Dâw is a Nadahup language spoken by about one hundred Dâw people in the northwestern part of Amazonas,

Brazil Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...

, in an area commonly known as Alto Rio Negro. Most Dâw also speak Nheengatu and Portuguese. An extinct variety, ''Kurikuria(r)í'', named after the Curicuriari River, was a distinct language sociolinguistically, but at least partially intelligible with Dâw.

Phonology

Vowels

Dâw has 15

vowels A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

: Vowels are laryngealized when occurring beside a

glottal stop The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...

, as seen in the examples below. : ''"large mouth"'' : ''"to lack"''

Vowel harmony

Vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning tha ...

in Dâw is seen primarily in two situations: in

compounding In the field of pharmacy, compounding (performed in compounding pharmacies) is preparation of custom medications to fit unique needs of patients that cannot be met with mass-produced formulations. This may be done, for example, to provide medic ...

and with the focus marker , where ''V'' indicates a vowel. When combining two words with the first word having the syllable structure CVC, vowel harmony is not seen, e.g. ''"high"'' + ''"boat"'' = ''"airplane"''. However, when combining two words with the first word having the syllable structure CV, vowel harmony is seen, e.g. ''"canoe"'' + ''"eye"'' = ''"sun"''. The vowel of the focus marker is the same as the vowel of the syllable it is appended to, e.g. ''"blood"'' + = .

Consonants

Dâw has 25

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

s: Glottalized consonants are also laryngealized, as seen in the examples below. : ''"oar"'' : ''"banana"'' The

plosive consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lip ...

s have

no audible release A stop consonant with no audible release, also known as an unreleased stop, checked stop or an applosive, is a plosive with no release burst: no audible indication of the end of its occlusion (hold). In the International Phonetic Alphabet, lack of ...

as codas, e.g. ''"to kick"'' is realized as , and ''"to scratch with the nail"'' as . As onsets, and are realized as

ejective consonant In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a Airstream mechanism#Glottalic initiation, glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with Aspirat ...

s, i.e. and , unlike the other plosive consonants, which are realized simply as plain consonants, e.g. ''"without hair"'', ''"to hook"''.

Stress

Stress is fixed in Dâw, occurring on the last syllable of a word. A few

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...

es in Dâw do not take the stress, however. The suffixes are divided into two groups, metric suffixes and extrametric suffixes. The former follows the general rule of stress on the last syllable, while the latter does not. See the examples below, where is a metric suffix, and an extrametric suffix. : ''"to return"'' : ''"return!"'' : ''"is returning"''

Tone

In Dâw there are either three or four tones, depending on analysis. There are a low tone, a high tone, a rising tone and a falling tone, marked by a

grave accent The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and many other Western European languages as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other ...

, an

acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...

, a

caron A caron or háček ( ), is a diacritic mark () placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages, to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation. Typographers tend to use the term ''caron'', while linguists prefer ...

and

circumflex The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from "bent around"a translation of ...

, respectively, but only the two latter are lexical. The low tone only occurs on syllables without stress, while the high tone only occurs on syllables with stress, and the rising and falling tones may occur on all syllables. As the low and high tones are not lexical, they are often left unmarked, as in ''"tooth"'', which really is realized as . Besides the lexical function of tone, tone may also function morphologically and syntactically. Consider the examples below, the first being morphological and the second being syntactical, showing how tone is used in a derivative manner and how tone is used to differentiate

intransitive In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb, aside from an auxiliary verb, whose context does not entail a transitive object. That lack of an object distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Additi ...

from

transitive verb A transitive verb is a verb that entails one or more transitive objects, for example, 'enjoys' in ''Amadeus enjoys music''. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not entail transitive objects, for example, 'arose' in ''Beatrice arose ...

s. : ''"to eat"'' : ''"food"'' : ''"to bathe (oneself)"'' : ''"to bathe (someone)"''

Vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual length (phonetics), duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels. On one hand, many ...

is predictable and present in Dâw, yet not distinctive lexically. All vowels with a rising or falling tone are long, while all vowels without a tone are short.

Orthography

The orthography used by the Dâw community is based on the Latin alphabet, with some correspondences coming from the Tukano language. Note that glottalized consonants are marked with the apostrophe before the consonant when the phoneme appears at the beginning of a word, and after the consonant when it appears anywhere else. Long vowels (i.e., those with tone) are written with two of the same vowel (e.g. , "rat"). When the

tilde The tilde (, also ) is a grapheme or with a number of uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish , which in turn came from the Latin , meaning 'title' or 'superscription'. Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in ...

are used with long vowels, only the first of the two is marked with the diacritic (e.g. ).

External links

Dâw basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
* ELAR archive o
Documentation of Dâw

Notes

General

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Daw Language Languages of Brazil Nadahup languages