Tuyuca language

Tuyuca
Docapúaraye
Native to	Colombia, Brazil
Native speakers	1,400 (2012)[1]
Language family	Tucanoan Eastern Central Bara Tuyuca
Language codes
ISO 639-3	tue
Glottolog	tuyu1244  Tuyuca
ELP	Tuyuka
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Tuyuca^[2] (also Dochkafuara, Tejuca, Tuyuka, Dojkapuara, Doxká-Poárá, Doka-Poara, or Tuiuca) is an Eastern Tucanoan language (similar to Tucano). Tuyuca is spoken by the Tuyuca, an indigenous ethnic group of some 500-1000 people, who inhabit the watershed of the Papuri River, the Inambú River, and the Tiquié River, in Vaupés Department, Colombia, and Amazonas State, Brazil.

Tuyuca is a postpositional agglutinative subject–object–verb language with mandatory type II evidentiality.^[3] Five evidentiality paradigms are used: visual, nonvisual, apparent, second-hand, and assumed, but second-hand evidentiality exists only in the past tense, and apparent evidentiality does not occur in the first-person present tense.^[4] The language is estimated to have 50 to 140 noun classes.^{[5][unreliable source]}

Tuyuca's consonants are /p t k b d ɡ s r w j h/, and its vowels are /i ɨ u e a o/, with syllable nasalization and pitch accent occurring as well.^[4]

The following words show some of the consonant contrasts.^[6]

/pakó/ 'mom'

/bapá/ 'plate'

/wapá/ 'payment'

/botéa/ 'a fish'

/bodé/ 'dragonfly'

/bosé/ 'party'

/boré/ 'whitening'

Velar and palatal contrasts

/bɨkó/ 'ant-eater'

/bɨɡó/ 'aunt'

/hoó/ 'plantain'

/joó/ 'thread'

• Voiceless plosives /p, t, k/ have aspirated variants that tend to occur before high vowels but 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 variation with their plain counterparts.
• Prenasal variants of /b, d, ɡ/ occur after nasal vowels and before oral vowels: /kĩĩbai/ [kʰĩĩmbaii̥].^[7]

• Voiced consonants /b, d, ɡ, r, w, j/ have nasal variants at the same place of articulation before nasal vowels: [m, n, ŋ, ɳ, w̃, j̃].
  • The /j/ can also surface as ɲ before high nasal vowels.
• The /h/ also has a nasalized variant that occurs before nasal vowels.

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.

Tuyuca's two suprasegmental features are tone and nasalization.

There is a high tone (H) and a low tone (L) in Tuyuca. The phonological word has only one high tone, which may occur in any syllable of the word. The low tone has two variants: a mid-tone, which occurs in words with at least three syllables in free variation, and the low tone, which occurs in internal syllables that have [i] that is contiguous to the high tone but not preceded by a low tone.

• The accent is the same as high tone.
• The tone is contrastive in (C)VV syllables.

/díi/ 'blood'

/dií/ 'mud'

• (C)VCV words, except for loanwords, have the tone on the second syllable.

/eté/ 'parakeet'

/b̃ésa/ 'table' (← Portuguese 'mesa')

Nasalization is phonemic and operates at the root level.

/sĩã/ 'to kill'

/sia/ 'to tie'

A syllable is any unit that may take tone and has a vocalic nucleus, regardless of whether or not it has a consonant before it.

• /ɡ/ and /r/ do not occur word-initially
• /ɡu/ and /wu/ do not occur.
• No VV string starts with /u/.
• Multisyllabic VVV strings occur, but not all combinations of vowels are attested. /u/ is always last in such strings.
• (C)V may be optionally be pronounced with aspiration, with the same quality as the preceding vowel, when the syllable is both unstressed and before syllables with voiceless onsets.^[8]

All affixes are in one of the two classes:

1. Oral affixes that may undergo nasalization, like the plural morpheme -ri: /sopéri/ 'marks'^{[clarification needed]}
2. Affixes that are intrinsically oral or nasal and are not changed.

When a nasal CV suffix occurs and C is a continuant or a vibrant /r/, regressive nasalization is undergone by the preceding vowel.

• Tuyuca language dictionary online from IDS (select simple or advanced browsing)
• ELAR archive of Brazilian Tuyuka language documentation materials
• Barnes, Janet; Silzer, Sheryl (1976). "Fonología del tuyuca". Sistemas fonológicos de idiomas colombianos (SIL) 3
• Barnes, Janet (1974). "Notes on Tuyuca discourse, paragraph and sentence".
• Tuyuca (Intercontinental Dictionary Series)