Tupi language

Old Tupi, Ancient Tupi or Classical Tupi (Portuguese pronunciation: [tuˈpi]) 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".^[1]

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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.^[2]

The names Old Tupi or Classical Tupi are used for the language in English and by modern scholars (it is referred to as tupi antigo in Portuguese). It has previously been known, in Portuguese, as língua brasílica "Brazilian language".

The following is a summary of the main characteristics of Classical Tupi, its typology and other distinguishing features.^[2][3]

• 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: /i/, /ĩ/; /ɨ/, /ɨ̃/; /u/, /ũ/; /ɛ/, /ɛ̃/; /ɔ/, /ɔ̃/; /a/, /ã/.
• Its consonantal inventory, on the other hand, is considered "relatively small".^[3]
• It is neither isolating, fusional, agglutinative or polysynthetic, rather displaying features of each, with none significantly more prevalent.^[3]
• There is no number, case or gender distinction in nouns.
• There are no marks of definiteness.
• It contains an inclusive first person plural (inclusive "we"), as well as an exclusive one, which does not include the listener.

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,^{[citation needed]} 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 (states of Maranhão, Pará, Amapá, Amazonas, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Goiás, São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul, Rio de Janeiro, and Espírito Santo), 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 /s/ by the glottal fricative /h/ 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 (and possibly only) 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 (which he called lingua Brasilica) 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 (used by Europeans and Indian populations alike) 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.

When the Portuguese first arrived on the shores of modern-day Brazil, most of the tribes they encountered spoke very closely related dialects. The Portuguese (and particularly the Jesuit priests who accompanied them) 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 (Catholic priests familiar with Latin grammars) 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 (again published by the Jesuits); 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 (2013), by the Brazilian scholar Eduardo de Almeida Navarro.

In Brazil, tupinology is the study of tupi language and literature. It began in 1901, with the work of Theodoro Sampaio.^[4] An individual who dedicates themselves to the field of tupinology is a tupinologist.

The phonology of tupinambá has some interesting and unusual features. For instance, it does not have the lateral approximant /l/ or the multiple vibrant rhotic consonant /r/. 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.

This section does not cite any sources. (September 2024)

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.^{[citation needed]}

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 /ʃ/, a spelling convention common in the languages of the Iberian Peninsula but unusual elsewhere.
• The use of the digraphs yg (for Ŷ), gu (for /w/), ss (to make intervocalic S unvoiced), and of j to represent the semivowel /j/.
• Hyphens are not used to separate the components of compounds except in the dictionary or for didactical purposes.

Tupi features clusivity, i.e., a distinction between inclusive (including the addressee) and exclusive (excluding the addressee) first-person pronouns. Personal pronouns in Tupi come in two series, each with its own uses.

* a'e means this/these or that/those, but it can also be used as a third-person personal pronoun, both singular and plural.^[2]

First series pronouns are generally used alone or along with verbs of the first class (those that are conjugated). For example: ixé a-karukatu: I ate well. Abápe morubixaba? – Ixé: who's the cacique? - I (am).

Second series pronouns are used in many different cases:

• alongside adjectives: xe porang, I'm beautiful.
• with verbs of the second class (see below): nde ma'enduar ixé resé, you remember me.
• in a genitive construction: i membyra, her son.

Old Tupi verbs are divided in two classes. First class are conjugated, with person markers coming at the beginning of the word. In addition, verbs can represent a present, past, or future action because, unlike Portuguese, they do not express time. (The future, in particular, is done by adding the particle -ne to the end of the sentence, but this does not change the fact that the verb itself does not express time.)^[2]

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

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 las 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.^[2]: 60

When the object is not incorporated, then in it is replaced by a pleonastic third-person pronoun-i-, even if the object is present elsewhere in the phrase. Monosyllabic verbs use -îo- (or also -nho- close to nasals) instead of -i-, and a few others use -s- instead. Some examples:

• pirá a-î-kutuk (literally: the fish, I it poke) or a-î-kutuk pirá

The pronoun -i- is incorporated and becomes a diphthong.^[2]: 60

• ere-îo-sub oré: you visit us (excl.).

The monosyllabic verb sub (to visit) has -îo- incorporated.

• a-îo-mim (or a-nho-mim) u'ubá: I hide the arrow.

The monosyllabic nasal verb mim (to hide) has -îo- or -nho- incorporated.^[2]: 61

• São Pedro itangapema o-s-ekyî: Saint Peter pulled the sword (itangapema).

The verb ekyî (to pull) requires -s- instead of -i-.^[2]: 62 From Anchieta, Catecismo na Língua Brasílica.

• pe-îuká îagûareté: you (pl.) killed the jaguar.

For îuká (to kill), the incorporated object is absorbed by the verb since it already begins with î.

Future

To express something happening in the future, the clitic -ne is always added to the last word in the sentence, independent of its grammatical class. This clitic has other meanings and may then be used as a particle in different positions.^[2]: 138

• Abá kori ka'ape osóne. The indian will go to the woods today.
• Oro'u onhemongyraba'eramane. We shall eat what fattens us. (The verb here is oro'u, but -ne for expressing the future always goes at the end of the sentence.)
• Pytuna i ro'yne. The night shall be cold (there is no verb "to be" in Old Tupi)
• Kururu opererekypyne. The frog will begin (ypy) to jump (pererek)
• Pytuna o'aryne. The night will fall. (y is insterted between the verb and the clitic to avoid consonants meeting, which isn't possible in Old Tupi)

All nouns in old Tupi end in a vowel. In the case of a verb or adjective substantivized, the suffix -a is added, if it does not already end in a vowel.^[2]

• Sem: to exit. Sema: the going out, the exit
• Pererek: to jump. Perereka: the jump, the leap.
• Só (verb): to go. Só (noun): the going, the going away.
• Porang: beautiful. Poranga: the beauty

The same occurs when a noun and an adjective are in composition. In this way:^[2]: 24

• Kunhãporanga: beautiful woman (kunhã, woman; porang, beautiful; a, suffix)

Noun tenses

Unlike the Portuguese language, the tense of an action, in old Tupi, is expressed by the noun, not the verb. Such tenses are future, past and a time called "unreal", which is similar to the future perfect, of Portuguese. They are indicated, respectively, by the adjectives -ram, -pûer and -rambûer. These, when in composition with the noun, receive the suffix -a, as explained above.^[8][2]

• Future: ka'a-ram-a = forest that will be (that has not yet been born; ka'a means forest)
• Past: ka'a-pûer-a = forest that was (place where there is no more forest; hence the word capoeira)
• Unreal: ybyrá-rambûer-a = tree that would be (if it had not been cut down)

In Old Tupi, there are only numerals from one to four, both cardinal and ordinal, as the need for mathematical precision was small in a primitive economy. Cardinal numerals can either come after or before the noun they refer to, while ordinals only come after. For example, in the case of cardinal numbers, mokõî pykasucode: tpw is deprecated and pykasu mokõîcode: tpw is deprecated are equivalent terms, meaning "two pigeons". In the case of ordinals, ta'yr-ypycode: tpw is deprecated means "first son (of a man)" and 'ara mosapyracode: tpw is deprecated means "third day".^[2]

They are the same as prepositions, but they come after the term they refer to. They are divided into unstressed postpositions, which are appended to the previous word, and stressed postpositions, which are written separately.^[2]

Just like in Portuguese or English, some verbs require certain postpositions:^[2]

• Pedo osykyîé o sy suícode: tpw is deprecated (Peter is afraid of his mother; the verb sykyîécode: tpw is deprecated requires the preposition suícode: tpw is deprecated )
• Tuba oma'ẽ o a'yra resécode: tpw is deprecated (The father looks at his son; the verb ma'ẽcode: tpw is deprecated requires resécode: tpw is deprecated )

There are many ways to negate a sentence in Old Tupi.^[2]

na ... ruã

Used to negate a noun, pronoun or an adverb.

• Îagûara ixé (I'm the jaguar)
• Na îagûara ruã ixé (I'm not the jaguar)

Tupi was an agglutinative language with moderate degree of fusional features (nasal mutation of stop consonants in compounding, the use of some prefixes and suffixes), although Tupi is not a polysynthetic language.^{[citation needed]}

Tupi parts of speech did not follow the same conventions of Indo-European languages:

• Verbs are "conjugated" for person (by means of prepositioning subject or object pronouns) but not for tense or mood (the very notion of mood is absent). All verbs are in the present tense.
• Nouns are "declined" for tense by means of suffixing the aspect marker (Nominal TAM) but not for gender or number.
• There is a distinction of nouns in two classes: "higher" (for things related to human beings or spirits) and "lower" (for things related to animals or inanimate beings). The usual manifestation of the distinction was the use of the prefixes t- for high-class nouns and s- for low-class ones, so that tesá meant "human eye", and sesá meant "the eye of an animal". Some authors argue that it is a type of gender inflection.
• Adjectives cannot be used in the place of nouns, neither as the subject nor as the object nucleus (in fact, they cannot be used alone).

Tupi had a split-intransitive grammatical alignment. Verbs were preceded by pronouns, which could be subject or object forms. Subject pronouns like a- "I" expressed the person was in control, while object pronouns like xe- "me" signified the person was not. The two types could be used alone or combined in transitive clauses, and they then functioned like subject and object in English:

• A-bebé = I-fly, "I can fly", "I flew".
• Xe pysyka = me catch, "Someone has caught me" or "I'm caught".
• A-î-pysyk = I-him-catch, "I have caught him".

Although Tupi verbs were not inflected, a number of pronominal variations existed to form a rather complex set of aspects regarding who did what to whom. That, together with the temporal inflection of the noun and the presence of tense markers like koára "today," made up a fully functional verbal system.

Word order played a key role in the formation of meaning:

• taba abá-im (village + man + tiny) = tiny man from the village
• taba-im abá = man from the small village

Tupi had no means to inflect words for gender, so used adjectives instead. Some of these were:

• apyŷaba = man, male
• kuñã = woman, female
• kunumĩ = boy, young male
• kuñãtãĩ = girl, young female
• mena = male animal
• kuñã = female animal

The notion of gender was expressed, once again, together with the notion of age and that of "humanity" or "animality".

The notion of plural was also expressed by adjectives or numerals:

• abá = man; abá-etá = many men

Unlike Indo-European languages, nouns were not implicitly masculine except for those provided with natural gender: abá "man" and kuñã[tã] "woman/girl"; for instance.

Without proper verbal inflection, all Tupi sentences were in the present or in the past. When needed, tense is indicated by adverbs like ko ara, "this day".

Adjectives and nouns, however, had temporal inflection:

• abáûera "he who was once a man"
• abárama "he who shall be a man someday"

That was often used as a semantic derivation process:

• akanga "head"
• akangûera "skull" (of a skeleton)
• abá "man"
• abárama "teenager"

With respect to syntax, Tupi was mostly SOV, but word order tended to be free, as the presence of pronouns made it easy to tell the subject from the object. Nevertheless, native Tupi sentences tended to be quite short, as the Indians were not used to complex rhetorical^{[citation needed]} or literary uses.

Most of the available data about Old Tupi are based on the tupinambá dialect, spoken in what is now the Brazilian state of São Paulo, but there were other dialects as well.

According to Edward Sapir's categories, Old Tupi could be characterized as follows:

1. With respect to the concepts expressed: complex, of pure relation, that is, it expresses material and relational content by means of affixes and word order, respectively.
2. With respect to the manner in which such concepts are expressed: a) fusional-agglutinative, b) symbolic or of internal inflection (using reduplication of syllables, functionally differentiated).
3. With respect to the degree of cohesion of the semantic elements of the sentence: synthetic.

Colors

• îub = yellow, golden
• (s)oby = blue, green
• pirang = red
• ting = white
• (s)un = black

Substances

• (t)atá = fire
• itá = rock, stone, metal,
• y = water, river
• yby = earth, ground
• ybytu = air, wind

People

• abá = man (as opposed to woman), Indian or Native-American (as opposed to European), human being (as opposed to the animal world)
• aîuba = Frenchman (literally "yellow heads")
• maíra = Frenchman (the name of a mythological figure that the Indians associated with the Frenchmen)
• karaíba = foreigner, white man (literally means "spirit of a dead person"). Means also prophet.
• kunhã = woman
• kunhãtã'ĩ = girl
• kunhãmuku = young woman
• kunumĩ = boy
• kunumĩgûasu = young man
• morubixaba = chief
• peró = Portuguese (neologism, from "Pero", old variant of "Pedro" = "Peter", a common Portuguese name)
• sy = mother
• tapy'yîa = slave (also the term for non-Tupi speaking Indians)

The body

• akanga = head
• îuru = mouth
• îyba = arm
• nambi = ear
• pó = hand
• py = foot
• py'a = heart
• (t)esá = eye
• (t)etimã = leg
• tĩ = nose
• (t)obá = face

Animals

Tupi plays a huge role in the naming of many South American animals introduced to European knowledge and/or borrowed into their languages:^[9][10]

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

This section does not cite any sources. (September 2024)

As the basis for the língua geral, spoken throughout the country by white and Indian settlers alike until the early 18th century, and still heard in isolated pockets until the early 20th century, Tupi left a strong mark on the Portuguese language of Brazil.

Tupi has given the Portuguese language:

• A few thousand words (some of them hybrids or corrupted) for animals, plants, fruit and cultural entities.
• Multiple names of locations, including states (e.g. Paraná, Pará, Paraíba)

Some municipalities which have Tupi names:

• Iguaçu ('y ûasú): great river
• Ipanema ('y panema): bad, fishless water
• Itanhangá (itá + añãgá): devil's rock
• Itaquaquecetuba (takûakesétyba, from itá + takûara + kesé + tyba): where bamboo knives are made
• Itaúna ("itá + una"): black rock
• Jaguariúna (îagûara + 'í + una): small black jaguar
• Pacaembu (paka + embu): valley of the pacas.
• Paraíba (pará + aíba): bad to navigation or "bad river"
• Paranaíba (paranãíba, from paranã + aíba): dangerous sea
• Paraná-mirim (paranã + mirĩ): salty lagoon (literally: "small sea")
• Pindorama (from pindó, "palm tree", and (r)etama , country): palm country. Today this is used to refer to the country of Brazil, but this use (or any other referring to the whole region natives lived in) is not attested in Old Tupi.
• Piracaia ("pirá" + "caia"): fried fish
• Piraí (pirá + y): "fish water"
• Umuarama (ũbuarama, from ũbu + arama): where the cacti will grow

Among the many Tupi loanwords in Portuguese, the following are noteworthy for their widespread use:

• abacaxi (pineapple, literally: "fruit with thorns")
• jacaré (caiman)
• mirim (small or juvenile) as in "escoteiro-mirim" ("Boy Scout")
• perereca (a type of small frog, also slang for vulva), literally: "hopper"
• peteca (a type of badminton game played with bare hands) literally: "slap"
• piranha (a carnivorous fish, also slang for immoral women) literally: "toothed fish"
• pipoca (popcorn) literally "explosion of skin"^[11]
• 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 Indian 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.

This section does not cite any sources. (September 2024)

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.

This section does not cite any sources. (September 2024)

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.

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