Tupi language


Old Tupi, Ancient Tupi or Classical Tupi is a classical Tupian language which was spoken by the indigenous Tupi people of Brazil, mostly those who inhabited coastal regions in South and Southeast Brazil. In the words of Brazilian tupinologist Eduardo Navarro, "it is the classical indigenous language of Brazil, and the one which had the utmost importance to the cultural and spiritual formation of the country".
Old Tupi belongs to the Tupi–Guarani language family, and has a written history spanning the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries. In the early colonial period, Tupi was used as a lingua franca throughout Brazil by Europeans and Amerindians, and had literary usage, but it was later suppressed almost to extinction. Today, its sole living descendant is the Nheengatu language.
As the most important native language of Brazil, it is the origin of most city names of indigenous origin. It also names several plants and animals, and many proper names are Tupi names, such as Moacir, Iara, Iracema and Jandaia. It has a rich literature, which includes catechisms, poems and plays.
The names Old Tupi or Classical Tupi are used for the language in English and by modern scholars. It has previously been known, in Portuguese, as língua brasílica "Brazilian language".

Linguistic description

The following is a summary of the main characteristics of Classical Tupi, its typology and other distinguishing features.
  • Tupi is a SOV language but was influenced by its Portuguese superstratum toward the latter's SVO,
  • It presents a system of vowel symmetry where each of the six phonemic oral vowels has its nasal phonemic counterpart:, ;, ;, ;, ;, ;,.
  • Its consonantal inventory, on the other hand, is considered "relatively small".
  • It is neither isolating, fusional, agglutinative or polysynthetic, rather displaying features of each, with none significantly more prevalent.
  • There is no number, case or gender distinction in nouns.
  • There are no marks of definiteness.
  • It contains an inclusive first person plural, as well as an exclusive one, which does not include the listener.

    History

Old Tupi was first spoken by the Tupinambá people, who lived under cultural and social conditions very unlike those found in Europe. It is quite different from Indo-European languages in phonology, morphology, and grammar, but it was adopted by many Luso-Brazilians born in Brazil as a lingua franca.
It belonged to the Tupi–Guarani language family, which stood out among other South American languages for the vast territory it covered. Until the 16th century, these languages were found throughout nearly the entirety of the Brazilian coast, from Pará to Santa Catarina, and the Río de la Plata basin. Today, Tupi languages are still heard in Brazil, as well as in French Guiana, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina.
It is a common mistake to speak of the "Tupi–Guarani language": Tupi, Guarani and a number of other minor or major languages all belong to the Tupian language family, in the same sense that English, Romanian, and Sanskrit belong to the Indo-European language family. One of the main differences between the two languages was the replacement of Tupi by the glottal fricative in Guarani.
The first accounts of the Old Tupi language date back from the early 16th century, but the first written documents containing actual information about it were produced from 1575 onwards – when Jesuits André Thévet and José de Anchieta began to translate Catholic prayers and biblical stories into the language. Another foreigner, Jean de Lery, wrote the first Tupi "phrasebook", in which he transcribed entire dialogues. Lery's work is the best available record of how Tupi was actually spoken.
In the first two or three centuries of Brazilian history, nearly all colonists coming to Brazil would learn the tupinambá variant of Tupi, as a means of communication with both the Indigenous people and with other early colonists who had adopted the language.
The Jesuits, however, not only learned to speak tupinambá, but also encouraged the natives to keep it. As a part of their missionary work, they translated some literature into it and also produced some original work written directly in Tupi. José de Anchieta reportedly wrote more than 4,000 lines of poetry in tupinambá and the first Tupi grammar. Luís Figueira was another important figure of this time, who wrote the second Tupi grammar, published circa 1628. In the second half of the 18th century, the works of Anchieta and Figueira were republished and Father João Filipe Bettendorff wrote a new and more complete catechism. By that time, the language had made its way into the clergy and was the de facto national language of Brazil – though it was probably seldom written, as the Roman Catholic Church held a near monopoly of literacy.
When the Portuguese Prime Minister Marquis of Pombal expelled the Jesuits from Brazil in 1759, the language started to wane quickly, as few Brazilians were literate in it. A new rush of Portuguese immigration had been taking place since the early 18th century, due to the discovery of gold, diamonds, and gems in the interior of Brazil, and these new colonists spoke only their mother tongue. Old Tupi survived as a spoken language only in isolated inland areas, far from the major urban centres. Its use by a few non-Indian speakers in those isolated areas would last for over a century still.

Tupi research

When the Portuguese first arrived on the shores of modern-day Brazil, most of the tribes they encountered spoke very closely related languages. The Portuguese set out to proselytise the natives. To do so most effectively, doing so in the natives' own languages was convenient, so the first Europeans to study Tupi were those priests.
The priests modeled their analysis of the new language after the one with which they had already experienced: Latin, which they had studied in the seminary. In fact, the first grammar of Tupi—written by the Jesuit priest José de Anchieta and published in 1595—is structured much like a contemporary Latin grammar. While this structure is not optimal, it certainly served its purpose of allowing its intended readership to get enough of a basic grasp of the language to be able to communicate with and evangelise the natives. Also, the grammar sometimes regularised or glossed over some regional differences in the expectation that the student, once "in the field", would learn these finer points of the particular dialect through use with his flock.
Significant works were a Jesuit catechism of 1618, with a second edition of 1686; another grammar written in 1687 by another Jesuit priest, Luís Figueira; an anonymous dictionary of 1795 ; a dictionary published by Antônio Gonçalves Dias, a well-known 19th century Brazilian poet and scholar, in 1858; and a chrestomathy published by Dr Ernesto Ferreira França in 1859. The most recent dictionary is the Old Tupi Dictionary, by the Brazilian scholar Eduardo de Almeida Navarro.

Tupinology

In Brazil, tupinology is the study of Tupi language and literature. It began in 1901, with the work of Theodoro Sampaio. An individual who dedicates themselves to the field of tupinology is a tupinologist.

Phonology

The phonology of tupinambá has some interesting and unusual features. For instance, it does not have the lateral approximant or the multiple vibrant rhotic consonant. It also has a rather small inventory of consonants and a large number of pure vowels.
This led to a Brazilian pun about this language, that native Brazilians não têm fé, nem lei, nem rei as the words fé, lei and rei could not be pronounced by a native Tupi speaker. It is also a double pun because Brazil has not had a king for more than two centuries.

Vowels

The nasal vowels are fully vocalic, without any trace of a trailing or. They are pronounced with the mouth open and the palate relaxed, not blocking the air from resounding through the nostrils. These approximations, however, must be taken with caution, as no actual recording exists, and Tupi had at least seven known dialects.

Consonants

Alternative view

According to Nataniel Santos Gomes, however, the phonetic inventory of Tupi was simpler:
  • Consonants:
  • * p, t, k, '
  • * b
  • * s, x
  • * m, n, ñ
  • * û, î
  • * r
  • Vowels
  • * i, y, u, ĩ, ỹ, ũ
  • * e, o, õ, ẽ
  • * a, ã
This scheme does not regard Ŷ as a separate semivowel, does not consider the existence of G, and does not differentiate between the two types of NG, probably because it does not regard MB, ND and NG as independent phonemes, but mere combinations of P, T, and K with nasalization.
Santos Gomes also remarks that the stop consonants shifted easily to nasal stops, which is attested by the fitful spelling of words like umbu in the works of the early missionaries and by the surviving dialects.
According to most sources, Tupi semivowels were more consonantal than their IPA counterparts. The Î, for instance, was rather fricative, thus resembling a very slight, and Û had a distinct similarity with the voiced stop , thus being sometimes written gu. As a consequence of that character, Tupi loanwords in Brazilian Portuguese often have j for Î and gu for Û.

Orthography

It would have been almost impossible to reconstruct the phonology of Tupi if it did not have a wide geographic distribution. The surviving Amazonian Nhengatu and the close Guarani correlates provide material that linguistic research can still use for an approximate reconstruction of the language.
Scientific reconstruction of Tupi suggests that Anchieta either simplified or overlooked the phonetics of the actual language when he was devising his grammar and his dictionary.
The writing system employed by Anchieta is still the basis for most modern scholars. It is easily typed with regular Portuguese or French typewriters and computer keyboards.
Its key features are: