Old Tupi, Ancient Tupi or Classical Tupi () is a classical Tupian language which was spoken by the Indigenous Tupi people of Brazil, 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 (Pindamonhangaba, Ubatuba, Botucatu, Jacareí). 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. 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 (12).

This led to a Brazilian pun about this language, that native Brazilians não têm fé, nem lei, nem rei (have neither faith, nor law, nor king) as the words fé (faith), lei (law) and rei (king) could not be pronounced by a native Tupi speaker (they would say pé, re'i and re'i). It is also a double pun because Brazil has not had a king for more than two centuries.

Vowels

{| class="wikitable"

! !! Front!! Central!! Back

|- align=center

! Close

| , || , || ,

|- align=center

! Mid

| , || || ,

|- align=center

! Open

| || , ||

|}

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

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"

|-

! colspan="2"|

! Labial

! Coronal

! Palatal

! Velar

! Glottal

|-

! colspan="2"| Nasals

|

|

|

| ||

|-

! rowspan="2"| Plosive

! <small>prenasalized</small>

|

| ||

| ||

|-

! <small>voiceless</small>

|

| ||

|

|

|-

! colspan="2"| Fricative

|

|

|

|

|

|-

! colspan="2"| Semivowel

| ||

|

|

|

|-

! colspan="2"| Flap

|

| || || ||

|}

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 ( and ), 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 (umu, ubu, umbu, upu, umpu) 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 (possibly via , which would likewise be a fricative counterpart of the labiovelar semivowel), 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 (Mbyá, Nhandéva, Kaiowá and Paraguayan Guarani) 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 (but not with character sets such as ISO-8859-1, which cannot produce ẽ, ĩ, ũ, ŷ and ỹ).

Its key features are:

  • The tilde indicating nasalisation: a → ã.
  • The circumflex accent indicating a semivowel: i → î.
  • The acute accent indicating the stressed syllable: abá.
  • The use of the letter x for the voiceless palatal fricative , a spelling convention common in the languages of the Iberian Peninsula but unusual elsewhere.
  • The use of the digraphs yg (for Ŷ), gu (for ), ss (to make intervocalic S unvoiced), and of j to represent the semivowel .
  • Hyphens are not used to separate the components of compounds except in the dictionary or for didactical purposes.

Typology

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".

{| class="wikitable"

|+First class intransitive verbs

!Pron.

!karu (eat)

!gûatá (walk)

!ker (sleep)

!pererek (jump)

!nhan (run)

!Translation

|-

!style="text-align:left"|Ixé (I)

|akaru

|agûatá

|aker

|apererek

|anhan

|I eat/ate, walk/walked...

|-

!style="text-align:left"|Endé (you)

|erekaru

|eregûatá

|ereker

|erepererek

|erenhan

|You eat/ate, walk/walked...

|-

!style="text-align:left"|A'e (he*)

|okaru

|ogûatá

|oker

|opererek

|onhan

|He eats/ate, walks/walked...

|-

!style="text-align:left"|Oré (we)

|orokaru

|orogûatá

|oroker

|oropererek

|oronhan

|We (exclusive) eat/ate, walk/walked...

|-

!style="text-align:left"|Îandé (we)

|îakaru

|îagûatá

|îaker

|îapererek

|îanhan

|We (inclusive) eat/ate, walk/walked...

|-

!style="text-align:left"|Peẽ (you)

|pekaru

|pegûatá

|peker

|pepererek

|penhan

|You (plural) eat/ate, walk/walked...

|-

!style="text-align:left"|A'e (they*)

|okaru

|ogûatá

|oker

|opererek

|onhan

|They eat/ate, walk/walked...

|}

Verbs from the second class are not conjugated and are used only with pronouns of the second series. This is because they are actually adjectives generally indicating a state or characteristic.

  • xe ma'endurar (I remember)
  • nde u'u (you cough) (sg.)
  • i membyrar (she gives birth)
  • oré rambûer (we fail) (excl.)
  • îandé nhyrõ (we forgive) (incl.)
  • pe poasem (you moan) (pl.)
  • i pytu (they breathe)

Transitive verbs

thumb|255px|Abá îagûara o<u>nh</u>ybõ. The indian shot the jaguar with an arrow. (literally: the indian shot with an arrow it, the jaguar.) This is an example of the object -i- becoming -nho- close to nasals.

Objects of transitive verbs in Old Tupi may come in many positions relative to the verb: either before, after or incorporated into it. In the last case, it comes after the person markers (a-, ere-, o-, etc.) in first class verbs, but before the root. For an example of incorporation:

  • a-pirá-kutuk (I poke the fish)

:: a- is the first-person marker, pirá means fish and kutuk to poke.</small>||4th||<br /><small>(little used)

  • ai = sloth (, ; )
  • aîuru = parrot, lory, lorykeet
  • arara = macaw, parrot
  • îagûara = jaguar
  • heira = tayra
  • îararaka = jararaca, yarará, a bothrops snake
  • ka'apiûara = capybara
  • koati = coati
  • mboîa = snake, cobra
  • paka = paca
  • pirá = fish
  • so'ó = game (animal)
  • tapi'ira = tapir
  • tukana = toucan
  • tatu = armadillo (, )

; Plants

  • ka'api = grass, ivy (from which the word capybara comes)
  • ka'a = plant, wood, forest
  • kuri = pine
  • (s)oba = leaf
  • yba = fruit
  • ybá = plant
  • ybyrá = tree, (piece of) wood
  • ybotyra = flower

; Society

  • oka = house
  • taba = village

; Adjectives

  • beraba = brilliant, gleamy, shiny
  • katu = good
  • mirĩ, 'í = little
  • panema = barren, contaminated, unhealthy, unlucky
  • poranga = beautiful
  • pûera, ûera = bad, old, dead
  • (s)etá = many, much
  • ûasu, usu = big

Sample texts

150px|thumb|right|The Lord's Prayer as in the Catechism in the Brasílica Language (1618)

Basic phrases

Here are some basic phrases in Old Tupi, some of which were attested by Europeans like Jean de Léry and Yves d'Évreux during the 16th century.

  • Abápe endé? (Who are you?)
  • Mamõ suípe ereîur? (Where do you come from?)
  • Mamõpe ereîkó? (Where do you live?)
  • Marãpe nde rera? (What's your name?)
  • Tiá nde karuka! (Good afternoon!)
  • Tiá nde ko'ema! (Good morning!)
  • Tiá nde pytuna! (Good night!)

Lord's Prayer

This is the Lord's Prayer in Tupi, according to Anchieta in his Catecismo na língua brasílica.

{|border=0 style='width:100%;text-align:center'

!Old tupi

!Literal Portuguese translation by Eduardo Navarro

  • piroca (originally meaning "bald", now a slang term for penis)
  • pororoca (a tidal phenomenon in the Amazon firth) literally: "confusion"
  • siri (crab)
  • sucuri (anaconda)
  • urubu (the Brazilian vulture)
  • urutu (a kind of poisonous snake)
  • uruçu (the common name for Melipona scutellaris)

It is interesting, however, that two of the most distinctive Brazilian animals, the jaguar and the tapir, are best known in Portuguese by non-Tupi names, onça and anta, despite being named in English with Tupi loanwords.

A significant number of Brazilians have Tupi names as well:

  • Araci (female): ara sy, "mother of the day"
  • Bartira, Potira (female): Ybotyra, "flower"
  • Iara (female): y îara, lady of the lake
  • Jaci (both): îasy, the moon
  • Janaína (female): îandá una, a type of black bird
  • Ubirajara (male): ybyrá îara, "lord of the trees/lance"
  • Ubiratã (male): ybyrá-atã, "hard wood"

Some names of distinct Native American ancestry have obscure etymology because the tupinambá, like the Europeans, cherished traditional names which sometimes had become archaic. Some of such names are Moacir (reportedly meaning "son of pain") and Moema.

Recurrence

Tupi is also remembered as distinctive trait of nationalism in Brazil. In the 1930s, Brazilian Integralism used it as the source of most of its catchphrases (like Anaûé meaning "you are my brother", the old Tupi salutation which was adopted as the Brazilian version of the German Sieg Heil, or the Roman "Ave") and terminology.

Literature

Old Tupi literature was composed mainly of religious and grammatical texts developed by Jesuit missionaries working among the colonial Brazilian people. The greatest poet to express in written Tupi language, and its first grammarian was José de Anchieta, who wrote over eighty poems and plays, compiled at his Lírica Portuguesa e Tupi. Later Brazilian authors, writing in Portuguese, employed Tupi in the speech of some of their characters.

See also

  • Jesuit Reductions
  • Língua Geral
  • List of Brazil state name etymologies

Notes

References

Bibliography

  • Edelweiss, Frederico G. Tupis e Guaranis, Estudos de Etnonímia e Lingüística. Salvador: Museu do Estado da Bahia, 1947. 220 p.
  • Edelweiss, Frederico G. O caráter da segunda conjugação tupi. Bahia: Livraria Progresso Editora, 1958. 157 p.
  • Edelweiss, Frederico G. Estudos tupi e tupi-guaranis: confrontos e revisões. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Brasiliana, 1969. 304 p.
  • Lemos Barbosa, A. Pequeno Vocabulário Tupi–Português. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria São José, 1951.
  • Lemos Barbosa, A. Pequeno vocabulário Tupi–Português. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria São José, 1955. (3ª ed.: Livraria São José, Rio de Janeiro, 1967)
  • Lemos Barbosa, A. Curso de Tupi antigo. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria São José, 1956.
  • Lemos Barbosa, A. Pequeno vocabulário Português-Tupi. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria São José, 1970.
  • Rodrigues, Aryon Dall'Igna. Morfologia do Verbo Tupi. Separata de "Letras". Curitiba, 1953.
  • Rodrigues, Aryon Dall'Igna. Descripción del tupinambá en el período colonial: el arte de José de Anchieta. Colóquio sobre a descrição das línguas ameríndias no período colonial. Ibero-amerikanisches Institut, Berlim.
  • Sampaio, Teodoro. O Tupi na Geografia Nacional. São Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1987. 360 p.
  • Tupi Swadesh-vocabulary list (from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix)
  • An elementary course of Old Tupi (in Portuguese)
  • Another course of Old Tupi (in Portuguese)
  • Ancient Tupi Home Page
  • TuLaR (Tupian Languages Resources)