| Yawalapiti | |
| States: | Brazil |
| Region: | Xingu Indigenous Park, Mato Grosso |
| Speakers: | 8 |
| Date: | 2006 |
| Ref: | e18 |
| Familycolor: | American |
| Fam2: | Southern ? |
| Fam3: | Paresí–Xingu |
| Fam4: | Waurá |
| Iso3: | yaw |
| Lc1: | avo |
| Ld1: | Agavotaguerra |
| Glotto: | yawa1261 |
| Glottoname: | Yawalapití |
| Glotto2: | agav1236 |
| Glottoname2: | Agavotaguerra (bibliographic info) |
| Glottorefname2: | Agavotaguerra |
Yawalapiti (Jaulapiti) is an Arawakan language of Brazil. The Agavotaguerra (Agavotoqueng) reportedly spoke the same language.[1] Speakers of the language live in a village along the edge of the river Tuatuari, a tributary of the Kuluene River, located in the southern part of the Xingu Indigenous Park (Upper Xingu), in the state of Mato Grosso.[2]
Yawalapiti and Waurá, an Arawakan language belonging to the same subgroup, share a very similar phonemic inventory. The main segments are classified in the following table.
| Nasal | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | (pronounced as /ink/) | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | ||
| Affricate | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | |||||
| Fricative | pronounced as /ink/ ~ pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | ||||
| Lateral | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | |||||
| Vibrant | pronounced as /ink/ | ||||||
| Flap | pronounced as /ink/ | ||||||
| Semivowel | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ |
There are no voiced plosives or affricates in the language. The palatal pronounced as /[c]/ appears to be an allophone of pronounced as //k// occurring before the front vowel pronounced as //i//, e.g. [puˈluka] "countryside" vs. [naˈciɾu] "my aunt". Also, the fricative pronounced as //ʂ// is in free variation with its voiced counterpart and pronounced as //ʐ// respectively, e.g. [iˈʂa ~ iˈʐa] "canoe".[4]
There are also some phonotactic constraints that dictate what types of consonants are allowed to appear in certain positions inside a word. For instance, the sounds pronounced as //tʃ, l, ɾ// cannot occur before the vowel pronounced as //ɨ//, and the latter two are restricted to the medial position. In a similar manner, the liquid pronounced as //ʎ// is only observed in medial position and never before pronounced as //a//. As for the voiceless pronounced as //r̥//, it is the only rhotic segment that is allowed to appear in any position and before any vowel. The semivowel pronounced as //w// is found in initial, medial and final position, while pronounced as //j// does not occur in final position.[5]
The glottal stop is automatic in words beginning or ending in a vowel, i.e. a word like pronounced as //u// "water" is pronounced as pronounced as /[ˈʔuʔ]/.[6]
The Yawalapiti language has both oral and nasal vowels, as shown below.
| Front | Central | Back | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| oral | nasal | oral | nasal | oral | nasal | ||
| High | pronounced as /i/ | pronounced as /ĩ/ | pronounced as /ɨ/ | pronounced as /ɨ̃/ | pronounced as /u/ | pronounced as /ũ/ | |
| Low | pronounced as /a/ | pronounced as /ã/ | |||||
Although nasal vowels mostly occur before or after nasal consonants, e.g. pronounced as /[ˈĩmi]/ "pequi oil" or pronounced as /[ˈmũnu]/ "termite",[5] there are cases in which they are found in non-nasal environments, e.g. pronounced as /[hã ~ hĩ]/ (emphatic particle).[7] Simple vowels can form various diphthongs, mainly pronounced as //iu, ui, ia, ai, au, ua, ɨu, uɨ//.[8]
Contrary to Waurá, Yawalapiti has no pronounced as //e// sound. This is because Proto-Arawak *e has evolved as pronounced as //ɨ// while, at the same time, Proto-Arawak *i and *ɨ have merged resulting into pronounced as //i// in Yawalapiti.[9]
Syllables in Yawalapiti can be of the type V, CV and, only in word-final position, (C)Vʔ. The stress may fall on the penultimate or on the last syllable of a word.[8]
As other Arawakan languages, Yawalapiti is agglutinative and makes use of affixes, especially suffixes, to convey basic grammatical relations. Nominal suffixes can be divided into two groups: classifiers and derivational suffixes.
The main classifiers found in Yawalapiti refer to the shape of an object or some other characteristic of it, like texture, length and position.[10]
| classifier | semantics | |
|---|---|---|
| -ja | liquid | |
| -ti | elongated | |
| -ta | circular or spherical | |
| -ka | flat | |
| -pana | leaf-shaped | |
| -lu | wrapping |
These morphemes attach to adjectives when they refer to a noun that needs a classifier, as in the following example.
Derivational suffixes are applied to primitive nouns to form new compound nouns. Sometimes, however, the meaning of the original noun is not known.
Nominal and verbal prefixes intervene in the formation of possessive phrases, and can indicate the subject or the object of a verb phrase. The set of possessive prefixes of Yawalapiti is very similar to those of the other languages of the Arawakan branch.
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st person | n-, ni- | a-, aw- | |
| 2nd person | p-, pi- | i- | |
| 3rd person | in- | in- ... -pa | |
| Before consonants | |||
| Singular | Plural | ||
| 1st person | nu- | a- | |
| 2nd person | hi-, ti- | i- | |
| 3rd person | i- | i- ... -pa | |
In vowel initial nouns and verbs, the forms ni- and pi- are frequently used with roots beginning in u, while the prefix aw- appears systematically before a. In nouns and verbs beginning in consonant, the form ti- occurs only when the root starts with h (in all the other cases, hi- is used). The third person plural is actually a circumfix formed by the correspondent prefix of the third person singular and the pluralizer suffix -pa. When nouns beginning with p, k, t, m, n, w and j are modified by the prefix of second person singular or plural, their initial sounds are subject to the following morphophonemic changes.[11]
p → ɾ
k → tʃ
t → ts
m → ɲ
n → ɲ
w → Ø
j → Ø
Thus, for example, -kuʃu "head" becomes hi-tʃuʃu "your head" (but nu-kuʃu "my head"), -palaka "face" becomes hi-ɾalaka "your face" (but nu-palata "my face") and -jakanati "saliva" becomes hi-akanati "your saliva" (but nu-jakanati "my saliva").
Apart from possessive prefixes, alienable nouns also receive alienable possessive suffixes, as in the case of uku "arrow", which becomes n-uku-la "my arrow", p-uku-la "your arrow", in-uku-la "his/her arrow", etc.
Independent pronouns of first and second person are listed in the table below.[12]
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st person | natu | aʂu | |
| 2nd person | tiʂu | iʂu |
For the third person, Yawalapiti speakers use demonstrative pronouns, which are also marked for gender.[12]
| Masculine | Feminine | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Near | iɾi | iɾu | |
| Far | itiɾa | iɾutiɾa |
From a typological point of view, the order of constituents in Yawalapiti is SVO. In genitive constructions, the possessor precedes the possessed item. The same is true for other modifiers, especially demonstratives and numerals, while adjectives are free to occur before or after their referent.[13]