Mura-Pirahã-Matanawí languages
The Mura-Pirahã-Matanawí languages are a small family of languages spoken in Brazil, in the Amazon basin, by various indigenous peoples. To it belong the Pirahã languages and the extinct Mura-Bohurá, Yahahi and probably also Matanawí.
Linguistically, the Mura family is characterized by being agglutinative, by its poverty in phonemes (Pirahã has only 11, compared to more than 40 in English) and by having grammatical tone.
About 1,500 people belong to the ethnic group, although the Mura group is strongly acculturated in Portuguese. The Pirahã group, about 150 people, is mostly monolingual.
Classification
The Mura-Pirahã-Matanawí languages generally accepted as belonging to the family are generally classified as follows:
- Mura (or mura-pirahã) languages
- Mura-Bohurá (†)
- Pirahã
- Yahahí (†)
- Matanawí (†)
The proposal that the poorly documented matanawí is related to the mura and the pirahã is basically a proposal by Rivet (1924:673) and Loukotka (1939:154) based on a few words. Curt Nimuendaju mentions that in the vocabularies they have close to half a dozen common words between Matanawí and Mura, but considers Rivet and Loukotka's proposal to conclude that there is a relationship between Matanawí and Mura-Pirahã highly speculative.
Lexical comparison
The numerals from 1 to 5 are:
GLOSA Mura Piraha Matanawí PROTO-
MURA'1' huihe hi2hói12 y y,paã ♪ '2' húihi hi2hói21 watoronaã ♪ '3' hi2báa2gi2 sauratété ♪ '4' hi2aí1ba1 ♪ '5' hi2aí1ba1 ♪
Where (¹) refers to a high tone and (²) to a low tone (this is indicated by Ladefoged & Everett (1995) by an acute accent (´) and no mark)
A list of basic words is:
GLOSA Mura Piraha Matanawí PROTO-
MURA'head' apai xa2á2pai1 apa zɨ ♪ "Fucker." apaité a2paí2tai21 apa z ya ya *apa-?-tai (?) 'front.' it turapa z z 'Ojo' kosé ko2si2 ♪ 'oreja' I bet 1oo1i aau zɨ *au-(?) 'nariz' tau-i i2taó2pai1 natu zɨ ♪ 'language' Yup. í2po1pai2 hu zi ♪ Ipu- 'Mano' I did. xoo1i1 ignosu zɨ ♪u-su- 'pie' apai aa21pai2 ipiti y y 'higado' ibiju i2bío1pai1 ♪ ibiu- 'woman' karí ♪kari- 'Man' kai ♪kari-yi 'tapir' tabatí ká2ba2ti1 awiyá 'murciélago' huahui wawá ♪wawa-i 'agua' pê pii aṕ. *p-- 'fire' uai ho2aí2 ua ♪ 'piedra' Hurry a2 Ayá ♪ 'sol' Huisí Hi vĩ *hu-isi- 'luna' ka-ãnhê ká2hai1 coinài21i2 ka ♪ka-