Камайура: язык и сохранение тупийского наследия Бразилии

Tupian language spoken in Brazil

The Kamayurá language (Kamaiurá in Portuguese) belongs to the Tupi–Guarani family, and is spoken by the Kamayurá people of Brazil – who numbered about 600 individuals in 2014. There is speculation that as the indigenous peoples who spoke the Tupi languages mingled with other indigenous peoples, their languages gradually changed accordingly. This speculation is consistent with research done by linguists who study languages in different regions in order to find similarities and differences between languages. The Kamayurá people live in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, specifically in the Upper Xingu area. The Kamayurá people do not have their own specific schools and rely on teaching each other the language, however, there have been a couple of youths, since the year 2000, that have participated in the Teacher Training Course. The Teacher Training Course strives to keep an indigenous language alive as well as educates individuals in the current national language of Brazil, in this case Portuguese. Currently, there are many transcribed works of the Kamayurá language as well as many grammatical concepts. Lucy Seki, is credited with the completion of a book detailing the grammar of the Kamayurá language In her book “Gramatica do Kamaiura” (“Grammar of the Kamaiura”) Lucy goes into detail on morphological structures and various phonological features of the Kamayurá language, however, Lucy's work does not stop there, she is also responsible for having documented many works that were otherwise undocumented, this allows for the preservation of the Kamayurá as a language and as a culture. Through her work with the Kamayurá she has also earned the status of an honorary member in the Linguistic Society of America. In an interview done by “Nova Raiz” in September 2011 it appears that Lucy Seki has retired, but continues to speak positively of her work with the Kamayurá.

Kamayurá is one of the few languages in the world with two mechanisms for causation that differ in how involved the causer is in the action. The prefix mo indicates that the causer was not involved in the activity ("he stopped in the canoe when he was outside it") while the prefix (e)ro expresses that it was involved ("he stopped in the canoe when he was inside it"). This is common in general in the languages of the Tupian stock, and both causatives have been posited to exist in Proto Tupian. In the Kamayurá language, affixes, clitics, order of constituents, postpositions, derivational processes and certain particles are all needed in order to express the syntactic and semantic functions of the noun. Affixes: a set of casual suffixes that indicate the noun in a nuclear function, locative, attributive, and external, and a set of relational prefixes including prefixes which encode the specified and indefinite third person, reflexive and non reflexive as well as the subject and object of the third person. Clitics: there are a set of flexible clitics which indicates a person and the number of the possessor as well as the subject of the object of verbs and postpositions. Order of constituents: are relevant to distinguish “a” (feminine the) and “o” (masculine the) when both are expressed by nominal, both receive the same suffix [ a]. The basic order of the constituents are “AOV” in the transitive sentence and “SV” in the intransitive sentences, which vary in certain contexts. Postpositions: Postpositions are used to express a variety of syntactic and semantic functions. Derivational Processes: there are a series of derivational affixes which form complex nominal from verbs and adverbs and of which are used to indicate syntactic and semantics roles of the noun. Particles: Certain particles ae used to indicate semantic/syntactic roles of the noun. There are several relations that are expressed in Portuguese by nominal or postpositional phrases which in Kamayurá, are expressed by adverbs and other types of constructions.

Personal Pronouns present certain characteristics which justify its treatment separately. It constitutes a closed class of elements, which unlike nouns, do not receive casual suffixes. There are two different pronouns with syntactic distribution consistently distinct, these are: the series of free pronouns and the series of clitic pronouns which are described below:

These are accented and syntactically occur in the following functions, and do not occur in subordinate sentences and also not as the possessor with nouns or as object of postpositions. There are also restrictions of the use of these pronouns in copulative sentences:

There are two descriptive verb elements which occur as quantifiers “be very, very, many times” and eta “be numerous”. The first only occurs with a third person indicator and, like other descriptive, can occur as an adverb:

Different from adverbs, particles do not occur isolated like a constituent and do not present adverbial characteristic properties. They are syntagmatically connected to the constituent which is or contains the element of which has scope. The particles can modify nominal, adverbial or the verb. This group of particles includes: tete “only”, meme “each”, atsã “little, small”, utsu “a lot”, a’ia’ip “much”. Below are examples of the tete particle:

In the verbal roots which are suffixed to the verb pointing out aspectual distinctions, the root pap “end, finish, complete” expresses universal quantification associated to the subject arguments of the transitive verbs and the objects of transitive verbs. With the suffix pap it is understood that the event/action covers the totality of the item, considered in its unit or the totality of the items. In the last case, in general, the indicator of number is present in construction: