Tuyuca | ||||
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Spoken in | Colombia, Brazil | |||
Native speakers | 570 (Etnias de Colombia);[1] 810 (SIL) (date missing) | |||
Language family |
Tucanoan
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Language codes | ||||
ISO 639-3 | tue | |||
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Tuyuca (also Dochkafuara, Tejuca, Tuyuka, Dojkapuara, Doxká-Poárá, Doka-Poara, or Tuiuca) is an Eastern Tucanoan language (similar to Tucano) spoken by the Tuyuca people. The Tuyuca are an indigenous ethnic group of some 500-1000 people who inhabit the watershed of the Papuri, Inambú and Tiquié rivers in the Colombian department of Vaupés and the Brazilian state of Amazonas.
Contents |
Tuyuca is a postpositional agglutinative SOV language with mandatory type II evidentiality. Five evidentiality paradigms are used: visual, nonvisual, apparent, secondhand, and assumed, though secondhand evidentiality exists only in the past tense and apparent evidentiality does not appear in the first person present tense.[2] The language is estimated to have 50 to 140 noun classes.[3]
The consonants in Tuyuca are /ptkbdɡsrwjh/ and the vowels are /iɨueao/, plus syllable nasalization and phonemic stress.[2]
Vowels
Back | Central | Front | |
---|---|---|---|
High | i | ɨ | u |
Mid | e | o | |
Low | a |
Consonants
bilabial | alveolar | palatal | velar | |
---|---|---|---|---|
voiceless stops | p | t | k | |
voiced stops | b | d | g | |
voiceless Spirant | s | |||
Rhotic | r | |||
Semi-vowel | w | j | h |
The following words show some of the consonant contrasts.[4]
Bilabial contrasts
Alveolar contrasts
Velar and palatal contrasts
Segments in a word are either all nasal or all oral.
Note that voiceless segments are transparent.
See further remarks regarding the oral/nasal nature of affixes in the Morphophonemics section.
The two suprasegmental features in this language are tone and nasalization.
There is a H-tone and a L-tone in Tuyuca. The phonological word has one and only one high tone which may occur in any syllable of the word. The low tone has two variants: a mid-tone that occurs in words that have at least three syllables in free variation with the low tone in internal syllables that have an [i] vowel contiguous to the H-tone and not preceded by a low-tone.
Nasalization is phonemic and operates on the root level:
A syllable is considered any unit that may take tone and is comprised of a vocalic nucleus with or without a consonant before it.
Restrictions
All affixes fall into one of two classes:
When a nasal CV suffix occurs where C is a continuant or a vibrant /r/, the nasalization spreads regressively to the preceding vowel.
The Economist has described Tuyuca as the world's "most difficult" language because of its many noun classes and its evidentiality: something which requires that all sentences be supported by evidence which the speaker must give in the form of verbal suffixes.[3]