Bororo language
Bororo, also known as Boe, is the sole surviving language of the small Bororoan family believed by some to be part of the Macro-Jê languages. It is spoken by the Bororo, hunters and gatherers in the central Mato Grosso region of Brazil.
Phonology
Bororo has a mid-sized phonemic inventory of seven vowels and fifteen consonants. Orthographic representations, when they differ from IPA, are shown in angle brackets.Vowels
The vowel system of Bororo is somewhat cross-linguistically unusual in that it distinguishes roundedness only in its back vowels.The mid vowels /e ɤ o/ alternate with the open-mid vowels in apparent free variation.
The unrounded back vowels /ɯ ɤ/ become central word-finally. Furthermore, is not distinguished from, and often surfaces as, front . As a result, /ɤ/ and /e/ are at least partially merged word-finally.
Diphthongs and long vowels
Bororo has a rich inventory of twelve diphthongs:| -i | -e | -u | -o | -a | |
| a- | ai̯ | ae̯ | au̯ | ao̯ | |
| e- | ei̯ | eo̯ | e̯a | ||
| o- | oi̯ | oe̯ | ou̯ | ||
| ɤ- | ɤi̯ | ||||
| ɯ- | ɯi̯ |
All pure vowels can also occur long, i.e. as /iː eː ɯː ɤː uː oː aː/. In contrast to other languages with phonemic vowel length, however, these are quite rare, and there seems to be no reason to distinguish long vowels from same-vowel sequences. This is evidenced by the mandatory lengthening of monosyllables, where the vowel of a monosyllable is repeated to form a long vowel: for example, /ba/ "village" becomes /baa̯/ .
Consonants
Unusually for a South American language, Bororo has no phonemic fricatives.The velar stop /k/ becomes aspirated before nonback vowels /a e i/; the labiovelar approximant /w/ becomes labiodental in the same environment. Plain and labialized velar stops / g kʷ ɡʷ/ merge as labialized before rounded vowels /u o/. The voiced velar stop /g/ lenites to fricative between vowels.
Syllable structure and stress
The canonical syllable structure in Bororo is : that is, a mandatory vowel nucleus, optionally preceded by a single onset consonant. Aside from unmodified loanwords from Portuguese, Bororo syllables never have onset consonant clusters or codas.Stress in Bororo occurs generally on the penultimate mora. Since diphthongs contain two morae, this means that a diphthong in either penultimate or final position will generally be stressed: "bow", "pimple, scale". Before compounding, however, diphthongs are reanalyzed as a monomoraic syllable, and stress is assigned again to the penultimate syllable of the whole compound: "finger", from /kera/ "hand" and /kae̯/ "digit".
Morphophonology
Bororo has a process of stem-initial mutation. When a stem beginning in a consonant takes on a prefix itself containing a consonant, the stem-initial consonant is voiced; for example, kodu "to go" becomes ikodu "I go" with the first person singular but pagodu "we go" in first person plural inclusive. In addition, /b/ becomes /w/ and /dʒ/ becomes /j/ when following a prefix, regardless of whether the latter has a consonant or not: bogai "for" becomes iwogai "for me". Stems beginning with /d g m n r j w/ do not undergo any change. This process is part of a wider harmony restriction in Bororo, rare among the world's languages: no word may contain more than one voiceless obstruent.Meanwhile, a stem beginning in a vowel requires the insertion of a "thematic" consonant to attach a prefix. The consonant used varies both by the prefix and the stem-initial vowel: the first-person singular, first-person plural exclusive, and third-person plural prefixes insert the thematic consonant -t-/-d- before stems beginning in a- or o-, while all other combinations insert -k-/-g-. For example, whereas ore "children" becomes i-t-ore "my children", "steal" becomes "I steal". A few irregular stems which would be expected to take -t-/-d- instead take -n-: oika "anxiety" becomes "my anxiety", rather than or similar. Finally, since vowel-initial stems never take a third-person singular prefix, no thematic vowel is inserted. This process is summarized in the table below.
Morphology
Bororo, like most languages of South America, is synthetic and agglutinative. However, it cannot strictly be labelled "polysynthetic"; it does not make use of incorporation or any other means of particularly extensive derivation. Nominal morphology is fairly simple – on a level comparable with modern Romance languages – and verbal morphology, while somewhat more complex, cannot exceed three or four affixes on any given verb, in sharp contrast to the better-known "polysynthetic" languages of the Americas such as Nahuatl or Mohawk.Six basic word classes exist in Bororo: nouns and verbs and conjunctions, postpositions, adverbs, and pronouns. Note that there is no independent class of adjectives; the functions of adjectives in European languages are filled by verbs or nouns in Bororo. This section provides an overview of Bororo morphology as organized by these classes.
Nouns
There is no category of obligatory nominal affixes in Bororo; a noun phrase may therefore be composed of a single unmarked root.Plurality
Most nouns are pluralized by means of a plural suffix, whose most common allomorph is -doge: arigao "dog" pluralizes to arigao-doge "dogs". The other allomorphs are -e, -mage and -ge. In addition, there is a "zero morpheme" *bo- which can occur only with the plural suffix -e, meaning "things" or "people", hence the Bororos' own term for themselves Boe.Some nouns, however, are basically plural and require a marked singular suffix -dü. These generally refer to human beings; examples include "white people" and "men".
Diminution and gender
is a productive process in Bororo. The diminutive suffix is -; "snake" therefore may become "little snake". This has the allomorph when attached to a plural noun: "snakes" becomes awagoe-kügüre "little snakes".Bororo has no obligatory marking of grammatical gender. Many distinctions made by noun gender in Portuguese and other languages with the category are simply made by suppletive forms in Bororo, as in marido/''oredüje "husband/wife", or by compounding with the nouns imedü "man" and aredü "woman" – hence tapira imedü "bull" and tapira aredü "cow" from tapira "cattle". However, there is also a feminine derivative suffix -do, which is used with personal names and demonstratives: awü "this", awü-do'' "this ".