The Ikpeng language is the language of the
Ikpeng
The Ikpeng (also known as Txikāo) are an indigenous community that now lives in the Xingu Indigenous Park in Mato Grosso, Brazil. They had a population of 459 in 2010, up from a low of 50 in 1969.
Name
The Ikpeng are also called Txicão, Txikão ...
people (also known as Txikāo) who live in the
Xingu Indigenous National Park in
Mato Grosso
Mato Grosso ( – lit. "Thick Bush") is one of the states of Brazil, the third largest by area, located in the Central-West region. The state has 1.66% of the Brazilian population and is responsible for 1.9% of the Brazilian GDP.
Neighborin ...
,
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
. There are approximately 500 speakers (Rodgers, 2013). Ikpeng is a language with high transmission, meaning it is passed on from parent to child at a high rate, with all members speaking the language (Moore, 2006). The majority of members are also
bilingual
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all Eu ...
speakers of Portuguese (Pacheco, 2005). The Ikpeng language is part of the
Carib (Karib) language family (Moore, 2006).
History
Early history
The Ikpeng were known to inhabit the same land as the Txipaya peoples, near the
Iriri River
The Iriri River ( pt, Rio Iriri, ; Mẽbêngôkre: ''Kororoti'', ) is a large tributary of the Xingu River in Brazil, in the state of Pará. It is long making it the 116th longest river in the world (with Krishna River, India) and the 15th long ...
, and they a strong alliance with that group in times of war. One
oral history
Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people w ...
traces the Ikpeng ancestral territory as far as the
Jari River
The Jari River, or Jary River ( pt, Rio Jari), is a northern tributary of the Amazon River on the border between the states of Pará and Amapá in northeastern Brazil. It is in the most downstream regions of the Amazon Basin and borders the Guian ...
(Rodgers, 2013). By 1850, the Ikpeng were known to inhabit an area of converging rivers thought to be the
Teles Pires
The Teles Pires ( pt, Rio São Manuel) is a long river in Brazil. The river flows through the state of Mato Grosso and its lower part marks the border between the states of Mato Grosso and Pará. At its mouth it joins Juruena River and togethe ...
-Juruena river basin (Menget & Troncarelli, 2003). Before 1900, the Ikpeng were at war with several polities, and even encountered settlers of European descent (2003). War and the colonization of the Teles Pires-Juruena basin pushed the Ikpeng across the Formosa Mountain formation and into the Upper Xingu Basin (2003).
Contact and relocation
In October 19, 1964,
Orlando and Cláudio Villas-Boas encountered Ikpeng villages as they were flying over the
Ronuro River
The Ronuro River is a river of Mato Grosso state in western Brazil, a tributary of the Xingu River.
The river drains the Rio Ronuro Ecological Station, a strictly protected conservation unit created in 1998. It also flows through the Xingu Indig ...
in Mato Grosso (Pacheco, 2005). They lived near the Ronuro and
Jabotá rivers and, when they were found malnourished and exposed to disease, they accepted resources and later relocation to the Xingu National Park in 1967 (Menget & Troncarelli, 2003). The Ikpeng dispersed for a short time, with different family groups living in different parts of the park, but later regrouped in the early 1970s near the Leonardo Villas-Boas Indigenous Post (2003). By the 1980s, they had moved to the middle Xingu region, and currently administer the Pavuru Indigenous Post, as well as the Ronuro Vigilance Post, which is near their traditional land on the Jabotá river (2003). From this post, they help defend the Xingu Park from illegal loggers and fishermen (Campetela, 1997). The Ikpeng made an expedition in 2002 to the Jabotá River to collect medicinal plants and shells. They currently seek to regain this territory (Menget & Troncarelli, 2003).
Schools
In the 1990s, the Ikpeng began to elaborate an education system within their community (Campetela, 1997). In 1994, Ikpeng teachers developed a form of writing with the help of linguists (Menget & Troncarelli, 2003). This was done through the Instituto Socioambiental's Teacher Training program, which has allowed Ikpeng children to learn their own language alongside Portuguese in the Ikpeng School (2003). This school plays a central role in the project, and it is responsible for the creation of material and distribution of this material for Ikpeng communities within the Xingu Park (2003).
Classification
The Carib language family also referred to as Karib or Cariban, is a family with languages spoken in
Colombia,
Venezuela
Venezuela (; ), officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela ( es, link=no, República Bolivariana de Venezuela), is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many islands and islets in ...
, the Mato Grosso region of Brazil and the three
Guianas
The Guianas, sometimes called by the Spanish loan-word ''Guayanas'' (''Las Guayanas''), is a region in north-eastern South America which includes the following three territories:
* French Guiana, an overseas department and region of France
* ...
(Britannica, 2007). The Carib language family comprises approximately 50 languages and is most commonly separated into regional language groups, such as Carib Central, Eastern, Northern etc. (Biblioteca Digital Curt Nimuendajú). Carib languages were first encountered in the seventeenth and eighteenth century by Europeans, however, the full spatiality of the language family was not uncovered until the nineteenth century when
Karl von den Steinen
Karl von den Steinen (born March 7, 1855 in Mülheim, died November 4, 1929 in Kronberg im Taunus) was a German physician (with emphasis in psychiatry), ethnologist, explorer, and author of important anthropological work, which is particular ...
documented the existence of Carib languages in Central Brazil (Meira & Franchetto, 2005, p. 129). Although large, with a population of over twenty-two thousand speakers, Carib languages have faced drastic changes in its geography and prevalence in the region (Britannica, 2007). Precolonial contact Carib languages were found throughout the
Greater Antilles
The Greater Antilles ( es, Grandes Antillas or Antillas Mayores; french: Grandes Antilles; ht, Gwo Zantiy; jam, Grieta hAntiliiz) is a grouping of the larger islands in the Caribbean Sea, including Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, ...
, however, much of the indigenous population was wiped out and the remaining population does not speak their indigenous languages (Britannica, 2007).
Literature
The first record of documentation of Ikpeng was conducted by Eduardo Galvano in 1964 when he created a word list of 12 Ikpeng words. Recently, the Ikpeng language has been analyzed a number of academics most extensively by Frantome Pachecho and Cilene Campetela. Beginning in 1997, Pacheco wrote "Aspectos da gramática Ikpeng", which explored the
morphology
Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to:
Disciplines
*Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts
*Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies, ...
,
orthography
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.
Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and mo ...
, grammar structure,
prosodic aspects, among other topics. Further into the exploration of Ikpeng, Pacheco wrote "Morfossintaxe do verbo Ikpeng" in 2001, an academic article solely focused on the morphology and
syntax of Ikpeng. In 2005 he wrote "O Ikpeng em contato com o português: empréstimo lexical e adaptação lingüística" an article on the influence of Portuguese on the Ikpeng language and its impact on cultural practices. Most recently in 2007 he wrote, "Morfofonologia dos prefixos pessoais em Ikpeng" which focuses on phonology and morphology. Cilene Campetela concurrently with Pacheco has published articles on Ikpeng since 1997. In 1997 she released "Análise do sistema de marcação de caso nas orações independentes da língua Ikpeng", which focused on phonology and morphology. "Aspectos prosódicos da língua Ikpeng" by Campetela was then released in 2002 and exclusively analysed the prosodic aspects of Ikpeng.
Along with Pacheco and Capetela, there have been a number of studies done by other researchers. Most notably, the 2008 ProDocLin project documenting the Ikpeng language in different social contexts via
audiovisual
Audiovisual (AV) is electronic media possessing both a sound and a visual component, such as slide-tape presentations, films, television programs, corporate conferencing, church services, and live theater productions.
Audiovisual service p ...
s with an accompanying lexicon database was conducted by Dr. Angela Fabiola Alves Chagas with assistance from Ingrid Lemos and Maria Luisa Freitas. Further research on the Ikpeng language includes an analysis of the Ikpeng Phonology by Eduardo Alves Vasconcelos, Maria Luisa Freitas' 2015 piece on the Grammatical
pedagogy
Pedagogy (), most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken ...
and Linguistic Changes by Wellington Quintino.
Documentation projects
The
Museu do Indio's documentation department, the Documentation Project of Indigenous Languages, has executed a documentation project on Ikpeng. It was led by Angela Chegas, assisted by associate researchers Ingrid Lemos and Maria Luisa Freitas, with Ikpeng consultation. The project aimed to document cultural and linguistic aspects of the Ikpeng people. This was accomplished through audio visual recordings of conversation, songs, stories, and ceremonial speech. The extensive lexical data and transcriptions are stored in a digitized
data bank In database management and information architecture, a data bank or databank is a repository of information about one or more subjects, that is, a database which is organized in a way that facilitates local or remote information retrieval and is ...
for researchers to access.
Phonology
Consonants
* // and // can also be realized as fricatives [] and [].
* // can be heard as a fricative [] in word-medial position, in front of a rounded back vowel, as voiced [] when preceding // in word-medial position, or as a voiced fricative [] when between vowels.
Vowels
* /, / can also be heard as open mid
* /, / when occurring after a consonant, or preceding a vowel, can be shortened as
* /, / may also be nasalized as
when preceding nasal consonants in medial position.
Morphology
Words in the Ikpeng language, like in many other languages, depend on a variety of morphemes in the form of
prefix
A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix ''un-'' is added to the word ''happy'', it creates the word ''unhappy''. Particu ...
es,
affix
In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ...
es and
suffixes to detail the function of specific words. Researchers of Ikpeng, notably Frantome Pacheco, have given special attention to the Ikpeng verb morphology, in which morphemes are used to give nuance to words in the language; they determine the
subject
Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to:
Philosophy
*''Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing
**Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective cons ...
or
object
Object may refer to:
General meanings
* Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept
** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place
** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter
* Goal, an ai ...
that is conjugated in the verb,
tense, number (plural and singular), inclusivity, causation, interrogation, negation and other more specific characteristics (Pacheco, 2001). The word classes present in Ikpeng are verbs, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, prepositions, and particles, and each have a variety of morphemes specific to their word class (Pacheco, 1997).
Pronouns
Independent personal pronouns
Demonstrative pronouns
Interrogative pronouns
Desideratives
In English, there exist separate verbs to express desire, like for instance 'to want.' By contrast, the Ikpeng language contains a
morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone ar ...
to express desire or want, called a
desiderative
In linguistics, a desiderative (abbreviated or ) form is one that has the meaning of "wanting to X". Desiderative forms are often verbs, derived from a more basic verb through a process of morphological derivation. Desiderative mood is a kind of ...
. The morpheme is /–tɨne/, and it is attached as a suffix to the verb in order to indicate that one wants to do a certain action (the verb) (Pacheco, 2001).
This morpheme is also used with auxiliary verbs, when the predicate has non-verbal elements at its core.
Morphemes to indicate immediate past
Ikpeng uses to morphemes to conjugate verbs in the "immediate past," meaning a period of time understood to be the moment right before the present and, at the very latest, yesterday (Campetela, 1997). These morphemes are /–lɨ/ and /–lan/, with /–lɨ/ being used for actions witnessed by the speaker, and /–lan/ for actions that were not witnessed by the speaker (1997).
(This event happened moments before and is witnessed by the speaker.)
(This event happened the day before and was not witnessed by the speaker.)
Syntax
Valency of verbs
Ikpeng has two different methods to determine increasing
valency
Valence or valency may refer to:
Science
* Valence (chemistry), a measure of an element's combining power with other atoms
* Degree (graph theory), also called the valency of a vertex in graph theory
* Valency (linguistics), aspect of verbs re ...
through
causative
In linguistics, a causative ( abbreviated ) is a valency-increasing operationPayne, Thomas E. (1997). Describing morphosyntax: A guide for field linguists'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 173–186. that indicates that a subject either ...
s related to the verb: the morphological causative, which is added as an affix to the verb, and the lexicalized causative, which uses an independent causative verb and another word is added as sentence complement (Pacheco, 2001).
Morphological causatives (affixes) are used to change both
transitive verb
A transitive verb is a verb that accepts one or more objects, for example, 'cleaned' in ''Donald cleaned the window''. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not have objects, for example, 'panicked' in ''Donald panicked''.
Transiti ...
sentences and
intransitive verb
In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb whose context does not entail a direct object. That lack of transitivity distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Additionally, intransitive verbs a ...
sentences to transitive causative verbs and intransitive causative verbs respectively (2001). The morpheme used for the affix is /-nopo/, with allomorphs such as /nop/ or /nob/ when inserted after a vowel, /pon/ and /poŋ/ after consonants, and /mpo/ which can be explained as an assimilation of the nasal sound (n) in /nopo/ (2001). Below are examples of the construction of the causative verb using morphemes.
Intransitive
In the above sentence, the causative morpheme indicates that it was the woman who caused the manioc to dry, instead of simply saying "the manioc dried."
Transitive
A particular hierarchy needs to be considered when dealing with morphological causatives, concerning the type of argument that is found in the sentence (S- subject, A- agent, and O- object) (2001).
: "Subject or Agent (S, A) > direct object (O) > not direct object or Oblique" (2001).
Lexicalized causatives are separate verbs in the sentences used to indicate increased valency. In Ikpeng, these are often verbs such a (in English) 'to order' (2001). These only happen in cases where the main verb is the causative (the ordering verb like 'to order,' or 'to do') and the action that is being ordered is added as complement of the phrase, instead of an otherwise completed verb (2001).
In this sentence, the first highlighted verb is the commanding verb "order" in this case, and the bracketed section is the verb that is being ordered, in this case "to run." The lexicalized verb in this case is 'to order.'
Semantics
Plurals
Ikpeng has multiple suffixes and prefixes which denote plurality of objects, events, verbs and nouns.
Object and iterative suffixes
To denote plural objects in Ikpeng, the suffixes /-tke/ and /-ke/ are employed. Additionally, these suffixes can be interpreted as
iterative suffixes as they are also used to express the repetition of an action. Distinguishing the use of the suffixes is contextual as there is no consistent differentiation between the two uses (Campetela 1997, pg. 84-85).
Verb plurals
Verb plurals are classified in three ways, plurals for the not future, and questions (interrogative).
To express plurality or a collective in not future tenses, the suffix /-kom/~ /ŋmo/ is attached to the end of the verb (Pacheco, 2001, pg. 84-85).
To express plurality or a collective in an interrogative phrase, the suffix /-tom/~/rom/ is attached at the end of the verb. This suffix is typically associated with the use of second person (Pacheco, 2001, pg. 84-85).
Nouns
To express the quantity of whom possesses an object in the promonimal context, the suffix /-kom/~ /ŋmo/ is attached to the object (Pacheco, 2001, pg. 103).
To express the quantity of the possessors in the nominal form, the suffix /-niŋkɨn/ is after the nominal morpheme.
When there is an agreement between nominal morphemes, /-niŋkɨn/ is used after the morpheme /keni/ to indicate plurals.
Pronouns
In Ikpeng, demonstrative third-person pronouns are used to indicate the distance and
animacy
Animacy (antonym: inanimacy) is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. Widely expressed, animacy is one of the most elementary principles in languages around ...
of the entity in relation to the speaker (Pacheco, 2001, pg. 120).
Independent personal pronouns express free grammars and occupy argumentative position (Pacheco, 2001, pg. 119).
References
* Biblioteca Digital Curt Nimuendajú. (n.d.)
Karib
* Britannica, T. E. (2007, July 24)
Cariban languages
* Campetela, C. (1997). Análise do Sistema de Marcação de Caso nas Orações Independentes da Língua Ikpeng. ''Universidade de Campinas,'' 15-17. Retrieved fro
* GALVÃO, Eduardo 1996.. Diários do Xingu (1947-1967). UFRJ, p. 249-381.
* Meira, S., & Franchetto, B. (2005). The Southern Cariban Languages and the Cariban Family. International Journal of American Linguistics, 71(2), 127-192. doi:10.1086/491633
* Menget, P., & Troncarelli, M.C. (2003). Ikpeng. ''Instituto Socioambiental: Povos Indígenas no Brasil.'' Retrieved fro
* Moore, D. (2006). Brazil: Language Situation. In Keith Brown (Eds.), ''Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics'' (117-128), Oxford: Elsevier.
* Pacheco, F. (2005). O IKPENG EM CONTATO COM O PORTUGUÊS: EMPRÉSTIMO LEXICAL E ADAPTAÇÃO LINGÜÍSTICA. ''Universidade de São Paulo'' and ''Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo,'' 1-2. Retrieved fro
* Pacheco, F. (1997). "Aspectos da gramática Ikpeng (Karib)." ''Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem Universidade de Campinas,'' 1-146. Retrieved fro
* Pacheco, F. (2001). "Morfossintaxe do verbo Ikpeng (Karib)." ''Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem Universidade de Campinas,'' 1-303. Retrieved fro
* Rodgers, D. (2013). The filter trap: Swarms, anomalies, and the quasi-topology of Ikpeng shamanism. ''HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3), 77-80.''
{{Cariban languages
Cariban languages
Languages of Xingu Indigenous Park