Tuyuca language

Tuyuca
Docapúaraye
Native to	Colombia, Brazil
Native speakers	(1,000 cited 1983–2006)[1]
Language family	Tucanoan Eastern Central Bara Tuyuca
Language codes
ISO 639-3	tue
Glottolog	tuyu1244  (Tuyuca)[2]

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.^[3] The language is estimated to have 50 to 140 noun classes.^[4]

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.^[3]

Vowels

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

Consonants

	Bilabial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar
Voiceless stop	p	t		k
Voiced stop	b ~ m	d ~ n		ɡ ~ ŋ
Fricative		s
Rhotic		ɺ ~ r ~ r̃
Continuant	w ~ w̃		dʒ ~ j ~ ɲ	h ~ h̃

Consonantal contrasts

The following words show some of the consonant contrasts.^[5]

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].^[6]

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.
• 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.^[7]

Morphophonemics

All affixes fall into one of two classes:

1. Oral affixes which may undergo nasalization, like the plural morpheme -ri: /sopéri/ '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.

References

1. Tuyuca at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Tuyuca". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
3. Janet Barnes (1984). "Evidentials in the Tuyuca verb." International Journal of American Linguistics 50, pp. 255–71.
4. "Difficult Languages: Tongue Twisters - In search of the world’s hardest language". The Economist. 2009-12-17. Retrieved 2009-12-23.
5. Barnes, Janet; Silzer, Sheryl (1976). "Fonología del tuyuca". Sistemas fonológicos de idiomas colombianos (SIL) 3: 125.
6. Barnes, Janet; Silzer, Sheryl (1976). "Fonología del tuyuca". Sistemas fonológicos de idiomas colombianos (SIL) 3: 127.
7. Barnes, Janet; Silzer, Sheryl (1976). "Fonología del tuyuca". Sistemas fonológicos de idiomas colombianos (SIL) 3: 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".