Tupi language

History

Old Tupi was first spoken by a pre-literate Tupinambá people, living under cultural and social conditions very unlike those found in Europe. It is quite different from Indo-European languages in phonology, morphology and grammar and even so it was adopted by many Luso-Brazilians as a lingua franca known as língua geral.

It belonged to the Tupi–Guarani language family, which stood out among other South American languages for the vast territory it covered. Until the 16th 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 speak of the "Tupi–Guarani language": Tupi, Guarani and a number of other minor or major languages all belong to the Tupian language family, in the same sense that English, Romanian and Sanskrit belong to the Indo-European language family. One of the main differences between the two languages was the replacement of Tupi /s/ by the glottal fricative /h/ in Guarani.

The first accounts of the Old Tupi language date back from the early 16th century, but the first written documents containing actual information about it were produced from 1575 onwards – when Jesuits André Thévet and José de Anchieta began to translate Catholic prayers and biblical stories into the language. Another foreigner, Jean de Lery, wrote the first (and possibly only) Tupi "phrasebook", in which he transcribed entire dialogues. Lery's work is very important because it is the best available record of how Tupi was actually spoken.

In the first two or three centuries of Brazilian history, nearly all colonists coming to Brazil would learn the tupinambá variant of Tupi, as a means of communication with both the Indians and with other early colonists who had adopted the language.

The Jesuits, however, not only learned to speak tupinambá but also encouraged the Indians to keep it. As a part of their missionary work they translated some literature into it and also produced some original work written directly in Tupi. José de Anchieta reportedly wrote more than 4,000 lines of poetry in tupinambá (which he called lingua Brasilica) and the first Tupi grammar. Luís Figueira was another important figure of this time, who wrote the second Tupi grammar, published in 1621. In the second half of the 18th century, the works of Anchieta and Figueira were republished and Father Bettendorf wrote a new and more complete catechism. 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 Roman Catholic Church held a near monopoly of literacy.

When the Portuguese Prime-Minister Marquis of Pombal expelled the Jesuits from Brazil in 1759, the language started to wane fast, as few Brazilians were literate in it. Besides, a new rush of Portuguese immigration had been taking place since the early 18th century, due to the discovery of gold, diamond and gems in the interior of Brazil; these new colonists spoke only their mother tongue. Old Tupi survived as a spoken language (used by Europeans and Indian populations alike) only in isolated inland areas, far from the major urban centres. Its use by a few non-Indian speakers in those isolated areas would last for over a century still.

Tupi research

When the Portuguese first arrived on the shores of modern-day Brazil, most of the tribes they encountered spoke very closely related dialects, a very different situation from the one they left in Europe. The Portuguese (and particularly the Jesuit priests that accompanied them) set out to proselytise the natives. In order to do so most effectively, it was convenient that they should do so in the natives' own languages; for that reason, the first Europeans to study Tupi were those priests.

The priests modeled their analysis of the new language after the one they had already experience with: Latin, which they had studied in the Seminary. And in fact, the first grammar of Tupi – written by the Jesuit priest José de Anchieta in 1595 – is structured much like a contemporary Latin grammar. While this structure is not optimal, it certainly served its purpose of allowing its intended readership (Catholic priests familiar with Latin grammars) to get enough of a basic grasp of the language to be able to communicate with and evangelise to the natives. Also, the grammar sometimes regularised or glossed over some regional differences in the expectation that the student, once "in the field", would learn these finer points of the particular dialect through use with his flock.

Significant works were a Jesuit Catechism of 1618, with a second edition of 1686; another grammar written in 1687 by another Jesuit priest, Luís Figueira; an anonymous dictionary of 1795 (again published by the Jesuits); a dictionary published by Antônio Gonçalves Dias, a well-known 19th century Brazilian poet and scholar, in 1858; and a chrestomathy published by Dr Ernesto Ferreira França in 1859.

Considering the breadth of its use both in time and space, this language is particularly poorly documented in writing, particularly the dialect of São Paulo spoken in the South.

Phonology

The phonology of tupinambá has some interesting and unusual features. For instance, it does not have the lateral approximant /l/ or the multiple vibrant rhotic consonant /r/. It also has a rather small inventory of consonants and a large number of pure vowels (twelve).

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 say pé, re'i and re'i).

Vowels

It should be noted that the nasal vowels are fully vocalic, without any trace of a trailing [m] or [n]. They are 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.

Consonants

The glottal stop is found only between a sequence of two consecutive vowels and at the beginning of vowel-initial words (aba, y, ara, etc.). When it is indicated in writing, it is generally written as an apostrophe.

† Some authors remark that the actual pronunciation of /s/ was retroflex /ʂ/. Also, most sources describe some dialects having /s/ and /h/ in free variation.

‡ The actual pronunciation of ŷ is the corresponding semivowel for /ɨ/. It appears to be unique to Tupi–Guarani languages, and it may not have existed in all dialects.

Alternative view

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

Consonants:

p, t, k, ‘ (/ʔ/)

b (/β/)

s, x (/ʃ/)

m, n, ñ (/ɲ/)

û (/w/), î (/j/)

r (/ɾ/)

Vowels

i, y (/ɨ/), u, ĩ, ỹ, ũ

e, o, õ, ẽ

a, ã

This scheme does not regard Ŷ as a separate semivowel, does not consider the existence of G (/ɣ/), and does not differentiate between the two types of NG (/ŋ/ and /ⁿɡ/), probably because it does not regard 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 stop consonants shifted easily to nasal stops, which is attested 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 [ʑ], and Û had a distinct similarity with the voiced stop [ɡʷ], thus being sometimes written gu. As a consequence of that character, Tupi loanwords in Brazilian Portuguese often have j for Î and gu for Û.

Considerations on the writing system

It would have been 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 still use for an approximate reconstruction of the language.

Scientific reconstruction of Tupi suggests that Anchieta either simplified or overlooked the phonetics of the actual language when he was devising his grammar and his dictionary.

The writing system employed by Anchieta is still the basis for most modern scholars. It is easily typed with regular Portuguese or French typewriters and computer keyboards (but not with character sets such as ISO-8859-1, which cannot produce ẽ, ĩ, ũ, ŷ and ỹ).

Its key features are:

The tilde indicating nasalisation: a → ã.

The circumflex accent indicating a semivowel: i → î.

The acute accent indicating the stressed syllable: abá.

The use of the letter x for the unvoiced palatal fricative /ʃ/, a spelling convention common in the languages of the Iberian Peninsula but unusual elsewhere.

The use of the digraphs yg (for Ŷ), gu (for /w/), ss (to make intervocalic S unvoiced), and of j to represent the semivowel /j/.

Hyphens are not used to separate the components of compounds except in the dictionary or for didactical purposes.

Morphology

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

a = round / head / seed

kaa = forest / bush / plant

oby = green / blue; considered a single colour in many languages.

y = water / liquid / spring / lake, puddle / river, brook

The most common words tend to be monosyllables:

a = head / round

ã = shadow / ghost

po = hand

sy = mother / source

u = food

y = water, river

Disyllabic words belong to two major groups, depending on which syllable is stressed:

If the stress falls on the penult, the last syllable ends with an unstressed vowel (traditionally written with the letter a). Such words usually drop the last vowel (or sometimes even the entire last syllable) to form compounds or drop the vowel and undergo a consonant mutation (nasalisation): ñeenga (speech) + katú (good) = ñeen-ngatú (the good language).

If the stress falls on the last syllable, the syllable is unchanged: itá (rock, stone) + úna (black) = itaúna.

Polysyllabic (non-compound) words are less common but are still frequent and follow the same scheme:

paranã (the sea) + mirĩ (little) = paranãmirĩ (salty lagoon)

pindóba (palm tree) + ûasú (big) = pindobusú.

Nasal mutation of the initial consonant is always present, regardless of stress. Polysyllabic words are never stressed on the first syllable.

Compound nouns are formed in three ways:

Simple agglutination:

arasy = ara + sy (day + mother) = mother of day: the sun

yîara = y + îara (water + lord/lady) = lady of the lake (a mythological figure).

Blending with either apocope or aphesis:

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 + ûasú (bamboo + big) = big bamboo tree. Portuguese: Taquaruçu (a variant of bamboo).

Complex blending, with both apocope and aphesis:

Taubaté = taba + ybaté (village + high) = the name of a Brazilian town, Taubaté, which was originally the name of a village on the top of a mountain.

Itákûakesétyba = takûara + kesé + tyba (bamboo + knife + collective mark): where knives are made out of bamboo wood (the name of a Brazilian town: Itaquaquecetuba).

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

îande + Îara (our + Lord) = a title held by Christ in Catholic worship.

Tupã + sy (God + mother) = the mother of God (Mary).

Some writers have even extended it 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", from sagüim, the name of a small tree-climbing monkey.

Grammatical structure

Unlike most European languages but like Japanese, Tupi was an agglutinative language with moderate degree of fusional features (nasal mutation of stop consonants in compounding, the use of some prefixes and suffixes). Although agglutinative, unlike Japanese, Tupi lacks enough agglutinative power to form complex sentence-containing words (as polysynthetic languages do).

Tupi parts of speech did not follow the same conventions of Indo-European languages:

Verbs are "conjugated" for person (by means of prepositioning subject or object pronouns) but not for tense or mood (the very notion of mood is absent). All verbs are in the present tense.

Nouns are "declined" for tense (by means of suffixing the aspect marker) but not for gender or number.

There is a distinction of nouns in two classes: "higher" (for things related to human beings or spirits) and "lower" (for things related to animals or inanimate beings). The usual manifestation of the distinction was the use of the prefixes t- for high-class nouns and s- for low-class ones, so that tesá meant "human eye", and sesá meant "the eye of an animal". Some authors argue that it is a type of gender inflection.

Adjectives cannot be used in the place of nouns, neither as the subject nor as the object nucleus (in fact, they cannot be used alone).

Tupi had a split-intransitive grammatical alignment. Verbs were preceded by pronouns, which could be subject or object forms. Subject pronouns like a- "I" expressed the person was in control, while object pronouns like xe- "me" signified the person was not. The two types could be used alone or combined in transitive clauses, and they then functioned like subject and object in English:

A-bebé = I-fly, "I can fly", "I flew".

Xe pysyka = me catch, "Someone has caught me" or "I'm caught".

A-î-pysyk = I-him-catch, "I have caught him".

Although Tupi verbs were not inflected, a number of pronominal variations existed to form a rather complex set of aspects regarding who did what to whom. That, together with the temporal inflection of the noun and the presence of tense markers like koára "today," made up a fully functional verbal system.

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

taba abá-im (village + man + tiny) = tiny man from the village

taba-im abá = man from the small village

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

apyŷaba = man, male

kuñã = woman, female

kunumĩ = boy, young male

kuñãtãĩ = girl, young female

mena = male animal

kuñã = female animal

The notion of gender was expressed, once again, together with the notion of age and that of "humanity" or "animality".

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

abá = man; abá-etá = many men

Unlike 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 were in the present or in the past. When needed, tense is indicated by adverbs like ko ara, "this day".

Adjectives and nouns, however, had temporal inflection:

abáûera "he who was once a man"

abárama "he who shall be a man someday"

That was often used as a semantic derivation process:

akanga "head"

akangûera "skull" (of a skeleton)

abá "man"

abárama "teenager"

With respect to syntax, Tupi was mostly SOV, but word order tended to be free, as the presence of pronouns made it easy to tell the subject from the object. Nevertheless, native Tupi sentences tended to be quite short, as the Indians were not used to complex rhetorical or literary uses.

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

According to Edward Sapir's categories, Old Tupi could be characterized as follows:

1. With respect to the concepts expressed: complex, of pure relation, that is, it expresses material and relational content by means of affixes and word order, respectively.
2. With respect to the manner in which such concepts are expressed: a) fusional-agglutinative, b) symbolic or of internal inflection (using reduplication of syllables, functionally differentiated).
3. With respect to the degree of cohesion of the semantic elements of the sentence: synthetic.

Colors

îubá = yellow, golden

(s)oby = blue, green

pirang = red

ting = white

(s)un = black

Substances

(t)atá = fire

itá = rock, stone, metal,

y = water, river

yby = earth, ground

ybytu = air, wind

People

abá = man (as opposed to woman), Indian or Native-American (as opposed to European), human being (as opposed to the animal world)

aîuba = Frenchman (literally "yellow heads")

maíra = Frenchman (the name of a mythological figure that the Indians associated with the Frenchmen)

karaíba = foreigner, white man (literally means "spirit of a dead person"). Means also prophet.

kuñã = woman

kuñãtã'ĩ = girl

kuñãmuku = young woman

kunumĩ = boy

kunumĩgûasu = young man

morubixaba = chief

peró = Portuguese (neologism, from "Pero", old variant of "Pedro" = "Peter", a very common Portuguese name)

sy = mother

tapy'yîa = slave (also the term for non-Tupi speaking Indians)

The body

akanga = head

îuru = mouth

îyba = arm

nambi = ear

pó = hand

py = foot

py'a = heart

(t)esá = eye

(t)etimã = leg

tĩ = nose

(t)obá = face

Animals

aîuru = parrot, lory, lorykeet

arara = macaw, parrot

îagûara = jaguar

ka'apiûara = capybara

mboîa = snake, cobra

pirá = fish

so'ó = game (animal)

tapi'ira = tapir

Plants

ka'api = grass, ivy

ka'a = plant, wood, forest

kuri = pine

(s)oba = leaf

yba = fruit

ybá = plant

ybyrá = tree, (piece of) wood

ybotyra = flower

Society

oka = house

taba = village

Adjectives

beraba = brilliant, gleamy, shiny

katu = good

mirĩ, 'í = little

panema = barren, contaminated, unhealthy, unlucky

poranga = beautiful

pûera, ûera = bad, old, dead

(s)etá = many, much

ûasu, usu = big

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 borrowed, as such concepts would be rather difficult to express with pure Tupi words.

Presence of Tupi in Brazil

As the basis for the língua geral, spoken throughout the country by white and Indian settlers alike 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 of Brazil, being by far its most distinctive source of modification.

Tupi has given Brazilian Portuguese:

A few thousand words (some of them hybrids or corrupted) for animals, plants, fruit and cultural entities.

Multiple names of locations, including states (e.g. Paraná, Pará, Paraíba)

Some municipalities which have Tupi names:

Iguaçu ('y ûasú): great river

Ipanema ('y panema): bad, fishless water

Itanhangá (itá + añãgá): devil's rock

Itaquaquecetuba (takûakesétyba, from itá + takûara + kesé + tyba): where bamboo knives are made

Itaúna ("itá + una"): black rock

Jaguariúna (îagûara + 'í + una): small black jaguar

Pacaembu (paka + embu): valley of the pacas.

Paraíba (pará + aíba): bad to navigation or "bad river"

Paranaíba (paranãíba, from paranã + aíba): dangerous sea

Paraná-mirim (paranã + mirĩ): salty lagoon (literally: "small sea")

Pindorama (from pindó, "palm tree", and (r)etama, country): palm country (this was the name that the tupiniquins gave to the place where they lived).

Piracaia ("pirá" + "caia"): fried fish

Piraí (pirá + y): "fish water"

Umuarama (ũbuarama, from ũbu + arama): where the cacti will grow

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

abacaxi (pineapple, literally: "fruit with thorns")

jacaré (caiman)

minhoca (earth worm)

mirim (small or juvenile) as in "escoteiro-mirim" ("Boy Scout")

perereca (a type of small frog, also slang for vulva), literally: "hopper"

peteca (a type of badminton game played with bare hands) literally: "slap"

piranha (a carnivorous fish, also slang for immoral women) literally: "toothed fish"

pipoca (popcorn) literally "explosion of skin"

piroca (originally meaning "bald", now a slang term for penis)

pororoca (a tidal phenomenon in the Amazon firth) literally: "confusion"

siri (crab)

sucuri (anaconda)

urubu (the Brazilian vulture)

urutu (a kind of poisonous snake)

uruçu (the common name for Melipona scutellaris)

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

A significant number of Brazilians have Tupi names as well:

Araci (female): ara sy, "mother of the day"

Bartira, Potira (female): Ybotyra, "flower"

Iara (female): 'y îara, lady of the lake

Jaci (both): îasy, the moon

Janaína (female): îandá una, a type of black bird

Ubirajara (male): ybyrá îara, "lord of the trees/lance"

Ubiratã (male): ybyrá-atã, "hard wood"

Some names of distinct Indian ancestry have obscure etymology because the tupinambá, like the Europeans, cherished traditional names which sometimes had become archaic. Some of such names are Moacir (reportedly meaning "son of pain") and Moema.

Literature

Old Tupi literature was composed mainly of religious and grammatical texts developed by Jesuit missionaries working among the colonial Brazilian people. The greatest poet to express in written Tupi language, and its first grammarian was José de Anchieta, who wrote over eighty poems and plays, compiled at his Lírica Portuguesa e Tupi. Later Brazilian authors, writing in Portuguese, employed Tupi in the speech of some of their characters.

Recurrence

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 (meaning "you are my brother", the old Tupi salutation which was adopted as the Brazilian version of the German Sieg Heil, or the Roman "Ave") and terminology.