : the rock where the devil goes.
  • Pacaembu ("paka + embu") : valley of the pacas.
  • Piraí ("pirá + í") : small fishes
  • Jaguariúna ("îagûara + í + una") : small black jaguar
  • Paraná-mirim ("paranã + mirĩ") : little ocean

Among the many Tupi loanwords in Portuguese, the following are notheworthy for their widespread use:

  • abacaxi (pineapple)
  • urubu (the Brazilian vulture)
  • urutu (a kind of rattlesnake)
  • pororoca (a tidal phenomenon in the Amazon firth)
  • piranha (a carnivorous fish, also slang for immoral women)
  • piroca (orinally meant "bald", now a slang for the penis)
  • pipoca (popcorn)
  • perereca (a type of small frog, also slang for the vulva)
  • peteca (a type of badminton game played with bare hands)
  • minhoca (earth worm)
  • siri (prawn)

It is interesting however, that two of the most distinctive Brazilian animals, the jaguar and the tapir, despite being named in English with Tupi loanwoards, are known in Portuguese by non-Tupi names: "onça" (on-sa) and "anta".

A significant number of Brazilians have Tupi names as well:

  • Araci (female) : "ara sy", the sun
  • Ubirajara (male) : "ybyrá îara", lord of the trees
  • Jaci (both) : "îá sy", the moon (mother of the night)
  • Ubiratan (male) : "ybyrá atã", war pipe
  • Janaína (female) : "îandá una", a beautiful black bird
  • Iara (female) : "y îara", lady of the lake

Some names of distinct indian ancestry have obscure etymology because the Tupinamba, as the Europeans, used to cherish traditional names, even though they sometimes had become archaic. Some of such names are "Moacir (reportedly meaning son of pain) and "Moema".

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Sample Vocabulary

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Colors

  • ting = white
  • pirang = red
  • oby = blue, green
  • îub = yellow
  • una = black
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Substances

  • yby = earth
  • itá = rock, stone, metal, mountain, island
  • y = water, river
  • ara = fire
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People

  • abá = man
  • kuñã = woman
  • kuñãtã = girl
  • ûirá = child
  • piá = son/daughter
  • sy = mother
  • morubixaba = chief
  • peró = Portuguese (neologism)
  • aîuba = Frenchman (literally "yellow heads")
  • karaĩb = foreigner, white man (literally means "spirit of a dead person")
  • tapyîa = slave (also the term for non-Tupi speaking indians)
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The Body

  • py = foot
  • po = hand
  • a, akanga = head
  • îyba = arm
  • etimã = leg
  • pŷa = heart
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Animals

  • mboî = snake, cobra
  • pirá = fish
  • tapyr = tapir
  • îagûar = jaguar
  • soó = game (animal)
  • kaapiûara = capivara
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Plants

  • kuri = pine
  • kaa, kaapi = grass, plant, ivy
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Society

  • oka = house, village
  • taba = collective house, Indian village
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Adjectives

  • asu, ûasu = big
  • mirĩ, í = little
  • katu, ngatu, gatu = good
  • ûera = bad, old, dead
  • panema = barren, contaminated, unhealthy, unlucky
  • tiba = many, much
  • beraba = brilliant, gleamy, shiny
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Sample Text

This is the Lord's Prayer in Tupi, according to Anchieta:

Oré r-ub, ybak-y-pe t-ekó-ar, I moeté-pyr-amo nde r-era t'o-îkó. T'o-ur nde Reino! Tó-ñe-moñang nde r-emi-motara yby-pe. Ybak-y-pe i ñe-moñanga îabé! Oré r-emi-'u, 'ara-îabi'õ-nduara, e-î-me'eng kori orébe. Nde ñyrõ oré angaîpaba r-esé orébe, oré r-erekó-memûã-sara supé oré ñyrõ îabé. Oré mo'ar-ukar umen îepe tentação pupé, oré pysyrõ-te îepé mba'e-a'iba suí.

Notice that two Portuguese words, "Reino" (Kingdom) and "tentação" (temptation) have been inserted, as no such concepts could be expressed with pure Tupi words.

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Recurrency

Tupi is also remembered as distinctive trait of nationalism in Brazil. In the 1930s, Integralism (Brazil's fascists) used it as the source of most of its catchphrases (like Anaûé, the old Tupi salutation that was adopted as the Brazilian version of the German "Sieg Heil") and terminology.

The study of Tupi is often proposed as a remedy for the lack of love for the country, like the law passed on Rio de Janeiro state in 1995. However, it is a dead language, actually known only to scholars.

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Bibliography

  • ALVES Jr., Ozias. Uma breve história da língua tupi, a língua do tempo que o brasil era canibal. http://www.staff.uni-mainz.de/lustig/guarani/lingua_tupi.htm
  • ANCHIETA, José de. Arte da gramática da língua mais usada na costa do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1933.
  • ANCHIETA, José de. Poemas: Lírica portuguesa e tupi. Editora Martins Fontes. (ISBN 8533619561)
  • COSTA, Luís R. Nheengatu Tupi. http://geocities.yahoo.com.br/lviz56/gramatica.htm
  • DI MAURO, Joubert J. Curso de Tupi Antigo. http://www.painet.com.br/joubert/cursotupiantigo.html
  • GOMES, Nataniel dos Santos. Síntese da Gramática Tupinambá. http://www.filologia.org.br/anais/anais_iicnlf45.html
  • EDELWEISS, Frederico G. Tupis e Guaranis, Estudos de Etnonímia e Lingüística. Salvador: Museu do Estado da Bahia, 1947. 220 p.
  • EDELWEISS, Frederico G. O caráter da segunda conjugação tupí. Bahia: Livraria Progresso Editora, 1958. 157 p.
  • EDELWEISS, Frederico G. Estudos tupi e tupi-guaranis: confrontos e revisões. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Brasiliana, 1969. 304 p.
  • GOMES, Nataniel dos Santos. Observações sobre o Tupinambá. Monografia final do Curso de Especialização em Línguas Indígenas Brasileiras. Rio de Janeiro: Museu Nacional / UFRJ, 1999.
  • LEMOS BARBOSA, A. Pequeno Vocabulário Tupi-Português. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria São José, 1951.
  • LEMOS BARBOSA, A. Juká, o paradigma da conjugação tupí: estudo etimológico-gramati
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External links

he:טופי אנטיגו pt:Tupi (língua)

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