Tuyuca (also Dochkafuara, Tejuca, Tuyuka, Dojkapuara, Doxká-Poárá, Doka-Poara, or Tuiuca) is an Eastern Tucanoan language (similar to Tucano) spoken by the Tuyuca people. The Tuyuca are an indigenous ethnic group of some 500-1000 people who inhabit the watershed of the Papuri, Inambú and Tiquié rivers in the Colombian department of Vaupés and the Brazilian state of Amazonas.

[edit] Grammar

Tuyuca is a postpositional agglutinative SOV language with mandatory type II evidentiality. Five evidentiality paradigms are used: visual, nonvisual, apparent, secondhand, and assumed, though secondhand evidentiality exists only in the past tense and apparent evidentiality does not appear in the first person present tense.^[3] The language is estimated to have 50 to 140 noun classes.^[4]

[edit] Phonetics & Phonology

The consonants in Tuyuca are /ptkbdɡsrwjh/ and the vowels are /iɨueao/, plus syllable nasalization and phonemic stress.^[3]

Vowels

Consonants

[edit] Consonantal contrasts

The following words show some of the consonant contrasts.^[5]

Bilabial contrasts

/pakó/ 'mom'

/bapá/ 'plate'

/wapá/ 'payment'

Alveolar contrasts

/botéa/ 'a fish'

/bodé/ 'dragonfly'

/bosé/ 'party'

/boré/ 'whitening'

Velar and palatal contrasts

/bɨkó/ 'ant-eater'

/bɨgó/ 'aunt'

/hoó/ 'plantain'

/yoó/ 'thread'

[edit] Consonantal variation

• The voiceless plosives /p, t, k/ have aspirated variants that tend to occur before high vowels and not near voiceless vowels. There are a few degrees of the amount of aspiration.
• Preglottalized variants of /b, d/ occur together at the onset.
  • Preglottal forms of [m, w, ~w, y, ~y, ɲ, dʒ] occur in the onset and are in free variations with their plain counterparts.
• Prenasal variants of /b, d, g/ occur after nasal vowels and before oral vowels: /kĩĩbai/ [kʰĩĩmbaiʰ].^[6]

[edit] Nasal Assimilation

• Voiced consonants /b, d, g, r, w, y/ have nasal variants at the same place of articulation [m, n, ɳ, ŋ, ~w, ~y] before nasal vowels.
  • The /y/ can also surface as ɲ before high nasal vowels.
• The [h] also has a nasalized variant that occurs before nasal vowels.

[edit] Nasal Harmony

Segments in a word are either all nasal or all oral.

/waa/ 'to go'

/ɯ̃ãã/ 'to illuminate' (the /w/ is nasal)

Note that voiceless segments are transparent.

/ãkã/ 'choke on a bone'

/ɯ̃ãtĩ/ 'demon'

See further remarks regarding the oral/nasal nature of affixes in the Morphophonemics section.

[edit] Suprasegmental features

The two suprasegmental features in this language are tone and nasalization.

[edit] Tone

There is a H-tone and a L-tone in Tuyuca. The phonological word has one and only one high tone which may occur in any syllable of the word. The low tone has two variants: a mid-tone that occurs in words that have at least three syllables in free variation with the low tone in internal syllables that have an [i] vowel contiguous to the H-tone and not preceded by a low-tone.

• Accent is the same as high tone.
• Tone is contrastive in (C)VV syllables

/díi/ 'blood'

/dií/ 'mud'

• Words of type (C)VCV have tone on the second syllable (but not in loanwords)

/eté/ 'parakeet'

/b~ésa/ 'table' (< Portuguese 'mesa')

[edit] Nasalization

Nasalization is phonemic and operates on the root level:

/sĩã/ 'to kill'

/sia/ 'to tie'

[edit] Phonetic distribution and syllabic structure

A syllable is considered any unit that may take tone and is comprised of a vocalic nucleus with or without a consonant before it.

Restrictions

• /g/ and /r/ never occur word-initially
• The strings /gu/ and /wu/ are absent.
• A VV string can be made up of any two vowels, either of which may occur first, except for /u/ which always occurs last.
• Multi-syllabic VVV strings occur, but not all combinations of vowels are attested. /u/ is always last in such strings.
• (C)V may be optionally realized with aspiration (having the same quality as the preceding vowel) when the syllable is unstressed and precedes syllables with voiceless onsets ^[7]..

[edit] Morphophonemics

All affixes fall into one of two classes:

1. Oral affixes which may undergo nasalization, like the plural morpheme -ri: /sopéri/ [sòO'pe~rĩh] 'marks'
2. Affixes that are intrinsically oral or nasal and cannot be changed.

When a nasal CV suffix occurs where C is a continuant or a vibrant /r/, the nasalization spreads regressively to the preceding vowel.

[edit] Difficulty

The Economist has described Tuyuca as the world's "most difficult" language because of its many noun classes and its evidentiality: a linguistic feature requiring that the speaker indicate the source or reliability of statements by the use of verbal suffixes.^[4]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Tuyuca language dictionary online from IDS (select simple or advanced browsing)
• Ethnologue entry

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