Madí language


Madí—also known as Jamamadí after one of its dialects, and also Kapaná or Kanamanti —is an Arawan language spoken by about 1,000 Jamamadi, Banawá, and Jarawara people scattered over Amazonas, Brazil.

Dialects

Madí has three extant dialects, corresponding to three distinct tribal groups. Dialectal differences are an important part of tribal self-identification, and although all three dialects are mutually intelligible Madí speakers refer to them as separate languages. The dialects and the tribes they represent are as follows:
  1. Jamamadí, spoken by 250 people to the northwest. As the most widely spoken dialect, "Jamamadí" is sometimes used to refer to the whole Madí-speaking population by outsiders and the neighboring Paumarí. The term, used by the Jamamadí people themselves, is a compound of jama "forest" and madi "people". This tribe is occasionally confused with another self-identified "Jamamadí" living further up the Purus River, who in fact speak a dialect of Kulina. The Jarawara use the word wahati and the Banawá wati to refer to the Jamamadí, both possibly meaning "liver".
  2. Jarawara, spoken by about 170 in seven villages to the south. This term - which was originally used only by outsiders, but today used in self-reference when speaking to non-Madí - is a compound of the Lingua Geral jara "white person" and wara "to eat". The Jarawara refer to themselves as Ee jokana, "us real people". The Banawá refer to them as jarawa-mee; the Jamamadí call them amara, "palm-tree".
  3. Banawá, spoken by about 120 to the northeast. This term is simply the Brazilian-Portuguese name for the river the tribe now lives on; they themselves refer to the river as Kitia, and the tribe as Kitia-ka-mee, "those who belong to the Kitia". The Banawá only recently migrated to the river area, in about 1950; prior to this they were known as the Munia. Both the Jarawara and Jamamadí refer to the Banawá as bato-jafi.
These three dialects share 95% of their vocabulary, and their grammars are nearly identical. Dixon characterizes Jarawara and Banawá as somewhat closer to each other than either is to Jamamadí, analogous to the standard British, Australian and American varieties of English. The three tribes have relatively little long-term interaction with one another; close personal relations, social events, and marriages generally occur only within a given tribe. As a result, there is no particular prestige dialect of Madí, and in fact all the native terms for other dialects described above are slightly derogatory.
Of the three Madí dialects, Jarawara is the most thoroughly documented; as such, this article will refer to Jarawara unless otherwise indicated.

Phonology

Madí has a relatively small phonemic inventory, distinguishing four vowel qualities and twelve consonants.

Vowels

  1. The back vowel here represented as /o oː/ is unrounded; its most common realization is mid-back , but this varies freely with close-back .
All vowel qualities may occur short or long, but the distinction is fairly limited and has a low functional load. All monosyllabic words have a long vowel: /baː/ "to hit", /soː/ "to urinate". In polysyllabic words, however, vowel length is occasionally contrastive, as shown in the minimal pair /ˈaba/ "fish" and /ˈaːba/ "to be finished, dead". Many instances of long vowels developed historically from the loss of /h/ preceding an unstressed syllable, a process that is still ongoing; for example, the citation form /ˈaha/ "water" may be pronounced /aː/ in casual speech.
Vowels are allophonically nasalized when adjacent to nasal consonants /m n h/, and at the end of main clauses.

Consonants

  1. The voiced alveolar stop /d/ occurs in the Jamamadí and Banawá dialects; in Jarawara it has merged with /t/.
  2. The palatal stop may be realized as a semivowel in rapid speech, and especially before /i/.
  3. The glottal stop has a limited distribution. It occurs between the elements of a compound where the second element begins with a vowel, e.g. /iso-ete/ "leg-stalk" > "shin". Similarly, it occurs after reduplication when the reduplicated stem begins with a vowel: /ata-atabo/ "be muddy all over" is realized as . Dixon therefore argues that the glottal stop is not a phoneme in its own right, but rather marks a phonological word boundary occurring within a grammatical word, when the following phonological word begins in a vowel.
  4. The glottal fricative /h/ is nasalized - that is, air escapes from both the mouth and nose while it is articulated - and is therefore represented here as <>. This causes the allophonic nasalization of surrounding vowels mentioned above.
  5. The most common realization of the liquid /r/ in Jarawara is a "darkish" lateral approximant ; a tap occurs as an allophone, most commonly before /i/. In Jamamadí and Banawá, however, this consonant is realized as in most contexts.
  6. The semivowel /w/ cannot occur, or is non-distinctive, before or after the back vowel /o oː/. As a result, it is often analysed as a non-syllabic allophone of /o/.
The Jarawara dialect does not distinguish voicing in any of its consonants. It is cross-linguistically unusual, however, in that voicing in its stop series is asymmetrical; /t k/ are underlyingly voiceless, whereas /b ɟ/ are underlyingly voiced. All except /ɟ/ have occasional voiced or voiceless allophones, i.e. /p d g/; voiced allophones often occur word-initially, and voiceless allophones tend to occur word-medially. This system is the result of several mergers occurring in the transition from Proto-Arawan, which had a much larger consonant inventory. The latter system is mostly preserved in the modern Arawan language Paumarí.

Syllables and stress

In common with many other Amazonian languages, Madí has a very simple syllable structure V; that is, a syllable must consist of a vowel, which may be preceded by a consonant. All consonant-vowel sequences are permitted except. VV sequences are heavily restricted; aside from /oV Vo/, sequences where /h/ is deleted before an unstressed vowel, and the recent loanword "day", the only permitted sequence is. Words cannot begin with VV sequences, except when is deleted from the sequence /VhV-/.
In the Jarawara dialect, stress is assigned to every second mora counting from the end of the phonological word, beginning with the penultimate, e.g. "tape recorder". Since long vowels bear two moras, they are always stressed: "priest".
In Banawá, however, stress is counted from the beginning of the word: the first or second mora is stressed, along with every second mora following. Jamamadi may share this system.

Orthography

Like all indigenous languages of South America, Madí was not written prior to Euro-American contact; moreover, no officially standardized orthography yet exists for the language, and most native speakers are illiterate. The basis for written representation of the language today, both among native and non-native speakers, is a practical orthography devised by SIL for the Jamamadí dialect. The differences between the International Phonetic Alphabet, the SIL orthography for Jamamadí, and Dixon's orthography for Jarawara are listed below.
This article, which focuses mostly on the Jarawara dialect, will henceforth use Dixon's practical orthography even when discussing Jamamadí and Banawá.

Grammar

Grammatical profile

Like many indigenous languages of the Americas, Madí is grammatically agglutinative, primarily suffixing, and "verb-heavy"; that is, a great deal of grammatical information is conveyed through verbal affixes, with each affix generally corresponding to a single morpheme. Dixon, for example, counts six prefixes and over eighty affixes. The Jarawara sentence below provides an example of a highly inflected verb, with six affixes corresponding to eight independent words in English :
On the other hand, all verbal affixes are optional, and many verbs occur in speech with three affixes or fewer; as a result, the actual morpheme-per-word ratio is lower than the large inventory of affixes might suggest. Other word classes, moreover, inflect with far less regularity and variety than verbs do. As a result, while theoretically possible, single-word sentences such as those characteristic of polysynthetic languages are rare in Madí.
Madí displays a "fluid-S" active-stative alignment system and a basic object-subject-verb word order. The latter feature is shared by other regional languages but is very rare cross-linguistically.
The language has an active–stative clause structure with an agent–object–verb or object–agent–verb word order, depending on whether the agent or object is the topic of discussion.

Gender

Madí has a two-way gender system, distinguishing between masculine and feminine. All nouns carry gender, but not overtly; instead, the gender of a noun is shown by its verbal agreement, specifically in affixes. Affixes which mark for gender generally do so by a vowel alternation: -a for masculine, -e for feminine. For example, the declarative suffix -kV surfaces as -ka when the verb it applies to references a masculine subject, but as -ke when feminine.
The default, unmarked gender is feminine, and all subject pronouns require feminine gender agreement.

Verbs

As mentioned above, the verb is by far the most morphologically complex part of speech in Madí. However, the precise delineation of a "single verb" is difficult, since certain grammatically bound inflections can nonetheless form independent phonological words. For example, the masculine declarative suffix -ke is phonologically bound to the verb root in the word kake "he is coming", but part of a phonologically independent word in the sentence okofawa oke "I drink with it". For this reason, Dixon prefers to analyse Madí in terms of "predicates" and "copulas" - sentence-level grammatical units which includes the verb root, personal pronouns in any position, and inflectional affixes, but excludes noun phrases.
This section discusses the notable features of Madí verbal morphology.