Tupi languages

The Tupi languages or macro-Tupi are a family of less than 80 aboriginal languages of America spoken by the Tupi peoples (76 are considered to still have a speaker). It is the family with the largest geographic extension in South America, spreading dispersely in both the Amazon and the La Plata Basin. It comprises 10 subfamilies, of which the most widespread both geographically and demographically are the Tupi-Guaraní languages.

History

When the Portuguese arrived in Brazil, they found that in different areas on the seashore of that new land, many locals spoke similar languages. The Jesuit missionaries took advantage of these similarities, systematizing common standards, which they later called língua geral ("general language") which was spoken in the region until the century XIX. The most spoken and best-known language of this group was classical Tupi, whose modern derivations are still spoken among the native peoples of the Río Negro region, where it is known as Ñehengatú, or the " good language". Even so, the Tupi family contains other languages.

In the Spanish border territory, Guaraní, another Tupi language, very close to classic Tupi, had a similar history. However, Guaraní was able to resist the expansion of Spanish better than the Tupi resisted the expansion of Portuguese, thanks to the historical isolation of Paraguay, both geographically and politically. Today Guaraní has 7 million speakers and is one of the languages officials of Paraguay and Mercosur. The Tupi family also includes some other languages with fewer speakers. These share irregular morphology with the Ye and Carib languages, which is why Ribeiro groups them in the Ye-Tupí-Carib family.

Classification

The first comparative works treated the Tupi-Guarani languages as "pure" of the Tupi-Guaraní family and the other languages as "impure" of it (Nimuendajú 1948:214, Loukotka 1950:26). However, the comparative work of A. Rodrigues (1953, 1986) made it clear that the non-Tupi-Guarani languages of the family are independent subfamilies and that the Tupi-Guarani languages are another branch of the Tupi family.

Family languages

The Tupi languages are divided into 10 subfamilies, 9 of which fall entirely in the Amazon basin and even the tenth subfamily, the Tupi-Guarani languages, has most of its members also in the Amazon basin:

1. Subfamily arikemTwo languages. One of them, the arikemIt's extinct. The remaining one, karitiâna, is spoken by about 320 people in the Candeias River, in the Brazilian state of Rondônia (2005). He had 123 speakers in 1997.
2. Subfamilia awetí: a tongue, awetI or awetö, spoken by about 140 people in the high river Xingú, in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso (2006). He was 35 in 1997.
3. Subfamily yuruna: 3 languages.
4. Subfamily mawé-sateré: a language, the Mawé or sateré, spoken by some 7,130 to 9000 people in more than 14 villages between the low river Tapajós and the low river Madeira, in the Brazilian states of Pará and Amazonas (2000). In 1991 he had 3000 speakers and in 1997 5,000. In 2010 census, it gives about 13 thousand speakers, although the 2008 estimates were 9200 competent speakers, most of them monolingual.
5. Monde languages: 6 languages.
6. Subfamily mundurukú: 2 languages.
7. Subfamily puruborá: a tongue, puruboraAlmost extinct. In 2002 only two speakers were recorded in the San Miguel River (Guporé River's contributor), in the Brazilian state of Rondônia.
8. Subfamily brancharama: originally formed by about five languages testified to the list of words, of which only the karo or Ara.
9. Subfamily tuparí: 5 languages.
10. Subfamily tupí-guaraní: 52 languages in 8 subgroups, plus one not classified. The main language is Guaraní paraguayo spoken by more than 6 million people.

Relations with other languages

There have been various attempts to relate the Tupi family with other languages. Recently, promising evidence has been found to suggest a kinship with the Yê languages and the Carib languages. If this thesis is fully confirmed, this relationship would imply that the Ye-Tupi-Caribbean languages constitute the largest family in number of languages in South America and the one that has reached the greatest geographical extent in that subcontinent.

Grammatic description

Most Tupi languages use prefixes to mark the subject or the object in the verb, some languages mark both. Some languages seem to have ergative features. The noun has no morphological case markings, although in syntactic or oblique adjuncts they are marked by postpositions. There is also no grammatical gender.

Phonology

All Tupi languages have three voiceless stops /p, t, k/, two nasals /m, n/ and three Sonorants /w-β, r, y/, although all languages have some extra phonemes apart from the mentioned, which vary from group to group. The total number of consonants varies between 10 and 19 for all languages. The following table summarizes the phonemes common to all branches and also those present in only some of the branches, having chosen a representative language for each branch:

All Tupi languages have between 5 and 7 different oral vowels: Karo has 7 vowels, Tupi-Guarani languages 6 and most other languages have 5. In most languages each oral vowel usually has a nasal correlate, so usually the number of distinctive vowels is more or less 12. There are usually no differences in vowel quantity and usually there are no more than two degrees of contrasting opening (sometimes there are 3, but never four).

There is no advanced reconstruction of the proto-Tupí. Although the characteristics of the protolanguage that gave rise to some branches are precisely known. Thus, the proto-tupí-guaraní has been quite well reconstructed and much progress has been made in the reconstruction of the proto-tuparí. In any case, preliminary work suggests that Proto-Tupi would have had two degrees of oppositional opening, distinctive nasality and 5 or 6 oral vowels. The closed oral vowels would be /i, ɨ, u/ and the open oral vowels /e, a, (o)/, it is not entirely clear whether the distinction between [u] and [o] is phonological and hence the doubts in the number of oral vowels.

Grammar

Nominal morphology is relatively simple without distinctions of gender or number.

Verbal morphology is somewhat more complex and includes subject person marks by prefix. The system of pronominal prefixes in the verb is reasonably homogeneous throughout the entire family, as shown in the following table:

The Roman numeral indicates the branch of the Tupi family for which it is found. Most branches are exemplified by a specific language, except for the Tupi-Guarani branch for which the forms of proto-Tupi-Guarani have been reconstructed with considerable certainty.

Lexical comparison

In this section some lexical forms from different branches are examined with the aim of illustrating the phonological difference of the different branches from each other:

Another list that compares cognates in different languages is (Rodrigues, 1986):

A comparison of reconstructions for proto-Tupi can be found in the wiktionary: Proto-Tupi.