| Cubeo | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spoken in | Brazil, Colombia | |||
| Native speakers | 4,632 (date missing) | |||
| Language family |
Tucanoan
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| Language codes | ||||
| ISO 639-3 | cub | |||
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The Cubeo language (otherwise known as Cuveo, Hehenawa, Kobeua, Kobewa, Kubwa, or Pamiwa) is a SOV language spoken by the Cubeo people and is a member of the central branch of the Tukano language. It has many lexical loans from the Nadahup languages and has a grammar which was apparently influenced by Arawak. The language is spoken in the Vaupés department, Cuduyari, and Querarií rivers and tributaries of Columbia. It is also spoken in Brazil.
Contents |
Vowels There are 6 oral vowels and six nasal ones. (See /ɨ/ if you are not familiar with this letter.)
| Back | Central | Front | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i ĩ | ɨ ɨ̃ | u ũ |
| Mid | ɛ ɛ̃ | o õ | |
| Low | a ã |
Consonants
| bilabial | alveolar | prepalatal | velar | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| voiceless stops | p | t | k | |
| voiced stops | b | d | ||
| voiceless Affricate | tʃ | |||
| Fricative | x | |||
| Rhotic | r | |||
| Semi-vowel | w | j |
Strangely, Cubeo has a velar fricative /x/ but not strident fricatives. When older Cubeos use Spanish loans with /s/, they pronounce it as /č/ before vowels. The /s/ deletes in word-final position in loans as in [xeˈtʃu] < Sp. Jesús [heˈsus] 'Jesus'.[1]
The stressed syllable is the first syllable with high tone in the phonological word (usually the second syllable of the word). Stress (and by extension, the position of the first high-tone syllable) is contrastive.[2]
Most morphemes belong to one of three categories:
No roots are unmarked with respect to this nasal/oral division, however some roots are partially oral and nasal, /bã'kaxa-/ [mã'kaxa-] 'to defecate'.[3]
Suffixes that begin with consonants without nasal allophones may be only nasal or oral (not unmarked) although suffixes that begin with consonants that have nasal allophones (/b, d, j, w, x, r/) may belong to any of the three classes above. It is impossible to predict the class to which a nasalizable consonant-initial suffix may belong.
There are some suffixes that are partially oral and partially nasal, like -kebã 'suppose'.[4] There are no cases in modern Cubeo in which -kebã is divided into separate oral and nasal suffixes.
Nasality spreads rightward from the nasal vowel, nasalizing all oral vowels within a word provided they are not nasal and that all intervening consonants are nasalizable (/b, d, j, w, x, r/)
Unlike the previous example, in the next one nasality spreads from the initial vowel to the following one, but is blocked from the third syllable by a non-nasalizable /k/:
Nasal spreading is blocked by underlyingly oral suffixes or vowels that are underlyingly oral in a nasal/oral morpheme.