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-