Tuyuca language

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. The language is estimated to have 50 to 140 noun classes.

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.

Vowels

Consonants

Consonantal contrasts

The following words show some of the consonant contrasts.

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].

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.

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.