Tuyuca (also Dochkafuara, Tejuca, Tuyuka, Dojkapuara, Doxká-Poárá, Doka-Poara, or Tuiuca) is an Eastern

Tucanoan Tucanoan (also Tukanoan, Tukánoan) is a language family of Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. Language contact Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Arutani, Paez, Sape, Taruma, Witoto-Okaina, Saliba-Hodi, ...

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 Papuri may refer to: * Papuri Island, an island of the Gambier Islands of French Polynesia *Papurí River in South America {{disambiguation ...

, the Inambú River, and the

Tiquié River The Tiquié River is a tributary stream of the Vaupés River. It runs between the Vaupés and the state of Amazonas, in the border region between Colombia and Brazil. It is a black water river. Its length is 374 km according to satellite measur ...

Vaupés Department Vaupés () is a departments of Colombia, department of southeastern Colombia in the Amazon rainforest, jungle covered Amazonía Region. It is located in the southeast part of the country, bordering Brazil to the east, the department of Amazonas ...

Colombia Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country primarily located in South America with Insular region of Colombia, insular regions in North America. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the north, Venezuel ...

, and Amazonas State,

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 ...

. Studies from the 1980s to 1990s noted that Tuyuca was spoken by fewer than 300 people in Colombia and 590 people in Brazil.

Grammar

Tuyuca is a postpositional

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes (word parts), each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglu ...

subject–object–verb language with mandatory type II

evidentiality In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and if so, what kind. An evidential (also verificational or validational) is the particul ...

. 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.

Phonology

Tuyuca's consonants are , and its vowels are , with syllable

nasalization In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation in British English) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . ...

and

pitch accent A pitch-accent language is a type of language that, when spoken, has certain syllables in words or morphemes that are prominent, as indicated by a distinct contrasting pitch (music), pitch (tone (linguistics), linguistic tone) rather than by vol ...

occurring as well.

Vowels

Consonants

Contrasts

The following words show some of the consonant contrasts.

=Bilabial contrasts

= : 'mom' : 'plate' : 'payment'

=Alveolar contrasts

= : 'a fish' : 'dragonfly' : 'party' : 'whitening' Velar and palatal contrasts : 'ant-eater' : 'aunt' : 'plantain' : 'thread'

Variation

* Voiceless plosives have aspirated variants that tend to occur before

high vowel A close vowel, also known as a high vowel (in U.S. terminology), is any in a class of vowel sounds used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned approximately as close as possible to ...

s but not near voiceless vowels. There are a few degrees of the amount of aspiration. * Preglottalized variants of occur together at the onset. ** Preglottalized forms of occur in the onset and are in free variation with their plain counterparts. * Prenasal variants of occur after nasal vowels and before oral vowels: .

Nasal assimilation

* Voiced consonants have nasal variants at the same place of articulation before nasal vowels: . ** The can also surface as before high nasal vowels. * The also has a nasalized variant that occurs before nasal vowels.

Nasal harmony

Segments in a word are either all nasal or all oral. : 'to go' : 'to illuminate' (the is nasal) Note that voiceless segments are transparent. : 'choke on a bone' : 'demon' See further remarks regarding the oral/nasal nature of affixes in the

Morphophonemics Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes (mi ...

section.

Suprasegmental features

Tuyuca's two suprasegmental features are

tone Tone may refer to: Visual arts and color-related * Tone (color theory), a mix of tint and shade, in painting and color theory * Tone (color), the lightness or brightness (as well as darkness) of a color * Toning (coin), color change in coins * ...

and

Tone

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 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. : 'blood' : 'mud' * (C)VCV words, except for loanwords, have the tone on the second syllable. : 'parakeet' : 'table' (← Portuguese 'mesa')

Nasalization

Nasalization is phonemic and operates at the root level. : 'to kill' : 'to tie'

Phonetic distribution and syllabic structure

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.

Restrictions

* and do not occur word-initially * and do not occur. * No VV string starts with . * Multisyllabic VVV strings occur, but not all combinations of vowels are attested. 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.

Morphophonemics

All affixes are in one of the two classes: # Oral affixes that may undergo nasalization, like the plural morpheme ''-ri'': 'marks' # 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.

References

External links

Tuyuca language dictionary online from IDS
(select simple or advanced browsing) * ELAR archive o
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 The Intercontinental Dictionary Series (commonly abbreviated as IDS) is a large database of topical vocabulary lists in various world languages. The general editor of the database is Bernard Comrie of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary An ...

) {{DEFAULTSORT:Tuyuca Language Agglutinative languages Languages of Brazil Languages of Colombia Tucanoan languages