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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. In the early colonial period Tupi was used as a lingua franca throughout Brazil by Europeans as well as Amerindians but it was later suppressed to extinction, leaving only one modern descendant: Nheengatu.

The names Old Tupi and Tupi Antigo are used for the language in English and Portuguese, respectively, by modern scholars, but the speakers of the language called it variously ñe'engatú ("the good language"), ñe'endyba ("the language of us all"), abáñe'enga ("human language"), in Old Tupi, or língua geral (general language), língua geral amazônica (Amazonian general language), língua brasílica (Brazilian language), in Portuguese.

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

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 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 /s/ 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 until today.

Tupi Research

The first studies on Tupi were not made by trained linguists, but by Catholic missionaries imbued with the will to understand and convert to christendom those "wild savages" whose habits (like cannibalism, polygamy, body piercing, free love and the absence of clothing) greatly 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 copiously translating 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. Taking this into account, one can agree on the following characteristics of Tupi.

Phonology

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

This led to a Portuguese pun about this language, that Brazilians não têm fé, nem lei, nem rei (have neither 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).

Vowels

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

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 caution, as no actual recording exists and it is known that Tupi had at least seven dialects.

Semivowels

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

[This] is a wavefile with a sample pronunciation of the /y/ by a native speaker of nhengatu. It must be noted, however, that the reported difficulty in understanding 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.

Consonants

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

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

An Alternative View

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

This scheme does not consider "ŷ" as a separate semivowel, ignores the existence of "G" (/ɣ/) and does not differentiate between the two types of NG (/ŋ/ and /ⁿɡ/), probably because it does not consider MB (/ⁿb/), ND ((/ⁿd/) and NG (/ⁿɡ/) as independent phonemes, but mere combinations of P, T, and K with nasalization.

Santos Gomes also remarks 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 /ʓ/, 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".

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:

Morphology

Most Tupi words are roots with one or two syllables, usually with double or triple meanings that are explored extensively for metaphorical purposes: Interestingly, the most common words tend to be monosyllabic: Most disyllabic words tend to have an unstressed final vowel (normally written "a") that is dropped when the word is used to form sentences or compounds. When the final vowel is stressed it never drops. Polysyllabic (non-compound) words, thought not as common, are frequent: Compound nouns are formed in three ways: Later, after the colonisation, the process was used to name things that the Indians originally did not have: Some writers have even extended this further, 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:

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

Grammatical Structure

Unlike most European languages, Tupi was not a fusional language, nor did it have discernible agglutinating features, though some authors still use the latter term 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".

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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 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:

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:

However, reduplication was not employed.

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

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:

Unlike in Indo-European languages, nouns were 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 adverbs like ko ara (this day).

Adjectives and nouns, however, do have temporal inflection:

Regarding syntax, 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 rhetorical or literary uses.

Presence of Tupi in Brazil

As the basis for the língua geral, spoken throughout the country by both white and Indian settlers until the early 18th century, and still heard in isolated pockets until the early 20th 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:

Tupi is still quite "felt" in Brazil today as about 40% of the Brazilian municipalities have Tupi names: Among the many Tupi loanwords in Portuguese, the following are notheworthy for their widespread use: 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 best known in Brazilian Portuguese by non-Tupi names: onça (on-sa) and anta.

A significant number of Brazilians have Tupi names as well:

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".

Sample Vocabulary

Colors

Substances

People

The Body

Animals

Plants

Society

Adjectives

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.

Recurrency

Tupi is also remembered as distinctive trait of nationalism in Brazil. In the 1930s, Brazilian Integralism used it as the source of most of its catchphrases (like Anaûé, the old Tupi salutation which 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.

Bibliography

See also

External links

 

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