Talk:Old Tupi language

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[edit] Extinct or not?

The article currently begins by stating that Old Tupi is a dead language, yet later it says that it has a modern descendant, called nhengatú. Which differences between Old Tupi and modern nhengatú justify their being considered different languages? FilipeS 20:29, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Oh, in Linguistics, modern descendents of ancient languages are considered different. Nheengatu (tupian - nhe'eng+katu - good language) is the modern version of Old Tupi, and, sometimes, it's called Modern Tupi. Smertios 13:58, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm nevertheless glad that someone has reworded the article, because saying that Nheengatu was led to extinction, leaving no descendants, has different political connotations than saying that its use declined, and it currently has much fewer speakers than it did until the 18th century.

I also wonder whether this article should not be merged with the one on Nheengatu, which currently has very little to say... FilipeS

This article should remain independent from Nheengatu because Old Tupi, unlike its modern descendant, was spoken by an appreciable part of the population and had a very important historical role. Nheengatu is much less spoken, has no literature and is apparently some sort of pidgin, mixing Old Tupi and other Brazilian indigenous languages (though Tupi elements predominate). There is perhaps more research about Old Tupi than about Nheengatu as well and that "dead" language is the one most Brazilians think about when they think about "indian language".
I have also some sort of admiration for this language because it sound so utterly primitive and clumsy (I would not dare write this to the article, so I commit it here). I once perused two extensive Tupi books (a dictionary with 5000 words or more Portuguese-Tupi and Tupi-Portuguese and a 600-page Grammar and Phrasebook) and they gave me the serious impression that it is impossible to convey any abstract reasoning or artful wording with this language.
Tupi is also probably the ugliest language I ever heard (and I have heard other indian languages that are beautiful, like Ticuna). When you try to read it aloud it sounds like barking. There was a film (Como Era Gostoso o meu Francês that was almost entirely shot in it and it was next to unbearable although the actors had been taught extensively by Tupi scholars. But that's, of course, trivia... jggouvea 22:51, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

I have never heard Nheengatu spoken, but I confess that I found its history fascinating. To think that, if things had turned out differently, today it might be the language of Brazil (truly a Brazilian language)!

I will take your word for it that it sounds ugly, although beauty is of course in the eye of the beholder. But perhaps the fact that the people you heard were not native speakers contributed to the impression of ugliness.

As for expressing abstract thoughts in Tupi, well the Jesuits had some success with it, didn't they? It's not surprising that that modern Tupi has little lexical or styllistic sophistication, if it's only used by people who still lead a traditional way of life. Why would they need to talk about complicated things? :-) FilipeS

There are two things that are notable about Old Tupi. a) it apparently did not have an extensive vocabulary (because the indians were not civilised, so they did not know a lot of things that were named in other languages and also because they preferred to use compounds instead of creating new roots) and b) its Ugliness-- which is of course, related to the different phonetic structure. Note there that Tupi was full nasal (mb, nd, ng, ñ. m, n) and glottal consonants (h, k and ') but had no dentals and a lot of retroflexes (r, s, x, j). This may be because the indians used to have piercings on their lips making it difficult for them to produce such sounds. The overall result of this arrangement is that the language sounds throaty and "mouthful". This is the type of pronunciation that is deemed ugly by most speakers of indo-european languages.
Had Tupi not been replaced by Portuguese, than Brazil would be probably bilingual. Tupi would be spoken in São Paulo, Paraná, Goiás, Tocantins, Mato Grosso/Mato Grosso do Sul and maybe by the Amazonian inhabitants (Amazonia would be probably bilingual itself). Elsewhere in Brazil Portuguese would be predominant. Tupi would have incorporated a lot of Portuguese vocabulary to supply its poor lexicon and would have become somehow related to Jopará or even more debased. Brazilian music and literature would be much poorer because the country would be divided linguistically-wise and there would be less room for developing them. I would not like to speak Tupi either: call me a racist, but my admiration for this language is no love, it is curiosity for its freakishness. jggouvea 22:46, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Since you seem to know a little about this language, I would like to ask you another question. From what I've read (which wasn't much, to be honest), I got the impression that Guarani is pretty similar to Nheengatu. Am I right? FilipeS

They're more or less as close as Portuguese and Spanish. Nowadays they may not be readily intelligible but they were closer in the past. Many words are identical or very similar. For instance, Guarani speakers call their language avañe'ẽ which (considering that Spanish, the other language of Paraguay, does not differ V and B) is almost identical to abáñeenga (one of the names used by the Tupinamba for their language). A lot of Tupi vocabulary and grammar has been reconstructed by linguists using Guarani and Nheengatu as starting points (giving that the two languages have been geographically separated for three centuries or more, whatever exists in both must have existed in Old Tupi, which was almost identical to Guarani). Linguists believe that the split between Tupi and Guarani was recent and that the population of the Brazilian coast by Tupi-Guarani speakers occurred a few centuries before 1500. Well, I guess this information, if we are able to locate references, is worth putting in the article, what do you think? jggouvea 00:39, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Good idea. I just don't know which would be the best place to put that information. The article on Guarani already mentions its similarity to Nheengatu, so you could add it to this article on Old Tupi, or to the one on Nheengatu, or to both. But there are also articles on the Tupi-Guarani language group, the Tupi languages, and so on (see the table with the language's classification, at the top of the article on Guarani)...

Thank you very much for your reply to my question. :-) FilipeS

[edit] Neutrality

Saying that the language's phonology is "surprising" isn't NPOV. Each language has some features that appear unusual for non-native speakers

I've rewritten that bit. Is it O.K. now? FilipeS 21:34, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Illiterate people"?

Old Tupi was spoken by an illiterate people, living under cultural and social conditions very unlike those found in Europe. It is quite different from Indo-European languages both in phonology, morphology and grammar.

The article says that Old Tupi was "spoken by an illiterate people", suggesting that that set it apart from European languages. No doubt the majority of the population was indeed illiterate -- as was always the case everywhere in the world, until the nineteenth century -- but the Jesuits used Tupi, and they were definitely not illiterate. I think this remark needs to be toned down. FilipeS 21:39, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Multiple vibrant rhotic"

Tupinamba phonology has some interesting and unusual features. For instance, it has only two fricatives, /s/ and /ʃ/ and does not have the lateral approximant /l/ or the multiple vibrant rhotic consonant /R/.

Does this mean the alveolar trill? What's unusual about not having the alveolar trill? Plenty of languages don't have it. FilipeS 22:03, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Voiced glottal stop?

Also from the Phonology section:

According to most sources, Tupi semivowels were more consonantal than their IPA counterparts [...] Û had a distinct similarity with the voiced glottal stop (/ɡ/), thus being sometimes written gu.

What is a voiced glottal stop? FilipeS 22:14, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Agglutinative, or not? Article contradicts itself

At the start of the Grammatical Structure section:

Unlike most European languages, Tupi was not distinctly fusional or agglutinating though such terms are still widely used to describe its grammar.
Regarding the mutations suffered by its consonants as a separate phenomenon, it can be argued that Tupi was mostly agglutinating, though it lacked enough agglutinative power to form complex sentence-containing words.

Which is it? FilipeS 22:17, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The rhotic consonant of Tupi: flap, or approximant?

In the section on the "Presence of Tupi in Brazil", the article has the following:

Tupi has given Brazilian Portuguese:
The English-like pronunciation of "r" in the southern states.

But earlier, in the Phonology section, the rhotic consonant of Tupi is described as an alveolar flap, not an alveolar approximant:

One rhotic consonant, a tap/flap (like the "r" of Spanish, or the "t" in American English city; IPA /ɾ/).

Which is it? FilipeS 22:09, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Presence of Tupi in Brazil

Another excerpt from this section:

Tupi has given Brazilian Portuguese:
The intensification of the difference between rounded and unrounded "e" and "o".

What does this mean? There is no rounded "e" in Portuguese, that I know of. FilipeS 22:23, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] On grammatical terminology

The section on Tupi Research says:

Therefore, the first (and the only contemporary) grammar of Tupi reflected the conditioning and the prejudices of both the religion and the science of Europe: Indo-European terminology and categorisation is used, despite being inadequate to Tupi. This tendency to regularise and grammaticalise the language is evident in the study of Tupian "verbs" and "nouns", as the former do not inflect for tense, while the later do.

But isn't the idea that verbs "should" inflect for tense, and nouns not, itself Eurocentric?

In the Celtic languages, prepositions are inflected for person, but no one complains that they should be renamed because of that... FilipeS 22:31, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Exactly. The whole Tupi Research section is quite NPOV --- how dare those Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century scholars not swear by Twenty-first-century multiculturalism? Truly, they were only concerned about oppressing and destroying the culture of the innocent Native Americans... While I will agree that Anchieta's grammar could do with a bit more distance from Latin, he wasn't a professional linguist, but rather a priest. Would a professional linguist have done a better job? Evidently, but there were none available at the time, so he and his contemporaries should be really cut some slack for providing us with the data we do have. --Wtrmute 14:07, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Nouns "implicitly masculine" in Indo-European languages?

From the Grammatical Struture section:

Unlike in Indo-European languages, nouns were not implicitly masculine, except for those provided with natural gender:

How are nouns "implicitly masculine" in Indo-European languages? FilipeS 23:14, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Word order example

From the Grammatical Structure section:

Word order played a key role in the formation of meaning:
*abá-í taba (man + tiny + our + village) = kid from the village
*abá taba-í = man from the small village (or "the man from Smallville"...)

Is the first translation right? Where does the word "our" come from? FilipeS 14:07, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

No, cut-n-paste error.... jggouvea 01:41, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] How many fricatives?

In the Phonology section, it's said:

There are only two fricatives, S and X (both unvoiced, one dental and the other palatal, IPA /s/ and IPA /ʃ/, as in English "sh", respectively). Some authors remark that the actual pronunciation of /s/ was retroflex (though still distinct from /ʃ/).

But there's also this:

The consonant written B is not pronounced with the mouth fully closed and has a distinctive fricative character (IPA /β/, similar to English "v" or Spanish "b", but articulated using both lips, not the bottom teeth and the top lips); it is not the voiced equivalent of the bilabial stop P.

And this:

The glottal fricative H is mostly absent and often pronounced as an S. According to most sources, the two sounds were interchangeable, and the prevalence of either varied from dialect to dialect (/h/ being more common in the southernmost dialects). FilipeS 14:18, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tupinambá: change redirect?

Searching for "Tupinambá" on Wikipedia currently redirects the reader to this page. It's true that Tumpinambá was the name of a dialect of Old Tupi, but it is also the name of an ethnicity. It would make more sense to make "Tupinambá" redirect to Tupi, for instance, since there are currently no articles about the Tupinambá tribe itself. FilipeS 19:27, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

AFAIK, the Tupi-speaking peoples were divided into several nations, namely (from memory) the Tupinambá, the Carijó, the Aimoré, the Tupinikin, the Potiguar and the Caeté. It should be investigated whether these were really ethnicities or merely local names the different tribes gave to themselves -- considering that the Tupi-speaking area started north of present-day Paraná (state) and extended well into the coast of Ceará, occupying most of the Brazilian coast, except for a small pocket in North Rio de Janeiro, whose population (the Goitacaz) was Je-speaking. I think it would be better to have several small articles on each, referring to Old Tupi as their common language and "Tupi" as their ethnicity (unless someone unearths evidence to the contrary). BTW, the chief reason why someone has redirected Tupinambá to Old Tupi is that most of the knowledge we have of this language is based on the research conducted by the Jesuits (and this was concentrated on the Tupinambá, who happened to inhabit present-day São Paulo (state) and a bit of the outskirts (roughly speaking, Carijós inhabited south São Paulo and Paraná, Tupinambá inhabited most of São Paulo plus some south Minas Gerais and most of Rio, Tupinikin inhabited a narrow coast strip from north Rio to Alagoas while the rest inhabited the remaining North-East coast). Some authors (no reference at hand) suggest that the Carijó dialect was transitional between Tupi and Guarani or outright Guarani (the two languages were very similar nevertheless). Time to hire an expert (and that's not me, imho). jggouvea 17:53, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

You see, Tupiniquim directs to an article on ethnicity, while Tupinambá redirects to an article on a language, which seems inconsistent to me. As I understand, they are each ethnicities and languages, so I think it would be better to have:
Tupiniquim --> Tupiniquim
Tupinambá --> Tupi / Tupi people (since it currently has no article of its own)
Tupiniquim language, Tupinambá language --> Tupi language / Old Tupi
See also Indigenous peoples of Brazil, where the Tupinambá are listed alongside the Tupiniquim. FilipeS 18:25, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Some more inconsistencies on pronunciation

  • Î — like semivowel "y" in English (IPA /j/). Often affricate, becoming similar to the French "j" (IPA /ʒ/).
  • Û — like "w" in English (IPA /w/). [...]

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 /ʓ/, while Û had a distinct similarity with the voiced stop /ɡ/, thus being sometimes written gu. As a consequence of this character, Tupi loanwords in Brazilian Portuguese will replace j for Î and gu for Û.

Here's what I think the author meant to say:

[edit] Assimilation or clipping?

Tupi has given Brazilian Portuguese:

  • [...]
  • The slang mechanism of producing compounds by assimilation (with both terms changing phonetically).

I think what the author meant here was clipping (or some equivalent term), not assimilation. FilipeS 18:49, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Word order versus morpheme order

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

  • abá-í taba (man + tiny + village) = kid from the village
  • abá taba-í = man from the small village (or "the man from Smallville"...) [...]
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 which was the subject, and which was the object. Nevertheless, native Tupi sentences tend to be quite short, as the Indians were not used to complex rhetorical or literary uses.

This is another inconsistency, but I think I understand what the author means: order was important in the formation of compounds (abaí and tabaí were analysed as two words), but it was not so important on the syntactic level. However, this needs to be better explained. FilipeS 18:53, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Move the article!

After carefully reading this article and also the one about Guarani language I have come to think that, maybe, it would be wiser to merge Nheengatu and Old Tupi language into Tupi language. There seem to be strong reasons for it:

  1. Nheengatu is the modern descendant of Old Tupi, grammatical and semantical differences apart, they are closer than mediaeval English and contemporary, informal English, so, why not allow them to flow one into the other?
  2. The article on Guarani does not make difference between historical Guarani and modern, vernacular Guarani (although there exists an article on Jopará, which is a variant Tupian language closely related to Guarani.
  3. You don't have many articles on "Old X language" in Wikipedia. Such use is found only when the Old form is really completely different from the current (Old English, Old Prussian, Old Church Slavonic).
  4. Nheegatu and Old Tupi language are overlapping and would both benefit from data available in the other.

Another suggestion is to incorporate (with adaptations), content taken from Guarani because the languages are largely similar, to the point of one article being a passable template for the other. Considering that the Guarani article looks and reads better, it is the template here, extra stuff from the current Old Tupi article could enrich the resulting article.

I wait for your opinions here, if I find that there is support for this proposal I will eventually do it sometime soon. jggouvea 03:26, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

  • I agree with your proposal to merge Old Tupi language with Nheengatu; they are two periods of the same language, as far as I can see. However, see this earlier discussion. Apparently, linguists classify them as separate languages, for whatever reason. If that is the case, we should respect the scholarly tradition.
  • As for the Tupi language and the Guarani language, I'm not sure I understand what you are proposing... FilipeS 18:20, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
I mean that, since these languages are very similar, we could incorporate also elements from the Guarani article.
Also note that scholars tend to unnecessarily categorise languages that have no written tradition into subtypes. SIL, for instance, differs Tupi, Tupinambá, Lingua Geral Paulista, Nheengatu, Nheengatu Amazonico and modern Tupi variants spoken in isolated pockets throughout Brazil. jggouvea 00:03, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Which elements from the article on Guarani were you thinking of incorporating into this one? FilipeS 19:02, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] An edit war about the X?

It seems that User:200.150.73.2 has deleted again a piece of information regarding how unusual is to employ the letter X for the [ʃ] phoneme. This issue had happened before (on 14th January, involving user:200.232.231.240 and User:FilipeS had enforced the information to remain. So, I think it should be wise to let it recorded here:

  • Exactly how relevant is the information?
  • Exactly how unusual is this convention?

AFAIK, this article seems to be in need of expertise, but I do not feel comfortable to call for it as I am not a linguist. jggouvea 03:25, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

I think User:200.150.73.2 should explain why he feels that using the letter X for the sound [ʃ] is not unusual. Until such time as he does, I am reverting the article to its original version. FilipeS 22:47, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
I put this topic here as a reminder because it was the second time someone deleted that information and you reverted it (by second time I actually mean second user editing with you reverting, not the actual number of times). Perhaps this notice will keep people from deleting that again without consideration. Just that. BTW. I think you, Filipe are right. jggouvea 01:34, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Marquis of Pombal and extintion

When the Portuguese Prime-Minister Marquis of Pombal expelled the Jesuits from Brazil in 1759, the language started to wane fast as few Brazilians were literate in it. Besides, a new rush of Portuguese immigration had been taking place since the early 18th century, due to the discovery of gold, diamond and gems in the interior of Brazil; 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 backward places would last for over a century still, but its influence was to be deeper than that.

As far as I know the government of the Marquis actually made it forbidden to teach, write and speak in Tupi. He also went in a trip to the Amazon changing Tupi names of several cities and places into Portuguese names, or to names of cities existing in Portugal.--El Chemaniaco 01:34, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I have read the same as well. It would be nice if someone could find a reference... FilipeS 20:10, 20 October 2007 (UTC)