Tuyuca language

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.

Tuyuca
Docapúaraye
Native toColombia, Brazil
Native speakers
1,400 (2012)[1]
Tucanoan
  • Eastern
    • Central
      • Bara
        • Tuyuca
Language codes
ISO 639-3tue
Glottologtuyu1244  Tuyuca
ELPTuyuka

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]

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:

  1. Oral affixes that may undergo nasalization, like the plural morpheme -ri: /sopéri/ 'marks'
  2. 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
  1. Tuyuca at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) closed access
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. "Difficult Languages: Tongue Twisters - In search of the world's hardest language". The Economist. 2009-12-17. Retrieved 2009-12-23.
  6. Barnes, Janet; Silzer, Sheryl (1976). "Fonología del tuyuca". Sistemas fonológicos de idiomas colombianos. SIL. 3: 125.
  7. Barnes, Janet; Silzer, Sheryl (1976). "Fonología del tuyuca". Sistemas fonológicos de idiomas colombianos. SIL. 3: 127.
  8. Barnes, Janet; Silzer, Sheryl (1976). "Fonología del tuyuca". Sistemas fonológicos de idiomas colombianos. SIL. 3: 134.
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