The Southern Cariban Languages and the Cariban Family

The Southern Cariban Languages and the Cariban Family

Abstract

This paper examines the hypothesis that the southernmost languages of the Cariban family (spoken in lowland South America) form a distinct genetic sub-branch. This hypothesis is evaluated with respect to a preliminary (but detailed) reconstruction of Proto-Cariban segmental phonology: all changes that took place in the southern languages are listed, so as to assess which ones could have been shared innovations. The final conclusion is that there are no substantive arguments in favor of a single southern branch; rather, two independent branches should be postulated. This has consequences for some of the ideas currently in debate concerning possible homelands and migration routes for speakers of Proto-Cariban.

Keywords

South America; historical linguistics; Cariban languages; reconstruction; prehistory

The Southern Cariban Languages and the Cariban Family

1. Introduction*

In the most recent classifications proposed for the Cariban language family (one of the largest South American families, with several dozen languages spoken in Brazil, the three Guianas, Venezuela, and Colombia), the southernmost languages — Arara-Ikpeng, Kuikuro, and Bakairi — are often lumped together in one group (Derbyshire 1999, Kaufman 1994, Durbin 1977). Only Girard (1971) does not place them in a single branch, since he did not suggest any further internal structure for his 14 small subgroups. The data on which these classifications are based are usually from quite unreliable, often old (19th-century) sources. The possibility of errors, as some of the authors acknowledge, is quite high.

The familiarity of one of the authors (B. Franchetto) with Kuikuro and the initial contact of the other author (S. Meira) with Bakairi led to doubts about the plausibility of placing the southern languages in a single sub-branch. Thanks to the recent publica-tion of better and richer data (Souza 1993 on Arara, Campetela 1997, Pachêco 1997, 2001 on Ikpeng, and the authors’ work on Kuikuro and Bakairi), it is now possible to evaluate more precisely the degree of relatedness between the southern languages so as to present better arguments for or against a ‘southern branch’. This is the main objective of the present work.

The first step in assessing the plausibility of the southern branch hypothesis is de-termining which changes are shared by the three southern languages. However, the only reconstruction of Proto-Cariban phonology that uses the historical-comparative method (Girard 1971) is based on unreliable data, especially with respect to the southern lan-guages. We have therefore decided to carry out a preliminary reconstruction of Proto-Cariban segments, by comparing cognates from the three southern languages with five northern languages: Yukpa, Tiriyó, Hixkaryana, Makushi, and Panare. These languages were chosen with two criteria: (a) degree of independence: they are clearly not closely

* We thank the Volkswagen-Stiftung / DoBeS (Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen) Program and the KNAW (Dutch Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences) for financial support. Abbreviations: 1 = first-person marker, 2 = second-person marker, 3 = third-person marker, 3R = third-person reflexive marker, CIRC.NZR = circumstance nominalizer, COL = collective, COMIT = comitative, EXCL = exclusive, EVID = evidential, IMPER = imperative, INAN = inanimate, INSTR = instrumental, INTR = intransitive, LIQ = liquid (locative: ‘in water’), N = noun, NEG = negation, POS = possession marker, PRES = present, PTCP = participial, TR = transitive, V = verb, VOC = vocative.

related within the family, and were placed in different subgroups in all extant classifi-cations; (b) availability of lexical data: for all languages, the authors had either first-hand field data (Yukpa, Tiriyó) or good descriptive sources (Hixkaryana: Derbyshire 1965, 1979, 1985; Makushi: Abbott 1991, Amodio and Pira 1996, MacDonell 2002; Panare: Muller 2002). As a first approach to the lexical proximity between these lan-guages, the cognates found in Swadesh’s 100-term list were counted and tabulated. After that, the reconstruction of Proto-Cariban segments was used to determine which changes had to be posited for the southern languages. These changes were then com-pared, so as to assess the possibility that at least some of them were shared.

The final conclusion is that there are some arguments to posit a subgroup that comprises Bakairi and Arara-Ikpeng, but not Kuikuro. The latter, together with its co-dialects (Matipu, Kalapalo, Nahukwa), should be seen as forming an independent sub-branch within the Cariban family.

2. The southern languages: a brief introduction

The first encounters between European explorers and speakers of Cariban lan-guages took place along the coast of Venezuela and the Guianas and the islands of the Caribbean in the 17th and 18th centuries. Because of this, and also given the initial pattern of European colonization (along the coasts), the Cariban family was initially believed to extend exclusively to the north of the Amazon river. It is, in fact, in this re-gion that most of its languages are spoken today, and presumably also when the Euro-peans first came to South America.

We owe Karl von den Steinen, a 19th-century German ethnologist, the discovery of Cariban languages in central Brazil. He published a description of Bakairi (Steinen 1886:335-353, 1892) and word lists of ‘Nahuquá’, his term for the group of dialects spoken along the eastern sources of the Xingu river, in Central Brazil (1894: 525-527). He also mentioned other Cariban groups: the Apiaká of the Tocantins river,1 now extinct (1894:399-401), to which, he claimed, Bakairi is closely related (based on Ehrenreich’s then unpublished materials), and the Yarumá, who lived close to the Suyá , a non-Cariban group (1894:118, 155).

Paul Ehrenreich collected in the lower Tocantins a list of 125 Apiaká words, which he published with some notes on the pronunciation and grammar (1895:168-176). Fritz Krause (1936) published more information on the Yarumá, based on the materials brought to Germany by Karl von den Steinen’s cousin Wilhelm, who accompanied him in his two first expeditions (1884, 1887), and on materials later gathered by Herrmann Meyer, who went to the Xingu area in 1896 and in 1899 and collected Yarumá words with the help of ‘Arikuanako-Nahuquá’, ‘Yamarikumá-Nahuquá’ and ‘Calapalú’ infor-mants. (‘Nahuquá’, obviously Steinen’s term, and ‘Calapalú’ are clearly the names of other Cariban-speaking groups; even today, there are Nahukwa and Kalapalo in the Upper Xingu basin). Krause located the Yaruma in the area to the east and southeast of the Culuene river, between the Xingu and the Araguaia rivers. He compared Yarumá, Apiaká of the Tocantins river (based on Ehrenreich’s materials), the various Nahuquá dialects, and Bakairi (based on Steinen’s material) and concluded that there was close linguistic relationship between Yarumá and Apiaká, and more distant rela-tionship with the ‘Nahuquá dialects’.

1 The Apiaká of the Tocantins river, a Cariban group, should not be confused with the Apiaká of the Ta-pajós river, a Tupian group.

First results from ethno-archeological and ethno-linguistic research among the upper Xingu Caribans (Heckenberger 1996, 2001a-b; Franchetto 2001) suggest that, up to the first half of the 18th century, the Culuene river separated the Caribans, to the east, from the large Arawak villages near the sources of the Xingu river, to the west. It is possible that Cariban groups from the east crossed the Culuene and forced the Arawak groups to move north and west. These Cariban newcomers would have later become the present-day upper Xingu Caribans (divided in four subgroups: Kuikuro, Kalapalo, Nahukwa, Matipu). Other Cariban groups would have given rise to the Yarumá-Apiaká, occupying the areas where they were subsequently found by Meyer.2

In the beginning of the 20th century, the Yarumá disappeared from the area be-tween the upper Xingu and the Araguaia rivers, and the Apiaká from the Tocantins river, because of epidemics and attacks of other groups — Caribans from the Culuene river (the Kalapalo; cf. Basso 1995), and non-Caribans (the Suyá, an Arawak group). There may still be, among the present-day Suyá, descendents from captive Yarumá (Menget, personal communication).

Nowadays, the following Cariban languages are found to the south of the Amazon: a. Kuikuro (/kuhikuƒu/), with its close co-dialects Kalapalo, Nahukwa, and Matipu,

has approximately 500 speakers in the Upper Xingu area, in the Brazilian State of Mato Grosso.

b. Arara-Ikpeng. Arara (‘Macaw’), spoken by 200 people in the central part of the State of Pará, and Ikpeng (previously known as Txikão), with 300 speakers in the Xingu Reservation in the State of Mato Grosso, are quite close linguistic varieties, a borderline case between languages and dialects.

c. Bakairi, the southernmost language, has 900 speakers in two small reservations (Bakairi and Santana) to the southwest of the Xingu Reservation in the State of Mato Grosso. In each reservation, a different dialect is spoken. The differences between them are considerable, though not sufficient to prevent mutual intel-ligibility.

2 To this group of languages should probably be added Pimenteira (Martius 1867; cf. Girard 1971:177-179), an extinct language once spoken in east central Brazil. Despite the poor transcription, a certain number of southern Cariban features can be found (e.g. titti ‘sun’, müngrü ‘blood’, soi, zui ‘tree, wood’).

GARARA

The Bak

Kuikuro andtheir subgrocontinuationApiaká, in wBakairi than

There arstudy represedistinctive se

KUIKURO

I

M

airi a its cups is of, ohich

to Ke difnt thgme

BAKAIR

ap. Current location of Southern Cariba

re still the same people whose languageo-dialects are clearly a continuation of S still called ‘Nahukwa’). Arara and Ikpr languages closely related to, Meyer’

case, according to Steinen and to Krauuikuro. ferent dialects of all languages in queste Kuikuro, Ikpeng, and Eastern Bakairi dnts of these three varieties.

IKPEN

n languages

Steinen described in 1892. teinen’s ‘Nahuquá’ (one of

eng are presumably either a s Yarumá and Ehrenreich’s se, they should be closer to

ion. The data in the present ialects. Table 1 presents the

Table 1. Summary of the segmental phonologies of the southern languages. Bakairi Ikpeng Kuikuro V O W E L S

i ˆ u e ´ o a

i ˆ u e o a

i ˆ u e o a

C O N S O N A N T S

p t k b d g s S h z Z3 m n ¯ r l w j

p t k g4 tS m n N r l w j

p t k dj

s ts ƒ h m n ¯ N l w

The liquid l is an interesting feature of the above table. It exists as a distinctive segment only in the southern languages (although there are cases of two vibrants, e.g. r vs. rj in Hixkaryana and Waiwai, there are no languages with an l distinct from r). This fact, at first sight, tends to bring the three southern languages together.

3. The Swadesh list

As a first step in the comparison of the southern languages and their northern sisters, we present in Table 2 below the results of the cognate counts in the standard 100-term Swadesh list. Similar terms were considered cognate when they, at least partially, agreed with the correspondences discussed in Sec. 4. There is an inevitable degree of subjectivity in the choices; it is possible that other specialists would disagree with our cognacy assessments. In order to allow the reader to make his own mind, the full list of terms, with our cognacy choices, is given in Appendix A.

On the data, the following comments are in order: (i) As might be expected, certain terms do not have exact correspondents in Carib-

an languages (e.g. swim and fly are simply ‘go by water’ or ‘bathe’, and ‘go by air’; skin and bark are usually the same word; we has an inclusive and an ex-clusive translation). It would be possible to eliminate these terms, or to replace them with other elements from the Cariban lexicon; however, in the present work, we decided to keep the original meanings for methodological reasons. As a consequence, the skin and bark cognate sets are practically identical, and

3 Preliminary analyses suggest that Bakairi ¯ is an allophone of j, conditioned by a subsequent nasal vowel. It is also possible that s, Z and h are co-allophones (h being followed by o or u, Z by i, and s by the other vowels), since the counterexamples are few and doubtful. 4 Pachêco (2001:28-31) does not explicitly mention g as a distinctive segment in Ikpeng. In his work, there are, however, many examples with g in what appears to be phonemic transcriptions (e.g. ogoy ‘snake’, the first person dual inclusive prefix ugw-, etc.). Even minimal pairs seem to exist: the first-person prefixes on active and stative intransitive verbs are, consistently, k- and g-. We therefore assume g to be a distinctive segment.

swim and fly often have the same stem as go. For we, the exclusive (1+3) form was chosen instead of the inlcusive (1+2) one.

(ii) The Ikpeng sources did not include enough data to complete the table: only 94 of the 100 terms could be found. For this reason, only the 94 terms for which there were Ikpeng cognates were counted. The percentages on Table 2 are thus based on these 94 terms.

Table 2. Cognate percentages found in 94 terms from the Swadesh 100-term list.

The southern languages are in bold. Yukpa

43 Tiriyó 38 58 Hixkaryana 40 58 52 Makushi35 52 49 50 Panare 35 46 40 46 43 Bakairi 30 45 39 39 38 53 Ikpeng 35 52 46 49 49 50 48 Kuikuro The results in Table 2 are suggestive, but not conclusive, since the numbers are

relatively close, without clear-cut, abrupt differences. There seems to be greater proximity between Hixkaryana, Tiriyó, and Makushi, and also between Bakairi and Ikpeng; but not overwhelmingly so. If, however, Kuikuro is also taken into account, there seems to be no affinity on which a southern group could be based. The 50% cognates between Kuikuro and Ikpeng and the 53% between Kuikuro and Bakairi are not significantly far from the 52% between Kuikuro and Tiriyó, or from the 49% between Kuikuro and Panare. This means that the results do not point to a closer proximity between the southern languages Ikpeng and Kuikuro than between Ikpeng and Tiriyó. Similarly, Kuikuro and Bakairi do not seem to be significantly closer than Kuikuro and Tiriyó, Panare, or even Makushi.

4. The correspondences

Before considering the correspondence sets, two factors in comparative Cariban phonology need to be mentioned.

(a) Syllable reduction. As Girard (1971:88-97) had already mentioned, it often hap-pens in the Cariban family that word-medial CV syllables are reduced and even lost. Gildea 1995 provides a good cross-Cariban description of the phenomenon. First, the vowel (usually ˆ or u) is lost, thus creating a word-internal consonant cluster. If the first consonant is an obstruent, it undergoes debuccalization (loss of place features), so that the cluster becomes a glottal cluster (/C or hC); if the first consonant is nasal, it becomes homorganic with the following consonant. Finally, the reduced consonant is dropped, usually with the compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel. The paths of evolution would be: *CVCVCV > *CVCCV > CV/CV, CVhCV (obstruents) or *CVNVCV > CVNCV (nasals; NC homorganic). A frequent result of this process is the synchronic existence of reduced and non-reduced allomorphs of the same mor-phemes, conditioned by the form of the following suffixes or clitics (cf. Meira 1999 for a Tiriyó case study).

(b) Ablaut. Cariban vowel-initial stems can, under certain circumstances (e.g. the presence of certain prefixes like k- ‘first person inclusive’ or t- ‘third person reflexive’), change their initial vowels. The most typical pattern involves e and o (e.g. Hixkaryana enu-ru ‘his eyes’, k-onu-ru ‘our eyes’) or e and ´ (e.g. Bakairi enu ‘his eyes’, k-ńu ‘our eyes’), but a ~ o or a ~ ´ are also attested in some languages (e.g. in Tiriyó, when the following syllable contains an o or an ´: apoto ‘his helper’, k-opoto ‘our helper’; ak´mi ‘his younger brother’, k-´k´mi ‘our younger brother’). There are also a few cases of e ~ o alternation in non-initial position (e.g. the Hixkaryana purpose-of-motion suffix -so ~ -Se).

The diachronic causes and conditionings of syllable reduction and ablaut are not known. Syllable reduction, though probably related to the stress system (roughly: un-stressed syllables tend to reduce), presents enough contradictory cases, even in indivi-dual languages, to make the search for clear generalizations a daunting task for future research. The same is true for ablaut: despite some promising common, cross-Cariban features, the conditioning factors may change from language to language, as well as the affected stems. In the present study, cases of syllable reduction (e.g. glottal stops or fricatives unexpectedly corresponding to obstruents) or ablaut (e-forms occurring in-stead of o-forms or vice-versa) will therefore be treated as language-specific unpredict-able idiosyncrasies; all attempts to provide general diachronic explanations for their occurrences will be left for future research.

In the following sections, the correspondences found in the available data are list-ed and discussed. The correspondences were divided in groups, according to their degree of similarity. A few of them are intermediate between groups: *n22 and *r24, with one and the same cognate set (TONGUE), could arguably be placed with the *n’s or with the *r’s. The choice is, in such situations, somewhat arbitrary. Since, however, the deviant status of the correspondence is always mentioned in the discussion, there is no danger of missing information.

In each section, the correspondences are listed in tables with a standard format: putative reconstruction, reflexes in the various languages, and list of examples (cognate sets). It is usually easy to decide where a given cognate set belongs. In some cases, however, this could not be unambiguously done, due to the absence of some reflexes (e.g. DRY, which has only two cognates, could be assigned to *n4, *n8, *n10-*n16). In such cases, the ambiguous cognate set is usually assigned to the correspondence with the largest number of examples. If there still remain several possibilities (e.g. for DRY, *n8, *n13, *n15), then the first one is arbitrarily chosen (i.e. *n8).

4.1 OBSTRUENTS

With respect to obstruents, Bakairi stands out by virtue of its distinctive series of voiced consonants. In the other southern languages, voiced obstruents are usually allo-phones of their voiceless counterparts (with the apparent exception of Ikpeng g). In the rest of the family, distinctive voiced obstruents occur only sporadically.

Let us first consider the correspondences in Table 3, all reconstructible as *p. At first sight, the number of correspondences is surprisingly large; however, most of them result from the occurrence of syllable reduction in different languages.

Table 3. Correspondences reconstrible as Proto-Cariban *p.

PC Yu Ti Hk Mk Pn Bk Ik Kk EXAMPLES

*p1 p p h p p w w h ABOUT/ERG, EAR, FIND, FRUIT, GRANDSON, MOUTH-2, NAVEL, NECK, SEIZE, THIGH, TIP/BEAK, WIFE

*p2 p ∅ p p w w h STINGRAY *p3 p h / / w w MOUNTAIN *p4 p ∅ / p h TOUCAN *p5 p h p p p p h ARROW-1, PECCARY, PIRANHA, TOAD, WATER-2 *p6 p ∅ p p p h SHAMAN *p7 p p h p p ∅ h FLESH/MEAT, KNOW *p8 ∅(:) h p p h ARROW-2 *p9 ∅(:) h p / ∅ h EGG *p10 p ∅(:) h p p/b p/w ∅ NEG *p11 w p h p p b p p BONE *p12 p p p p p h p p HAIR *p13 p p(/h) h / / h p h STONE, CIRC.NZR, FOOT-1 *p14 p p h p p h p h ROAST, CAUS *p15 p p / / p p h RAIN *p16 p p h p p ∅ p h BATHE, SKIN/BARK *p17 p p p p ∅ p ∅ BRING, COME, (FOOT-2) *p18 ∅ p h / / ∅ p h SKY *p19 h h h (/) h ∅ p ∅ ARMPIT *p20 h h h p h ∅ ∅ FIRE, (FOOT-2)

The main correspondences are *p1 and *p5, which are in complementary distribu-

tion: *p1 occurs word-internally, and *p5 occurs word-initially (note that, in examples like EAR or WIFE, *p1 occurs stem-initially but not word-initially, since these words

are always possessed and thus always provided with a person-marking prefix; the *p5 examples, on the other hand, are non-possessible or non-possessed forms that occur without prefixes, so that *p5 does occur word-initially). Consequently, both corres-pondences can be reconstructed as *p. This *p becomes h in Hixkaryana and in Kui-kuro, w intervocalically in Bakairi and Ikpeng, and is preserved as such in the other languages.

The remaining correspondences can also be ascribed to *p, with the following re-marks:

(a) *p2-p4 are identical to *p1, except in Hixkaryana, Makushi, and Panare, in which there was syllable reduction;5

(b) *p6, *p8-*p9 and *p15-*p17 are also identical to *p5, except for the cases of syllable reduction (note e.g. the Kuikuro ∅ in *p17, indicating reduction of the final syllable of BRING, but not in *p15-*p16, since the relevant syllables in RAIN and BATHE were conserved); in *p7, there is also Bakairi ∅, which occurs be-fore u, thus suggesting that the expected reflex w was absorbed by it (*wu)ru ) >

5 For *p4 (TOUCAN), it may be better to assume that there are two parts in this word: an initial element kˆja-, cognate accross the family, and a second element kwe/ke//ke vs. poko, not always cognate. In this case, *p4 is only valid for languages which have a reflex of the element poko.

u)ru) ‘meat’);6 in *p19-*p20, syllable reduction occurred everywhere, except in one language (Ikpeng in *p19, Makushi in *p20);7

(c) *p11 unexpectedly has p in Kuikuro and b in Bakairi; if one notes that the other languages have consonant clusters (tp, /p, hp, tSh), this fact can be used as a conditioning factor: Kuikuro perseves the original *p (and Bakairi changes it into b instead of w) if it was part of a consonant cluster. This may also explain the unexpected w in Yukpa. Bakairi p/b and Ikpeng p/w in *p10 (NEG) also result from the fact that the negative morpheme, itself a reducing morpheme (with forms like pˆra, pra or pa), can be added to stems that can also undergo reduction, thus creating various different environments for the initial consonant (sometimes part of a cluster, sometimes intervocalic, etc.); Kuikuro ∅ indicates unnconditional reduction of the first syllable. In *p13, Bakairi p instead of w may also result from an earlier consonant cluster (cf. Np in the Ikpeng cognate koNpo ‘rain’).

(d) In *p18, besides syllable reduction in Yukpa, the expected Bakairi reflex w has apparently fused with the following u (as in *p7): *kapu > *kawu > kau.

(e) In *p12-*p14, there is an unexpected Bakairi reflex h. With respect to STONE in *p13, Bakairi tuhu is probably not cognate; there is, in fact, a better candidate: tú ‘large waterfall’ (also the name of a place with big rocks), which parallels the case of *kapu mentioned in (d): *tôpu > *t´wu > tú. With respect to the other words in *p13-*p14, one may note that, in all cases, the following vowel is o or u, and the *p was part of a consonant cluster resulting from the reduction of the preceding syllable; if this cluster was *hp, then one could posit a *hpo, *hpu > ho, hu change in Bakairi (FOOT-1: *hpu > hu; CIRC.NZR: possibly *-topo > *-tpo > *-hpo > -ho; HAIR: *hpo > *ho > hu (assimilation to the final u); for CAUS, note the existence of longer causative suffixes in some languages, like Katxuyana -mespo and Wayana -nehpo, with clusters). The same would presumably be true for ROAST, but, in this case, there is so far no independent evidence of an earlier hp cluster.

With respect to the southern languages, we observe one possible shared change in

Bakairi and Ikpeng (*p > w / V__V), and one independent change in Kuikuro (*p > h). The *p > h change has also affected Hixkaryana, but the considerable differences between Hixkaryana and Kuikuro indicate that this is a case of parallel development. Bakairi has also undergone independent changes: *wu > u, *hpu, *hpo > hu, ho.

6 Note that *p7 is identical to *p16. They are kept apart here because the environments for Bakairi ∅ are different: in *p7, it occurs syllable-initially and results from the fusion of an earlier w with the following u; in *p16, it is syllable-final and results from syllable reduction (*pt > t). 7 Note that, in *p19 (FIRE), the p in Makushi apo/ does not correspond to the initial p in Bakairi peto, as one might think at first. This initial p is the normal development of a word-initial *w (cf. Sec. 4.4). Since Makushi / corresponds to the final syllable to, Makushi p must correspond to a ∅ between the e and the t in Bakairi peto (i.e. the medial syllable *po was reduced to ∅ in Bakairi). This would explain the intervocalic voiceless t in peto, instead of the regular voiced d (cf. the discussion of *t below): this t was part of a consonant cluster and thus not really intervocalic (a possible historical path: *wepoto > *wepto > *pepto > *pehto > peto).

Table 4. Correspondences reconstructible as Proto-Cariban *k.


*k1 k k k k k k k k AGOUTI, CLOUD, DOG/JAGUAR, FISH, GOOD, HIGH, NIGHT, RAIN, SKY, TOUCAN

*k2 k k k tS k TOUCAN *k3 k k k(//) k// g k k DRINK (N), HORSEFLY *k4 k/∅ k(/∅) k / / g k k ABOUT/ERG, WHO *k5 k ∅ ∅ ∅ ∅ k SON *k6 k(/∅) k k k k/g k/g k IMPER, INSTR, SAY *k7 k k k k / g k k COMIT, TWO *k8 k k k k k g g k FLEA, GREASE/FAT, MAN, SNAKE, TAIL *k9 k k k k k k g k LIQ.IN, SALIVA, WE (INCL) *k10 k k k k k ∅ k/N k COL *k11 k k k k k g SLEEP *k12 k k k k k ts BITE *k13 k k k / k// k ts URINE *k14 k k k k ∅ ∅ ∅ PECCARY *k`15 k k k k k N STAR

The main correspondence *k1 is an identity correspondence, immediately recon-

structible as *k. All remaining correspondences can also be assigned to *k, with the following comments:

(a) *k3-*k4, *k7 exemplify cases of syllable reduction. In *k3, the Panare and

Makushi k ~ / alternation comes from the fact that some, but not all, forms of the stems in queston underwent syllable reduction. (For Bakairi pogu ~ woku, cf. Sec. 4.4).

(b) Panare tS in *k2 probably results from the palatalization of a *kj sequence: *kˆjapoko > *kjapoko > *tSapoko > tSopoko.

(c) *k5 may exemplify many (four) independent cases of syllable reduction. But it is also possible that the final element ku was an independent element which was incorporated into the stem only in some languages. (Notice that some lan-guages seem to have both a stem that ends in ku and one that does not: e.g. Kuikuro mu ‘man’s son’ and muku ‘woman’s son’.)

(d) In *k7, besides syllable reduction in Tiriyó (IMPER, but not SAY or INSTR), there is synchronic k ~ g alternation in Bakairi and Ikpeng, conditioned by the envi-ronment (cf. (e) below).

(e) *k8 shows words with g in both Bakairi and Ikpeng; in all cases, the g is inter-vocalic. If one notices that, in *k7 and *k3, Ikpeng k is word-final, and that, in *k9, Ikpeng g is followed by l (SALIVA), which has the synchronic morphopho-nological effect of voicing a preceding stop, or w (LIQ.IN), similar to a vowel, it becomes possible to propose that Bakairi and Ikpeng have voiced *k in inter-vocalic position.

(f) In *k10, besides syllable reduction in Bakairi, there is synchronic k ~ N alterna-tion in Ikpeng (kom ‘collective’ becomes Nmo when the preceding morpheme ends in a vowel).

(g) In *k11, Kuikuro g instead of k can be plausibly ascribed to the voicing effect of the preceding nasal consonant (Kuikuro g is an allophone of k, found after a nasal consonant and also in other environments).

(h) In *k12-*k13, Kuikuro ts is the result of palatalization caused by the preceding i; this rule is still active synchronically in Kuikuro (Franchetto 1995:72).

(i) In *k14, the final syllable ko, ke is entirely absent in the southern languages. This is probably not a case of syllable reduction, since these languages never lose final syllables (unlike Panare and Makushi). A more probable hypothesis is that this final syllable is an independent element which became part of the word in the northern languages.

(j) In *k15, Ikpeng final N is unexpected. Note that Bakairi Simuk´ has an interme-diate syllable mu, apparently without counterpart in the northern cognates; it might correspond to the final N in Ikpeng, in which case the final ko, k´ of the other languages was simply lost in Ikpeng (reflex ∅, not N). The similarity be-tween Bakairi Simu- and Ikpeng tˆriN improves if one considers the Western Bakairi form Sirimuk´, with Sirimu-.

Apparently, Proto-Cariban *k was conserved without important changes in most

languages (being sometimes lost via syllable reduction, and sometimes voiced by a preceding nasal consonant). The most important change was *k > g / V__V in Bakairi and in Ikpeng. (The apparent exception in AGOUTI, with an intervocalic k that did not become g in Bakairi and Ikpeng, may be related to the loss of the final syllable ri, like the cases of intervocalic p, b in Bakairi mentioned in the discussion of *p above. But for DOG/JAGUAR, in which the Ikpeng intervocalic reflex is k instead of g (Bakairi has no cognate), no such explanation is available.

Table 5. Correspondences reconstructible as Proto-Cariban *t.


*t1 t t t t t t t t 3R, ARMPIT, BIRD, CIRC.NZR, FOOT-2, GRANDFATHER, HORSEFLY, STONE, TIP/BEAK

*t2 t t t t t t/r d MOUTH-1 *t3 t t t t t t/∅ t/∅ t CIRC.NZR *t4 k t t t t ∅? t WATER-1 *t5 t t t / t t t FIRE *t6 ∅ t tS / h ∅ t ∅ BONE *t7 t t t / ∅? r? ∅? r? t BREAST

*t8 t t t t t d r t BURN (INTR), GIVE, GO, MOUTH-2, PERSON (first syllable), WOODPECKER

*t9 t t t / t d r t PERSON (final syllable), WHAT, WORM *t10 t t tS t tj d r t HEAR *t11 t t/∅ tS ∅ / d t ∅ HAIR *t12 t //∅ t d t t LIANA *t13 ∅ t t /(/∅) /(/t) d t t EXCREMENT, GREASE/FAT, NAME (final syllable), THIGH *t14 t t// / t r t HOUSE *t15 ∅(:) t t t ∅ KNOW *t16 t t tS / h d r ts FOREST *t17 ∅/t S / d r dz ROOT/VEIN *t18 ∅/t tS ∅ / d t ts WIFE

PC Yu Ti Hk Mk Pn Bk Ik Kk EXAMPLES *t19 t t t t t d l t SALIVA *t20 ∅ s ∅ j Z t t SPIDER, SHAMAN *t21 s S s ∅ S tS t STINGRAY *t22 S tS t SUN-2 (last syllable), WE (EXCL)-2 *t23 s/j/∅ s/S s/∅ s/z t t PTCP *t24 S j j s/j s/j z j/t/r t MOTHER *t25 s ∅ s s s z r t TWO *t26 s ∅ s s tS z r t NAME (middle syllable) *t27 s s s s s s t OTTER, SAND *t28 s t s t JACU BIRD *t29 S ∅ s s s S tS d DAUGHTER *t30 ∅ s ∅ / Z t ∅ CORN *t31 S s S s S t STAR *t32 s s s tS S s FLEA *t33 S s S s s S/Z tS ƒ SUN-2 (first syllable), URINE

The first correspondence, *t1, is an identity correspondence and can thus be im-

mediately reconstructed as *t. Note that *t1 is always followed by back vowels (a, o, u, ´, ˆ). In *t2, Kuikuro d can be attributed to voicing due to the preceding n (and Ikpeng r occurs intervocalically; cf. below). Disregarding syllable reduction, respon-sible for the ∅’s in Bakairi and Ikpeng and for the glottal stop in Makushi, *t3 and *t5 are identical to *t1.8 In *t4, the only difference is Yukpa k; since there is only one example (WATER-1), it seems more sensible to assume that Yukpa added an extra non-cognate element to this word, which would allow *t4 to be also ascribed to *t. It is also possible to add *t6 to this group: note that Hixkaryana tS occurs mostly before e (=[e]~[i]: HEAR, WIFE; FOREST is a possible non-cognate), a palatalizing vowel, and that the ∅’s and glottal segments (/, h) represent cases of syllable reduction. As for *t7, it may belong to this group, but the reflexes of the final syllable in Ikpeng and Bakairi are ambiguous: the final rˆ may correspond to the tˆ found in the northern languages, but it might also derive historically from possessive suffix -rˆ (cf. the Hixkaryana cognate).

The next four correspondences (*t8-*t13) are characterized by voiced segments in Bakairi (d) and Ikpeng (r). Since these segments occur always intervocalically, it seems possible to ascribe these correspondences to *t, presupposing that it was voiced intervocalically in Bakairi and Ikpeng (the cases of Ikpeng t are synchronically word-final, and can be explained by assuming that an original final vowel, preserved in Ba-kairi, was subsequently lost). In the other languages, there are cases of syllable reduc-tion and palatalization (tS in Hixkaryana, tj in Panare). In *t14, Bakairi t (instead of d) was probably preserved because it was part of a consonant cluster *wt; in *t15, the consonant cluster was maybe *pt (<*putu), or maybe also *wt, in case the *p became *w and then fused with the following u. It is also possible to add *t16-*t18 (noting, in passing, the cases of palatalization and syllable reduction in the northern languages) if we notice that the major difference, Kuikuro ts (dz after a nasal), always occur after i (there is still a synchronic morphophonological rule in Kuikuro which changes t’s and k’s into ts’s when preceded by i’s; cf. Franchetto 1995:72). In *t19, only Ikpeng l is 8 Note that, in *t4 (FIRE), an intervocalic *t should have become voiced in Bakairi. In this case, however, the *t was not really intervocalic: there was a *ht or *pt consonant cluster at some point (cf. the discussion of *p above).

surprising; it may be better to consider the Ikpeng term non-cognate. Therefore, *t8-*t19 (the ‘leniting’ or ‘voicing’ group) can be reconstructed as *t.

The next correspondences, *t20-*t32 represent a more complicated case. They re-late fricatives and affricates in the northern languages (and also in Bakairi) to t’s in Kuikuro (and, in some cases, also in Ikpeng). Based on them, Girard proposed Proto-Cariban *c (possibly *[tS] or *[ts]). However, the overwhelming majority of the cases of *c occur in palatalizing environments (before i: *t20-*t22, *t28-*t32; before e: *t23-*t24, *t26). In some cases, the palatalizing vowel occurs in some, but not all, cognates (e.g. URINE in *t32, in which the palatalizing i occurs only in Bakairi and Kuikuro; it seems possible to reconstruct *i and propose that the u’s in the northern languages result from assimilation to the final u). Only in *t25 (TWO) and *t27 (OTTER; SAND may not be a true cognate set) does it clearly precede the vowel a, thus contrasting with some occurrences of *t1 (cf. e.g. GRANDFATHER). These two cases are very few, when compared to the others. Although it may be possible to use them to reconstruct *c as a

proto-segment with a low functional load, it seems simpler to suppose that these are exceptional cases (derived from e.g. *ti: *tiaro ‘otter’ > Kuikuro taƒo, saro in the others; or from *it: *itaro > taƒo, with the i having been dropped before the appearance of the synchronic rule i + t → its in Kuikuro).9 If no new data appears that gives support to Girard’s *c, reconstructing only *t seems more plausible. That would make Proto-Cariban a language without fricatives or affricates. Note, in *t32, the only case of Kuikuro s in this table (sike; elsewhere, there is only ti, as in e.g. tihaƒi ‘sting-ray’); this is unexpected enough to suggest, in the absence of other cases, the possibility of external influence from another Cariban language.

The evolution of Proto-Cariban *t was relatively complex. It underwent palataliza-tion and reduction in many northern languages, and also in Bakairi. In Kuikuro, it was preserved in all positions (except in BONE, where it was lost via syllable reduction). In Bakairi and Ikpeng, *t was preserved word-initially and word-finally, and also in con-sonant clusters; intervocalically, it was lenited to d in Bakairi and r in Ikpeng. Note that the cluster *wt became wr in Ikpeng (i.e. *w had the effect of a vowel) but t in Bakairi (i.e. *w had the effect of a consonant). Assuming that *wt > Ikpeng wr is a more recent change, it would be possible to claim that the intervocalic lenition of *t is an innovation shared by Ikpeng and Bakairi. It can be suggested that, as a first step, *t became *d, which was conserved as such in Bakairi but changed into r in Ikpeng. In all languages except Kuikuro, *t fricativized when followed by a front vowel (e, i), presumably via palatalization: *t > *tj

> ts, tS, s, S... In Ikpeng, fricativization occurred only with a following i; an e apparently had no special effect, since, in the only example (NAME), there was no palatalization, but rather the regular lenition to r caused by the intervocalic environment. In Bakairi, there was palatalization: before i, Z occurs inter-vocalically (SPIDER, SHAMAN), and S word-initially (STINGRAY, FLEA; in SUN-2, the sec-ond S appears to be the result of assimilation to the first S) or in consonant clusters (as in DAUGHTER); z occurs before a and e (the s ~ z alternation in PTCP — the participial suffix — is not yet well understood). Of all these changes, only fricativization before i has any chance of being an innovation shared by Ikpeng and Bakairi (*t > tS / __i in Ikpeng, and possibly *t > *tS > S /#__i, Z / V__i in Bakairi). However, in the languages of the world, cases of palatalization and fricativization before i are very frequent; such changes could also have happened independently in Bakairi and in Ikpeng.

9 With respect to TWO, it should be mentioned that a reciprocal prefix az- ~ as- ~ ´s- may be involved which, in some of its allomorphs, occurs with the palatalizing vowel e (es-, et-).

4.2 NASALS The bilabial nasal consonant *m has a relatively simple development in the Cariban

family, as can be seen in Table 6.

Table 6. Correspondences reconstructible as Proto-Cariban *m.


*m1 m m m m m m m ∅ EGG, JACU BIRD, NECK, SPIDER, THAT (INAN), WORM, YOU

*m2 m m m m w m ∅ BREAST, GRANDFATHER, ROOT/VEIN *m3 m m m m m w m m PATH *m4 m m m ∅ m ∅ BLOOD *m5 ∅ m m n [N] m m m ∅ LOUSE, SONG *m6 m m m m m m SON, SIEVE *m7 m n [N] m n [N] m w m ∅ FATHER *m8 ∅ n [N] m n [N] n [N] m m ∅ COL *m9 m m m m m m m ¯ SCROTUM *m10 m n [¯] n ¯ m m ¯ HAND, DRY *m11 ∅ m/(n) m n n ∅ m n DAUGHTER, MOUTH-1

All correspondences in Table 6 can be derived from a single Proto-Cariban *m,

with the following remarks: (a) the cases of n ([n], [N]) and ∅ in the northern languages result from syllable

reduction (so e.g. *m7 can be added to *m2); (b) *m2 and *m1, different only in Bakairi (w vs. m), are in complementary distribu-

tion: m (*m1) occurs word-initially and w (*m2) intervocalically, so that they can both be reconstructed as *m;

(c) *m3 differs from *m2 only in Kuikuro, in which the m (instead of ∅) seems to result from an intermediary consonant cluster (cf. the Ikpeng cognate anma; see also the discussion of *ô in Sec. 4.5);

(d) *m6 can, it seems, be assimilated to *m1, with Kuikuro m being preserved be-cause of a consonant cluster (SON), or indicating a loanword (SIEVE; cf. below);

(e) in *m10, Panare ¯ reflects palatalization after e (a change with synchronic ef-fects in the morphophonology); Kuikuro ¯ in *m9 and *m10 reflects palataliza-tion after i (also synchronically attested), assumed to have occurred before the loss of intervocalic m (so as to explain why the reflex here is not ∅); Kuikuro n is *m11 can be attributed to syllable reduction;

(f) in *m11, Bakairi ∅ apparently comes from total syllable reduction; but in *m4, since the stem (unu ‘blood’) starts with u, it seems more probable that *m be-came *w (as in *m2), which then disappeared because of the following u (the stem is unu ‘blood’).

Thus, Proto-Cariban *m was preserved as such in most languages (except for cases

of syllable reduction). In Ikpeng, it was always conserved. In Kuikuro, it was almost al-ways lost, exept when it was part of a consonant cluster (including *mm, as in SON), or after i, in which case it became ¯. The only exception, SIEVE (Kuikuro manaƒe), has, in addition to the unexpected initial m, also an irregular intervocalic n, instead of the expected N; the best suggestion is that it is a borrowing, probably from another

Cariban language. In Bakairi, *m was retained word-initially and in consonant clusters, and changed into w (as happened to *p) in intervocalic position. SCROTUM and HAND, in *m9 and *m10, with m instead of w, are explained by reconstructing m-preserving consonant clusters: for HAND, *mj; for SCROTUM, *mr, with the *r of the possessive suffix *-ru (i.e. *emu-ru > *em-ru > emu, which explains the absence of the suffix -ru, usually obligatory in possessed nouns; cf. also the Ikpeng cognate g-em-ru). The same solution also explains the Bakairi m in YOU and NECK (in *m1): in both cases, an earlier *mr cluster is plausible (for YOU, cf. the Ikpeng cognate omro; for NECK, notice the absence of the possessive suffix -rˆ, suggesting a development like *i-wˆmˆ-rˆ > *i-wˆm-rˆ > i-wˆmˆ.

Thus, Kuikuro and Bakairi have both eliminated some *m’s. The two changes are, however, actually quite different: in Bakairi, *m > w / V__V, with w > ∅ if the second V is u; in Kuikuro, *m > ∅ / #__V. There is no obvious way in which these two changes could be seen as a shared innovation.

Table 7. Correspondences reconstructible as Proto-Cariban *n.

PC Yu Ti Hk Mk Pn Bk Ik Kk EXAMPLES *n1 n n n n n r~ N N BEE/HONEY, FISH, WATER-1 *n2 ∅ n n n ∅ r~ N FLESH/MEAT *n3 n n n n n r~ r~ N EARTH (final syllable) *n4 n ¯ ¯ r~ n N PIRANHA *n5 n n n n ∅ n N N EYE *n6 r n n n n N N BLOOD *n7 n n n n n N ∅ DRINK (V) *n8 n n n n ∅ n n n DRY, NOSE, SIEVE *n9 n n [¯] n n n n n WE (EXCL)-1, -2 *n10 n n n ¯ n n N BRING *n11 n nn n n n n MOON (final syllable) *n12 k n n n n N MOON (first syllable) *n13 n n n n n ∅(/~) n N EAR, SLEEP *n14 n n ¯ ¯ ∅ n N SEE *n15 n n n ¯ ∅~ n n CORN, LIANA *n16 j n n n n ∅~ n N LEAVE (TR) *n17 n n n ∅ ∅~ N N BREAST *n18 j n n n ∅ N N RAIN *n19 n [¯] ¯ n [¯/n] ∅ ¯/N HUSBAND *n20 n n n ∅ ∅ ∅ N EARTH (first syllable) *n21 n [¯] ¯ n n ∅ ∅ ∅ PECCARY *n22 r n n n? ∅? m ∅ BIRD *n23 n n n n l n NAVEL *n24 n? r? ¯ n ¯ l l N TONGUE

The correspondences in Table 7 show a number of discouraging irregularities and

deviations. Nevertheless, it is possible to see three groups that can be used as starting points: *n1-*n4, *n5-n12, and *n13-*n21. In the first group, the Bakairi reflex is r, with nasalization of the adjacent vowels; in the second group, it is n; in the third group, ∅. Let us now examine each group in detail.

Beginning with the second group (*n5-*n12), one sees a consistent Bakairi reflex n. In almost all cases, there are consonant clusters in at least one other language: for NOSE, Ikpeng g-eNna-n, Hixkaryana k-owna-rˆ; for WE (EXCL), Ikpeng tSimna; for MOON, Tiriyó nunn´. With EYE and BLOOD, the situation is similar to NECK in the discussion of *m above: the possession marker -ru, usually obligatory in Bakairi, does not occur in these examples, which suggests that there were *nr clusters (EYE: *enu-ru > *en-ru > enu; *unu-ru > *un-ru > unu), still preserved in the Ikpeng cognates eN-ru and i-mˆ N-ru. For DRINK (V), there is no possession marker, but the final syllable rˆ (cf. e.g. Tiriyó w-enˆrˆ, Makushi enˆrˆ) plays the same role: *m-enˆrˆ > *m-enrˆ > m-enˆ (cf. Ikpeng m-eNgrˆ-t). Only for BRING (Bakairi ene-k´) is there, as far as can be seen, no previous consonant cluster. With this exception, Bakairi n is apparently always the reflex of a putative Proto-Cariban *n in consonant clusters.

Looking now at the third group (*n13-*n21), one sees a number of ∅ reflexes in Bakairi. They are, however, not always the same: sometimes there is a nasal vowel (EAR: i-wa)ta-rˆ; CORN: a)Zi; LIANA: Sie)d´; LEAVE (TR): m-i ); BREAST: i-wa )-rˆ), some-times not (SLEEP: ˆkˆ-lˆ; RAIN: kop´; SEE: m-e-tai; HUSBAND: u-so). Note, in the cases without nasal vowels, that the following stops (k, p, t, s) are voiceless: as was seen in Sec. 4.1, this indicates that they result from previous clusters. One may then suggest that an earlier *n was dropped but failed to cause vowel nasalization because it was part of a consonant cluster (SLEEP: *ˆnkˆ-lˆ > ˆkˆ-lˆ; RAIN: *konp´ > kop´; cf. the Ik-peng cognates ˆnkˆ-lˆ and koNpo). Note that these are not the same clusters mentioned in the previous paragraph: comparing the cases, it would seem that the *n is preserved in sonorant clusters (*nr, *wn, *mn) but dropped in stop clusters (*nk, *np), or, in fact, in obstruent clusters, if one admits the same solution for HUSBAND (assuming *u-nso > u-so; for the s, cf. the discussion of *j in Sec. 4.4). Judging by the Ikpeng cognates, the point of articulation of the nasal consonant was not always dental: it ap-parently was *n in SLEEP, but *N in RAIN. (It is not necessary, by the way, to posit *N for the cases of *nr discussed in the preceding paragraph, since the Ikpeng reflex Nr does not contrast with nr; in fact, it would seem that Nr is simply the synchronic mor-phophonological result of having n and r form a cluster in Ikpeng: n + r → Nr.) For the cases with a nasal vowel, one can finally suggest intervocalic *n loss (BREAST: *i-wana-rˆ > i-wa )-rˆ; EAR: *i-wanata-rˆ > i-wa )ta-rˆ; LEAVE (TR): *m-in´ > m-i´ ); LIANA: *Sined´ > Sie )d´; CORN: *anaZi > a)Zi.10 For SEE, one could propose the development *m-enen-tai > *m-e )n-tai (intervocalic n loss) > m-en-tai > m-e-tai (nasal cluster sim-plification); cf. the Ikpeng cognate stem in eneN-lˆ.

Turning finally to the first group, one sees that its most striking feature is that all examples have two syllables. Apparently, an intervocalic *n in a bisyllabic word was not dropped, but rather changed into r + nasalization of the surrounding vowels, as if the word wanted to retain its bisyllabicity.11 The only exception is LEAVE (TR), in *n16: it was apparently bisyllabic (*m-in´), but its n was dropped instead of turning into r. Note, however, that, being a verb stem, i´ can take several tense-aspect-mood suffixes, often resulting in words with more than two syllables; if the *n had been lost in the

10 Forms with intervocalic n’s are actually attested in Steinen (1892), the earliest Bakairi source: in @-uan@a-λ ‘Weibliche Brust’ (‘female breast’, p.10; hyphens added); m-ino-ráki ‘zurücklassen, lassen’ (‘leave’, p.128); s&ine@ta, zine@ta ‘Liane’ (‘liana’, p.51), ana@z&i, ana@hi, ara#èhi ‘Mais’ (‘corn’, p.46). 11 Stress is another possible conditioning factor. Since Bakairi stress falls regularly on the penultimate mora (i.e. on the penultimate syllable if the final syllable is CV, else on the final syllable), it always precedes the *n in the words of the first group, but not in those of the third group. This stress hypothesis would differ from the bisyllabicity hypothesis with respect to longer words (for a a *CVCVnV word, the former would yield CVCVrV, since stress precedes the *n, while the latter would predict CVCVV, since the word is not bisyllabic). Unfortunately, no such cognates have been found thus far.

longer forms, it could have spread to the bisyllabic ones by paradigmatic levelling. Another possibility is that the verb stem in question had extra syllables in the past (notice that some of the cognates are longer: cf. Makushi nˆmˆ-u-ja, Hixkaryana mˆ-nom-no).

Thus, it is possible to explain the Bakairi reflexes assuming a single Proto-Cariban *n. Most of the unexpected reflexes in the other languages are also explainable. The ¯’s in Panare and Hixkaryana are always adjacent to i’s or e’s and can thus be attribut-ed to palatalization. There is one exception: in *n7 (DRINK (v)), the Panare reflex is n, despite the adjacent e and i (a¯-eni-/ka ‘not drinking it’). Notice, however, the final syllable rˆ in cognates from other languages (Tiriyó w-enˆrˆ, Makushi enˆrˆ, Ikpeng m-eNgrˆ-t), which may have protected the *n in Panare. Yukpa k in *n12 is certainly unexpected; it probably reflects an extra, non-cognate element (like the k in *t4 [Sec. 4.1]; note that k(a)-initial words in Yukpa are more frequent than in other languages). In BLOOD (*n6), Yukpa r, though unexpected, is clearly not a non-cognate element; one may suggest assimilation to the r in the possession-marking suffix -ru.

Most cases of loss of *n (i.e. ∅) are examples of syllable reduction. However, Pa-nare ∅ occurs in a number of cases for which syllable reduction is not a plausible ex-planation. In NOSE (*n8), the ∅ is perhaps the normal development of a *wn cluster (*wn > w). In FLESH/MEAT (*n2), the final syllable *nu may have been a possession-marking suffix like *-rˆ, either originally (a suffix -nˆ ~ -nu is attested in some languages) or via reanalysis (since *-rˆ > -n in Panare [cf. Sec. 4.3], a final *nu might plausibly have been reinterpreted as a suffix); this suffix might then be dropped in certain forms (the Panare cognate pu-to is in its absolute, non-possessed form, indicated by the suffix -to). In EYE (*n5), a possible explanation is that the final vowel *u was lost by syllable reduction and the now stem-final *n fused with the possessive suffix -n (i.e. *j-onu-ru > *j-on-n > j-o-n) In BREAST (*n17), the middle syllable is totally absent; it may be that Panare ma/ is only partially cognate, if at all. Finally, EARTH (*n21) is a difficult case: not only is the initial n lost in Panare, but there is an extra final N in Ikpeng. Looking at other languages, we find an irregular r in e.g. Wayana ro and Waiwai ro:wo (both ‘earth, land’), thus suggesting that the history of this word was complicated. The evolution of the initial consonant — and therefore its loss in Panare — is clearly exceptional.

In Kuikuro, the regular development of *n is obviously N. The few exceptions have plausible explanations. For instance, in SIEVE (*n8), Kuikuro manaƒe is irregular not only because of its n (instead of N), but also because of its initial m, which should have been dropped (cf. discussion of *m above), and because of its final e instead of the regular i (cf. discussion of *e in Sec. 4.5). These three facts make it very likely that manaƒe is a borrowing which entered the language after the *m > ∅ and n > N changes had been completed. Elsewhere, Kuikuro n reflects a previous cluster: in NOSE (*n8), the n in u-inata-ƒi can be compared to the wn in Hixkaryana k-owna-rˆ and to the Nn in Ikpeng g-eNna-rˆ; in MOON (*n11), corresponding to the n in Nune, one finds Tiriyó nn in nunn´. The ∅ in PECCARY (*n21), which corresponds to ∅’s in the other southern languages, suggests that the final syllables (Tiriyó njeke, Hixkaryana ¯ko, etc.) were actually an independent, non-cognate element.

The Ikpeng reflexes are, in general, n intervocalically and N when next to a vibrant. In fact, when intervocalic, the reflex is almost always n (EAR, LIANA, LEAVE (TR), SEE, CORN, BRING, PIRANHA). There are, however, two exceptions: BREAST (i-maNarˆ, appa-rently contrasting with EAR: i-wana-n) and FISH (kaNa).12 There are also two cases of 12 Note that kaNa means not ‘fish’, but ‘kingfisher’ (a bird).

N that are not adjacent to a vibrant: BEE/HONEY (paNmomtSi ‘bee sp.’, with paN- being cognate and -momtSi an independent word; cf. mum-tSi ‘head (possessed)’), and RAIN (koNpo). For BEE/HONEY, the N may be a consequence of compounding; for RAIN, however, no such explanation is available.

Finally, there are a few exceptional correspondences. The first one, *n22 (NAVEL), has l (or ∅?) in Ikpeng, and n, instead of N, in Kuikuro. This latter development sug-gests that a cluster may have been involved. In fact, the possession-marking suffix *-rˆ (> Ikpeng -n) is conspicuously absent in Ikpeng (but present in other languages, like Hixkaryana k-honu-ru); one could then posit *i-won(ˆ)-rˆ > *i-won-rˆ > i-wolˆ as an explanation. Interestingly, *n24 (TONGUE) seems to agree with NAVEL: Ikpeng and Bakairi l (i-lu, o-lu) correspnd to cognates having *n and *r (or reflexes thereof) in other languages: Tiriyó i-nore, Kuikuro u-Nuƒu, Panare j-i¯o-n. This suggests that, under certain circumstances, an *nr cluster may evolve in Ikpeng into either Nr or l. This apparently contrasts with the cases in the second group (*n5-*n12), in which *nr gave rise to Ikpeng Nr. Should TONGUE and NAVEL be seen as idiosyncratic cases, or should a different nasal sound be reconstructed? Considering that TONGUE and NAVEL do not agree (their Kuikuro reflexes are different), it seems best, for the time being, to consier them as idiosyncratic cases in search of an explanation (like EARTH above). Finally, *n23 (BIRD) includes an apparent case of metathesis (compare Tiriyó tonoro and Hixkaryana torono), and a cognate with surprising vowels (Ikpeng talim). The Ikpeng word is deviant enough that is seems better to consider it non-cognate.

Let us now summarize the rather lengthy discussion of the correspondences in Table 7. It suffices to assume a single Proto-Cariban nasal segment *n and a number of conditioned changes to explain most of the correspondences. There are, however, some problematic cases: BREAST, FISH, BEE/HONEY and RAIN (with the unexpected Ikpeng reflex N), TONGUE and NAVEL (unexpected reflexes in the southern languages, in apparent contrast with patterns from the second group of correspondences). Given that these cases do not agree among themselves, it seems better, all things considered, to reconstruct only one segment, *n. In Sec. 4.1, we had decided that only one dental *t should be reconstructed; the exceptional cases were too few to give much support to another proto-sound (e.g. Girard’s *c). We are using the same argument here, for *n, though, given the exceptional cases and the number and intricacy of the changes and environments in the evolution of *n, our level of certainty is lower. It may be that further research will lead to the reconstruction of more nasals.

Proto-Cariban *n had a complex history. Interestingly, the most impressive changes have taken place in the southern languages. In Kuikuro, *n regularly became N, except in clusters (note that SIEVE, with initial m and intervocalic n, must be a borrowing). In Bakairi, *n was conserved only when it was part of a sonorant cluster (*nr, *nn, *mn); in stop clusters (np, nk), it disappeared without a trace. Intervocalically, it al-ways caused the nasalization of the adjacent vowels, became r in bisyllabic words (or perhaps when preceded by stress) and disappeared in longer words (or when not pre-ceded by stress). In Ikpeng, *n was conserved intervocalically, except in kaNa ‘king-fisher’ (in the FISH set) and in i-maNarˆ ‘her breast’ (BREAST). It became N when fol-lowed by r, and in the exceptional cases koNpo ‘rain’ (RAIN) and paN-momtSi ‘bee sp.’ (BEE/HONEY).

The *n > N change in Ikpeng and in Kuikuro occurred in different environments. It would still be possible to argue for a partially shared innovation (if, for instance, the *n > N change happened in two phases: first intervocalically, in both Kuikuro and Ik-peng, and then in other non-cluster environments, only in Kuikuro). A similar claim

might be made for Bakairi and Ikpeng, with respect to the evolution of *nr clusters (e.g. in EYE or BLOOD): in both languages, a *nu-ru sequence was reduced to *n-ru, which then further became Ikpeng N-ru and Bakairi nu, while Kuikuro maintained the vowel. Both claims are somewhat dubious: there is so far no reason to suppose that the evolution of Kuikuro N had two phases, and it is not clear that the reduction of nu-ru happened in the above order (it could have been *nu-ru > *Nu-ru > Ikpeng N-ru, in which case it would be easier to say that the first part was shared by Ikpeng and Kuikuro — *n > N — than by Ikpeng and Bakairi). Therefore, despite the remaining problems in the reconstruction of Proto-Cariban *n, the observed patterns do not seem to lend any further support to the southern branch hypothesis. 4.3 FLAPS AND LIQUIDS

In the northern languages, there usually is only one flap (here written r, realized as R, }, or ‰, depending on the language and on the phonological environment) and no liquids. Some languages have two flaps, one the palatalized version of the other (e.g. r [R] and rj [Rj] in Hixkaryana and Waiwai). But only in the southern languages can a true liquid be found (l, usually, like Russian l, more dorsal than the canonical [l]). This fact seems, at first sight, to argue in favor of a southern group.

Table 8. Correspondences involving liquids and flaps.


*r1 r r r r r ƒ ARROW-1, SONG, JACU BIRD, GOOD, TAIL, TOAD (middle syllable), WATER-2

*r2 r r r r n r r ƒ CASSAVA , HORSEFLY, OTTER *r3 r r r r n r n ƒ POS, TOAD (final syllable) *r4 r r r r n ∅ n/r ƒ TAKE, ARROW-2 *r5 r r r ∅ n ƒ FIND *r6 r rj r n r n ƒ STINGRAY, SIEVE *r7 r rj r ¯ ∅ ∅ ƒ AGOUTI *r8 r rj n r BAT *r9 r r r r n r m ƒ LEAF *r10 ∅ ∅ r r ∅ r r ƒ I, WE (INCL) *r11 ∅ ∅ r r n ∅ r ƒ YOU *r12 ∅ r rj r ∅ r STAR *r13 r r r ∅ ∅ ∅ ∅ COMIT *r14 ∅ ∅/r r ∅ n r n s DAUGHTER *r15 r r ∅ r n ∅ t ∅ WOMAN *r16 r r r r ∅ ∅/r r l ROAST, NEG *r17 r ∅ r ∅ ∅ r l DRINK (V) *r18 r r rj r ¯ r r l LIVER *r19 r r r r ¯ l l s FRUIT *r20 n? r? ¯ n ¯ l l N/ƒ TONGUE *r21 r r r l l ASH *r22 r r r l l ƒ VAGINA

The first two correspondences, *r1 and *r2, can be put together, since the only dif-

ference between them is the absence of Panare and Yukpa cognates in *r1. The result

is one correspondence with ten examples, immediately reconstructible as Proto-Cariban *r. Note that this *r became a velar fricative (ƒ) in Kuikuro, and a nasal (n) in Panare (with loss of the following vowel: *rV > n). It is possible to assign *r3-*r8 to *r, assuming that: (a) Ikpeng n results from the same kind of *rV > n change found in Panare (but apparently limited, in Ikpeng, to stem-final position); (b) Hixkaryana rj only occurs before e (corresponding to e or i in other languages); and (c) the ∅’s are the result of syllable reduction. Panare ¯ instead of n in *r7 (AGOUTI) can be seen as a case of palatalization, caused by the following i before it disappeared: *akuri > *akun(i) > aku¯. Also *r9 can be attributed to *r, except for the unexpected Ikpeng reflex m, which might result from (irregular) assimilation of an earlier *n < *r to the following p. In *r10-*r13, there are more ∅’s, often from syllable reduction; in some cases, however, they seem to indicate that a certain syllable was not part of the original stem (e.g. the final r´, ro in *r10 or *r11, for which a plausible etymology is an ‘em-phatic’ particle r´ ~ ro, found in almost all Cariban languages, frequently used to rein-force pronouns like I, WE (INCL), or YOU; the same particle may also have become the final syllable of COMIT (*r13) in Tiriyó, Hixkaryana, and Makushi). Aside from that, *r10-*r13 can certainly be seen as cases of *r. In *r14, the only surprising reflex is Kui-kuro s in the possession-marking suffix -sˆ (instead of the regular -ƒˆ). Since -sˆ exists as a suffix, independently of -ƒ ˆ, it may be than an earlier -ƒˆ was here replaced by -sˆ, which would allow *r14 to be seen as a case of *r. Finally, *r15 shows an unexpected t in Ikpeng. Noticing, however, that Ikpeng t and r are in morphophonological variation (t’s become r’s intervocalically; cf. also the discussion of *t in Sec. 4.1), it is possible to propose that, after the loss of the following vowel, the preceding *r, no longer inter-vocalic, was turned into a t by analogy.

The remaining correspondences, however, do not seem easily reducible to *r. In the northern languages, there is no serious problem (Hixkaryana rj occurs after e; the ∅’s indicate syllable reduction; Panare ¯ instead of n occurs in palatalizing environ-ments). But the southern languages, even excluding syllable-reduction ∅’s, show a number of different correspondences: r/∅:r:l (*r16-*r18), l:l:s (*r19), l:l:N/ƒ (*r20), l:?:l (*r21), and l:l:ƒ (*r22). In some cases, there possibly were *n-r or *r-r sequences that might lead to the irregular reflexes (*n-r: TONGUE in *r20, also mentioned in *n24 above; DRINK (V) in *r17; *r-r: VAGINA in *r22; LIVER in *r18; maybe also ASH in *r21). However, it is not clear why these *n-r sequences do not have the same reflexes as the ones in *n5-*n6. Moreover, ROAST, NEG, and FRUIT have no *n-r/*r-r sequences. It is therefore difficult to interpret these correspondences: borrowings? Non-cognates? Different proto-phonemes? In the absence of more data, it seems best to leave this question open.

With respect to the hypothesis of a southern branch, we observe that the only clear-ly reconstructible change is *r > Kuikuro ƒ, not shared by the other southern languages. There does not seem to be a single correspondence that could be reconstructed as *l; in fact, there does not seem to be any way to relate the l’s in the southern languages, so as to explain them as the result of a shared innovation. If Kuikuro is left out, the cases of r:r (*r1-*r2, *r10, *r18) and l:l (e.g. *r19-*r20, *r22, maybe *r21) suggest the possible existence of *r and *l in a putative Proto-Bakairi-Ikpeng. Since there are only a few examples, this *l is, at best, a preliminary hypothesis. Let us say that the avail-able data lend some support to the idea of a Bakairi-Ikpeng branch (*l as a shared in-novation, to be verified in the future with more Bakairi-Ikpeng cognates), but none to the idea of a southern branch (Kuikuro l looks like an independent phenomenon).

4.4 GLIDES Let us now turn to the correspondences involving labial and palatal glides (w, j).

There is some overlap with vowel correspondences: w sometimes corresponds to u, and j to i. This is usually the result of syllable reduction: sequences like CVwVCV and CVjVCV may evolve into CVwCV and CVjCV by vowel loss, thus creating Vw and Vj sequences that are sometimes analyzed as simple diphthongs, Vu and Vi.

Table 9. Correspondences involving labial glides.

PC Yu Ti Hk Mk Pn Bk Ik Kk EXAMPLES *w1 w w w w w ∅ w/o ∅ EXCREMENT, HOUSE, SHOOT, SUN-1 *w2 w w u u u u u u I *w3 u u u m ∅ ARROW-1 *w4 ∅ w ∅ m ∅ LIQ.IN *w5 w w w w w p p ∅ WOMAN *w6 w w w w w p p ∅ BEE/HONEY *w7 j w w u p/w w ∅ DRINK (N) *w8 w p/w w ∅ AX *w9 ∅ (w) p w ∅ FIELD/GRASS *w10 w m w ∅ w p ∅ FIRE *w11 w w w w p? p? HIGH *w12 ∅ ∅(:) w u w ∅ N ∅ NOSE *w13 w w w j j s j ∅ TREE/WOOD *w14 w ∅ ∅ ∅ u u ∅ PERSON *w15 ∅ ∅ w ∅ ∅ ∅ ∅ MOUNTAIN *w16 w h s w ∅ WOODPECKER

The best correspondence, *w1, can be reconstructed as *w. In *w2, we observe that

the reflex u is the result of vowel loss (syllable reduction) on the syllable *wˆ, so that *w2 can also be ascribed to *w. So can also *w3-*w4, noting that: (a) the u’s are part of diphthongs that result from syllable reduction (*VwV > *Vw = Vu), and apparently also Ikpeng m (*VwV > *Vw > Vm); (b) Tiriyó ∅ is adjacent to the vowel o, a very plausible environment for the loss of an earlier w (the sequence wo is not attested syn-chronically in Tiriyó). Bakairi ∅ appears to be the regular reflex of *w.

In *w5-*w10, one apparently has an independent correspondence, judging by the Bakairi reflex p (also found, in two cases, in Ikpeng). The differences found in the other languages can be expalined: Tiriyó ∅ in *w9 occurs before an o, already mentioned as a plausible environment for w loss; the parenthetical w in Hixkaryana is actually from the closely related Katxuyana language (which has wosu ‘grass, field’), here placed because there is no cognate term in Hixkaryana. Tiriyó m in *w10 is quite unexpected, and is best attributed to an extra, non-cognate element; the same is probably true for Tiriyó j in *w7.13 13 Note Bakairi p/w in *w7 (DRINK (N)), which is not, at least synchronically, a case of alternation: here, there are two possible cognates, pogu ‘porridge’ and woku ‘my drink’, both of which might apparently fit. Comparing woku to other person-marked forms (oku ‘your drink’, e-oku ‘his drink’, k-oku ‘our drink’), one sees that the initial w is not part of the stem; rather, it is a first-person marker, from Proto-Cariban *u, not *w. Pogu, on the other hand, is a non-possessed term, with the p that would be expect-ed as the reflex of word-initial *w. It may be that pogu was etymologically the non-possessed form of oku, the meaning ‘porridge’ being a later innovation. Notice that the voiced stop g is also the regular re-flex of Proto-Cariban *k intervocalically, unlike the irregular k in woku. It may be that only one of

There are thus two groups, *w (*w1-*w4) and *w5-*w10, differing basically in their Bakairi reflexes (∅ and p, respectively). It is possible to argue that they are basically in complementary distribution: *w occurs mostly word-internally, while the examples in *w5-*w10 are mostly word-initial. For instance, SHOOT and EXCREMENT (in *w1) are obligatorily preceded by person-marking prefixes, so that their initial consonants are always in intervocalic position. SUN-1, a free, non-possessible stem in which the *w is word-initial, was placed in *w1 by default, since it lacks a Bakairi cognate; if one is ever found, we expect it to be p-initial, with SUN-1 ending up in the *w5-*w10 group. In *w2, an intervocalic environment is also quite plausible, as in Yukpa awˆ (although the cognates from the other languages in this work start with w or u, a vowel preceding this w or u is not uncommon in the remaining languages of the family, as in Kari’na a:u, Katxuyana owˆ, Apalaí ˆwˆ; cf. *a in Sec. 4.5 below). In *w3-*w4, the *w is again word-internal. The *w5-*w10 cases, on the other hand, involve word-initial *w’s in non-person-marked forms. There is even synchronic alternation between p and w in the cases of stems that can be possessed, with the non-possessed (prefixless) form having p and the possessed (prefixed) form having w (e.g. AX: Bakairi pˆ ‘ax’, ˆ-wˆ-rˆ ‘my ax’). The same alternation was observed in the reconstruction of *p (cf. Sec. 4.1), suggesting that, in Bakairi, stems beginning with *p and *w were confused: both origins lead to the same alternation pattern. Note that there seem to be no monomorphemic words beginning with w in Bakairi, with the exception of postpositions (e.g. w´g´ ‘about, on’), particles (war´ ‘thus, also’), which are phono-logically dependent on the preceding word, the word wariri ‘small anteater sp.’, a possible borrowing, and the first-person prefix w-, which probably reflects Proto-Cariban *u- (also synchronically attested as a first-person prefix in Bakairi).

Consequently, *w1-*w4 and *w5-*w10 can be reconstructed as a single *w. It is possible to add *w11 (HIGH) if one considers the unexpected p’s in Ikpeng and Kuikuro not to be cognate: in fact, it seems that only the initial element ka is cognate across the family. The final p in Ikpeng ˆkap is apparently the essive element -p ‘as, in the quality of’, a general denominalizer elsewhere attested in the language; in Kuikuro kapehe, the final element pehe is sufficiently anomalous to be non-cognate.14 Ikpeng N in *w12 could also be explained as the regular development of *w in a *wn cluster; if, despite the absence of other examples, this is accepted, then *w12 can also be added to *w.

On the other hand, *w13-*w16 are irregular correspondences in need of an explana-tion. It is semantically plausible that *w13 (TREE/WOOD) and *w16 (WOODPECKER) are related, but notice that the reflexes are not always the same. It is possible that not all words in these sets are really cognate. In *w14-*w15, there are so many ∅’s that the *w is more probably part of a non-cognate element — an extra *w(ˆ) — than the result of syllable reduction.

There are no good arguments here in favor of the southern branch hypothesis. The loss of *w in all cases in Kuikuro is different from the loss of intervocalic *w in Ba-kairi. If Kuikuro *w had been first lost intervocalically, and only later word-initially, it might be argued that the first phase could have been shared with Bakairi; however, there is thus far no evidence that this was the case. Even between Ikpeng and Bakairi, there does not seem to have been any common developments, as Ikpeng, unlike Ba-

these two forms is really cognate. In any case, however, the development of *w would be regular: either ∅ intervocalically, or p word-initially. 14 In some languages, more than one word for ‘high’ is attested; cf. Tiriyó kae and kaw´, the former be-ing archaic. It may be that various locative or directional elements (a perlative -(j)e and a locative -w´, -wo are elsewhere attested; cf. Meira 2000:80, Derbyshire 1999:42) were added to an initial stem ka, maybe cognate with the initial syllable of kapu ‘sky’.

kairi, did not lose *w in any environment, but rather changed it to m word-finally. As for the Bakairi confusion between *p and *w, the two Ikpeng cognates differ: WOMAN and BEE/HONEY have p, suggesting that Ikpeng also confused *p and *w, but AX, DRINK (N), and FIELD/GRASS have w, denying that there was any such confusion. We conclude that there are no good arguments in favor of any groupings here.

Table 10. Correspondences involving palatal glides.

PC Yu Ti Hk Mk Pn Bk Ik Kk EXAMPLES *j1 j j j j j ∅ j ∅ LOUSE *j2 j j (i)∅ j ∅ ∅ SHAMAN *j3 ∅ j j (j) ∅ j ∅ HAND *j4 ∅/i j j ∅/Z j s SPIDER (middle syllable) *j5 j j j (tS)∅ ∅(:) TOUCAN *j6 (∅)i j (∅)i ∅ (∅)u j ∅ SNAKE *j7 j j j j j ∅ ∅ ∅ BONE, FATHER, TOOTH *j8 j ∅ ∅ ∅ ∅ BURN *j9 j j j j j/∅ ∅ ∅ dj ARMPIT *j10 tS (∅)i j (∅)i ∅ ∅ SUN-1

The palatal glide j is curiously rare in clearly cognate words. It is very frequent in

some allomorphs of the person-marking prefixes (e.g. Tiriyó ´j- ‘2’, Bakairi j- ‘1’, Hixkaryana oj- ‘2’), where it may be the reflex of an older ‘relator prefix’ j-, marking a dependency relation between the stem on which it occurs and the preceding term (another word, or a person-marking prefix; cf. Gildea 1998:105 for further details). A similar prefix is posited by A. Rodrigues for the Tupi-Guarani languages (cf. Jensen 1998:502 on the linking prefix r-). In fact, in the j-initial examples of Table 10 (*j7-*j9), the j may also be a remnant of this relator prefix.

The various cognate sets show slight deviances from a general pattern. Despite the differences, the overall similarities make the hypothesis of a single *j more plausible than suggesting a number of independent segments that occurred only in one or two words each. We make the following comments:

(a) There were several cases of fortition: Kuikuro s in SPIDER (*j4), dj in ARMPIT

(*j9), Yukpa tS in SUN-1 (*j10). (b) Tiriyó and Makushi i in SNAKE (*j6) and SUN-1 (*j10) result from *jV > *j re-

duction, with *j analyzed as i when it is the second element of a diphthong. Ba-kairi u in SNAKE suggests that the final syllable was *ju (> je [ji] in Hixkaryana by assimilation).15

(c) In SHAMAN (*j2), Makushi has ∅, but the preceding i (instead of the ˆ found in its cognates) probably reflects assimilation to the original *j (e.g. *ˆj > i).

15 In SPIDER, Tiriyó i might also reflect Proto-Cariban *j (*mojoti > *mojosi > *mojoi > *moji > *moj > moi). But it would be necessary to posit a *oi > *i simplification for which there are no other Tiriyó examples. It may be better to assume that *j was lost (perhaps when surrounded by identical vowels, for which SPIDER is the only example) and that the two o’s coalesced (e.g.: *mojoti > *mojosi > *moosi > *mooi > moi). Similarly, Bakairi Z might reflect the original *j (*mojoti > *moji > moZi), but, since most *j’s have ∅ reflexes in Bakairi, it seems better to assume the same for SPIDER by deriving Z from *t (e.g. *mojoti > *mojosi > *moosi > *mosi > moZi).

(d) In HAND (*j3), one may propose an *mj cluster, conserved in Ikpeng, simplified to m in Yukpa and Bakairi, and assimilated to nj, ¯ in Tiriyó, Makushi, Panare, and Kuikuro.

(e) The cases of Ikpeng ∅ are all morpheme-initial (*j -*j ), in which the j, as was pointed out above, may actually reflect a relator prefix. Ikpeng may simply have lost this prefix in these cases. (The Ikpeng cognate for FATHER may ac-tually have retained this *j in its irregular first-person form ˆ-rojmˆ, if the ro is assumed to be an intrusive element. One possible source for it is the first-person pronoun uro: *uro j(ˆ)mˆ > *u-ro-jmˆ > ˆ-rojmˆ.)

7 9

The reconstruction of a single *j for all the above correspondences would make it

possible to propose an innovation shared by Kuikuro and Bakairi: the loss of *j in all environments. Nevertheless, the few examples and the sometimes irregular Kuikuro reflexes lower the plausibility of this shared innovation. It is at best a weak and ques-tionable argument in favor of the hypothesis of a southern branch.

4.5 VOWELS

As Girard (1971:79) had already mentioned, the reconstruction of Proto-Cariban vowels is often made difficult by the existence of many cases of irregular, unpredict-able assimilation of a vowel (especially a central vowel) to another vowel in the same word. Such cases will be pointed out as they occur.

As can be seen in Table 11, there is a good number of cognates that support the reconstruction of the Proto-Cariban vowel *a.

Table 11. Correspondences reconstructible as Proto-Cariban *a.


*a1 a a a a a a a a

AGOUTI, ARMPIT, BREAST, BURN (INTR), COMIT, CORN, EAR, FISH, FOOT-2, GRANDFATHER, GREASE/FAT, HAND, HEAR, HIGH, JACU BIRD, LEAF, LIQ.IN, MOUTH-1, -2, NOSE, NEG, PATH, SALIVA, SEED, SHAMAN, SIEVE, SKY, STINGRAY, WATER-1, WATER-2, WE (EXCL)-1, -

*a2 a ∅ ∅ ∅ ∅ ∅ ∅ ∅ I *a3 a a a a a e a a LOUSE *a4 a a a o a a TOUCAN *a5 a a o o a a a OTTER *a6 ´ a a a a a a TWO *a7 a a a a a a a i BITE, SEIZE, TAKE *a8 a a a a e e i SAY, GRANDSON *a9 a a e a a e a i BEE/HONEY *a10 e a e a a e i FIRE *a11 a e o a a e e i MOTHER *a12 a a a e a ∅ LIANA *a13 a a ∅ TAIL

The first correspondence (*a1) is immediately reconstructible as *a; *a2-*a6 can

also be seen as reflexes of *a, with the following remarks: (a) In *a2, there is one a-initial form (Yukpa awˆ) while all the others have no

initial vowel. As was seen in Sec. 4.4, there are, in some languages not considered in the present work, other first-person pronouns with an initial

vowel, like e.g. Apalaí ˆwˆ, Katxuyana and Waiwai owˆ, Karihona ´wˆ, and also Kari’na a:u and Waimiri-Atroari awˆ, with the same a as in Yukpa. Gildea (1998), considering that the vowels other than a (i.e. ˆ, o) could result from vowel reduction or assimilation, reconstructed *a- as a first-person prefix; Meira (2002), using a similar argument, proposed *awˆ as the Proto-Cariban first-person pronoun; the ∅’s represent thus many cases of vowel loss.

(b) Bakairi e in *a3 can be seen as resulting from the influence of a preceding *j (LOUSE: *ajamˆ > *aemˆ > emˆ).

(c) In *a4, Panare o can be attributed to assimilation (the two following syllables have o’s); in *a5, the same may be true for the o’s in Hixkaryana and Makushi.

(d) The Tiriyó long ´: in *a6 (TWO) is the outcome of the loss of intervocalic *tS (<*t), a well-attested change in Tiriyó history. Meira (2000:31), using Tiriyó ´:kń´ and Karihona s´kń´-r´ ‘two’, reconstructs *´tS ´kń´ for the Proto-Taranoan sub-branch. The a’s in the other languages suggest that there was assimilation: the original word had probably one *a and one *´ (= *ô; cf. *o below), with *a > *ô happening in Taranoan languages and *ô > *a in the others. From this cognate set, it is not clear which of the two first vowels was *a, and which was *ô (i.e. *ôtakô or *atôkô). If, however, one considers this word as derived from the comitative postposition *akô(rô), the most plausible reconstruction becomes *ôt-akô, with the reflexive/reciprocal prefix (i.e. ‘with each other’ = ‘as a pair’ = ‘two’). The final elements, -n´/-nˆ, -ko, can be relat-ed to collective/plural markers.

The *a7-*a11 group is more difficult to interpret. These correspondences have sev-

eral instances of e, or related vowels (Kuikuro i derives from *i or *e; cf. below). In *a8 and *a11 (and maybe *a10), it looks as if the southern languages had *e, while the northern languages have (mostly) *a. However, in *a7, only Kuikuro has i (<*e), 16 and in *a9 Ikpeng has a. All these cases probably reflect one of the types of Cariban ablaut (cf. the beginning of Sec. 4), a problem left for future research. They are listed in *a simply because there are more a’s in the reflexes, but it is possible that both a- and e-forms will eventually be reconstructed (cf. e.g., in BEE/HONEY, Tiriyó wan´ ‘honey’ and i-weni ‘its honey, its sweetener, that which makes it sweet’). For SAY, in *a8, there are cases of synchronic allomorphy between ka and ke (e.g. Wayana ka ‘say’ becomes ke in the present: wˆ- ‘1’ + ka + -ja ‘PRES’ + -i ‘EVID’ → wˆkei ‘I say, I am saying’); it is possible to imagine that the ke allomorph was extended to all environ-ments in some languages.

The two last correspondences are problematic cases. In *a12 (LIANA), there seem to be extra, non-cognate elements (ke in Panare; possibly mi in Tiriyó); the history of this word is therefore not regular. In *a13 (TAIL), Hixkaryana ∅ depends on consider-ing the i in i-ƒoko-ƒu to be only a person marker; if, however, it were also part of the stem, it could be yet another case of ablaut (as in *a7-*a11).

The idea of a southern group will receive support if *a8, *a10-*a11 represent a shared innovation (*a > e in the southern languages). However, as we saw, these are problematic cases, involving the (not yet well understood) Cariban ablaut. It seems best to assume that Proto-Cariban *a was conserved relatively intact in the daughter

16 One possible explanation for Kuikuro i in *a7 (BITE) is that the second i corresponds to a second *e in the stem, and not to the final *a (compare Kuikuro itsi with Yukpa eseka). In this case, Kuikuro would have lost the last syllable, and its ts would reflect *t, not *k (*eteka > itsi).

languages (except in the cases of assimilation), which thus gives no support to family-internal subgrouping.

Table 12. Correspondences reconstructible as Proto-Cariban *e.


*e1 e e e e e e e i BITE, BRING (middle syllable), DRINK (V), DRY, EXCREMENT, KNEE, PIRANHA, SEE, SONG (middle syllable), SUN-1, THIGH, WOODPECKER

*e2 e e e e(/i) e(/i) e a i BRING (first syllable), TREE/WOOD *e3 ´/e e ´/e o/e e/i SONG (first syllable) *e4 e e o e a/ˆ e e i SCROTUM, DAUGHTER *e5 e e e e i e e i NAME (first syllable), BAT *e6 o e e e i e e i FRUIT (first syllable), LIVER (first syllable) *e7 e ∅ o e e e e i NAME (middle syllable), PTCP *e8 e e e e o e e i EYE *e9 a e e e a/e e e i INSTR *e10 e e e e e ∅ i HAND *e11 e e e a ∅ ∅ FIND *e12 e e i e ∅ e SIEVE *e13 i e e ∅ e ∅ i STINGRAY *e14 e o o e ´ e e i NOSE *e15 ˆ e e e e i i i FRUIT (middle syllable) *e16 e e e e e i i i HEAR *e17 e e ∅ e i ASH *e18 e e ˆ ˆ i ARROW-2 *e19 e e e e ∅ e e u? LIVER (final syllable) *e20 e ∅ a ∅ ˆ/a ∅ ∅ ∅ PATH *e21 e e o e ∅ e ∅ i SALIVA *e22 e e ˆ i THIS (INAN) *e23 o e a/ˆ e i i VAGINA

The main correspondence, *e1, can be automatically reconstructed as *e. All the

other correspondences can also be ascribed to *e, with the following remarks: (a) The variant forms in *e3 represent synchronic ablaut (cf. beginning of Sec. 4):

there are e- and ´-initial forms of the stems in questions in Tiriyó and in Bakairi, corresponding regularly to e- and o-initial forms in Ikpeng and to e- and i-initial forms in Kuikuro. Hixkaryana o in *e4 also results from synchronic ablaut: there are o- and e-initial forms of the stems in question. The two Panare vowels also seem to be synchronic ablaut forms (attested for one of the stems: SCROTUM amu ‘non-possessed’, j-ˆmu-n ‘possessed’). The details in Panare are often difficult to establish, because the ablaut patterns interact with the complex (and mostly undescribed) rules of Panare morphophonology.

(b) Panare i in *e2, *e5-*e6, o in *e8, a in *e9, *e11, *e20, and ´ in *e14 are probably also dependent on the details of Panare morphophonolgy and their interaction with the ablaut pattern; the same is probably true for Makushi i in *e2.

(c) The (unknown) details of Yukpa morphophonology will also hopefully explain the o in *e6 and *e23, the a in *e9, and perhaps also the ˆ in *e15 (though, in the latter case, assimilation to the ˆ in the following syllable seems more probable).

(d) In *e7, Tiriyó ∅ reflects the fusion of the two e’s in the stem after the loss of the intermediate fricative (*etetˆ > *etSetˆ > e:tˆ); Hixkaryana o is unexpected, but it is possible that at least one of the morphemes in question (NAME) contain a reflexive/reciprocal prefix (*et-etˆ > *etS-etˆ) which may have had, in the past, morphophonological effects on the following vowel (e/o ablaut; note that the reflexive/reciprocal prefix on verb stems always takes the o-form of the stem in Hixkaryana, as in os-o¯e ‘to see oneself, to be seen’, from e¯e / o¯e ‘to see’). The only alternative would be to suppose a less plausible assimilation of an original *o to the initial *e in all the other languages.

(e) Kuikuro e in *e12 (SIEVE) represents yet a third irregularity (aside from the initial m and the intervocalic n) by virtue of which this word can be singled out as a borrowing.

(f) In *e13, Tiriyó i apparently results from assimilation to the first i in the stem; the same can be said about Makushi i in *e12.

(g) In *e14, Tiriyó o is not a mere consequence of synchronic ablaut (which, in this language, has the form e ~ ´, not e ~ o), since this pattern does not affect the term at hand, o:na ‘nose’. However, it is possible that o:na did, in the past, follow the ablaut pattern, with forms like *úna ~ *euna (cf. e.g. Hixkaryana owna ~ ewna ‘nose’), from which *ú > o by assimilation, with the o form replacing both the *ú and the *eu forms (another possibility is that the Tiriyó alterna-tion might have been, as in Hixkaryana, *ouna ~ *euna, with *ouna > o:na replacing *euna; but see the discussion of *o below);

(h) In *e15-*e16, the i’s in Bakairi and Ikpeng (and probably Bakairi i in *e22 and Ikpeng i in *e23) are unexpected: they cannot be explained by ablaut, since they occur word-internally. For FRUIT, there may have been influence from related terms (there often are words like Tiriyó eperu ‘fruit’, epˆ ‘tree, trunk’, epu ‘post, pole, mast’, which could exert influence on each other’s pronunciation). For the others, however, no such explanation is readily available.

(i) In general, ∅’s represent syllable reduction (e.g. regular *re > n in Panare and Ikpeng in *e13, and in Ikpeng in *e12; cf. Sec. 4.3). The loss of the final syllable in Ikpeng and in Kuikuro in *e11 is irregular, as is also the loss of the initial *e in Ikpeng in *e10.

(j) In *e18 (ARROW-2), the ˆ’s in Bakairi and Ikpeng are quite irregular. It may be, however, that this stem used to take the possession-marking suffix -rˆ, which could have influenced the stem-final e: *ˆ-pˆre-rˆ > Ikpeng i-prˆ > Bakairi i-pˆ.

(k) In *e19 (LIVER), Kuikuro u is quite unexpected. It may be an indication that the word in question (u-tilu) is not a cognate; but it may also be the reflex of a se-parate morpheme (e.g. the possession-marking suffix *-ru).

(l) In *e20 (PATH), the first two vowels apparently underwent language-specific as-similations; compare Hixkaryana asama, Yukpa osema, and Makushi e/ma, Tiriyó e:ma (both apparently from *etSema). Apparently, this word lost the middle syllable in the three southern languages (the n in Ikpeng may be a rem-nant of that syllable: *asema > *asma > anma).

With respect to the plausibility of a southern branch, the development of Proto-

Cariban *e does not generate any new arguments. In Kuikuro, *e became i in all envi-

ronments, but no corresponding change occurred regularly in Bakairi or in Ikpeng; in these languages, as in most other Cariban languages, *e was simply preserved as such. There are thus no shared innovations.

Table 13. Correspondences reconstructible as Proto-Cariban *i.

PC Yu Ti Hk Mk Pn Bk Ik Kk EXAMPLES *i1 e i e i ∅ i i i AGOUTI, LIANA, STAR, SUN-2, WE (EXCL)-2 *i2 ∅ i ∅ j i i i i FOREST *i3 i ∅ i i i ROOT/VEIN *i4 i ∅ u/i ∅ i i i STINGRAY *i5 i ∅ ∅ ∅ i i SHAMAN (final syllable) *i6 i ˆ i i i i i FLEA, 3 *i7 i ˆ i ˆ JACU BIRD *i8 i ˆ i i// i ∅ ∅ CORN *i9 i ˆ i i ∅ i SPIDER (final syllable) *i10 ∅ ˆ ˆ i i ˆ MOUNTAIN (first syllable) *i11 e i ˆ i ˆ i i i DAUGHTER *i12 i u i i ∅ u/i i SKIN/BARK *i13 u u ∅ u u i i i URINE (first syllable)

The vowel i is relatively rare in Cariban languages (although it occurs in the high-

frequency third-person prefix i- ‘3’). The number of cognates involving i is therefore rather low.

The examples in *i1-*i5 are the best candidates for reconstruction as *i (note that, in Hixkaryana, [i] and [e] are realizations of e), with the following remarks:

(a) Hixkaryana and Tiriyó ∅’s result from syllable reduction. (b) Panare ∅ has indirect causes (in AGOUTI, the final syllable *ri becomes ¯; in

LIANA, the first syllable, which has *i, is reduced to a glottal stop by the addition of the extra non-cognate element ke-).

(c) In STAR (*i1), Ikpeng unexpectedly has two different vowels (tˆriN, with ˆ and i); one may suggest a *i > ˆ change as the first step in the reduction of the initial syllable.

(d) In Yukpa and in Hixkaryana, the *i in FOREST (*i2) is lost; in Hixkaryana, it may have palatalized the following *t (tSetSa), but, since the vowel e occurs instead of the expected u, this word may also be non-cognate. Makushi j in the same word (ju/) may be a reflex of the *i; but, since it seems quite difficult to explain why the intervocalic t disappeared and how a glottal stop appeared at the end of the word, it may be better to assume that the initial ju is actually a retention, so that the protoform was *jutu, the i in the other languages resulting from assimilation (*ju > *ji > i), and the Makushi final / is a reduced form of the final syllable *tu.

(e) Makushi u/i in *i4 represents dialectal variation. In *i6-*i11, on the other hand, one finds Hixkaryana ˆ instead of the normal e. It is

possible that they are cases of *ˆ rather than *i. Given, however, that in all examples a fricative s or S precedes the i (except for 3, the third-person prefix), it seems better to

posit a conditioned change: *si > Hixkaryana sˆ. (Because this s is presumably the result of palatalization — cf. the discussion of *t in Sec. 4.1 above —, one would have the sequence *ti > *si > sˆ.) The ∅’s in Ikpeng and Kuikuro indicate syllable re-duction.

In *i12, the reflexes are compatible with reconstruction as *i or as *u, with assimila-tion to the vowel in the second syllable in the cases in which the original vowel was changed. Since assimilation to u is better attested in the family than assimilation to i (of which there are no clear cases), *i11 is here reconstructed as *i, with the cases of u deriving from assimilation to the vowel in the second syllable, reconstructed as *u (cf. Bakairi tubi, Ikpeng pitu, in which this *u was apparently conserved): *pi-tupô > *pu-tupô > Ikpeng i-put, *pitSupô > *putSupô > Hixkaryana hutShu. Finally, for *i13, despite the four u reflexes, reconstruction as *i is preferred because it is the necessary palatalizing environment for the preceding fricative (s, S) to derive from a stop (*t); cf. the discussion of *t in Sec. 4.1.

Since there were no changes in the southern languages (they all preserved Proto-Cariban *i, except in CORN, where Ikpeng loses the final vowel and Kuikuro the whole final syllable), there are no new arguments in favor of or against a southern branch.

Table 14. Correspondences reconstructible as Proto-Cariban *u.


*u1 u u u u u u u u CASSAVA (first syllable), DRY, FOOT-1, FLESH/MEAT (first syllable), KNOW, MOON, SON, WATER-2

*u2 u u u u ˆ u u u BURN (INTR), WATER-1

*u3 u ˆ u u u u u HORSEFLY *u4 u u u u u u ∅ u ROAST (first syllable) *u5 u u u u ∅ ∅ u AGOUTI *u6 u u ∅ u u u ∅ u SCROTUM, SALIVA *u7 u u u u ∅ u ∅ u EYE *u8 u u u u u WOODPECKER

*u9 ∅ u(/∅) u ∅ ∅ u u STONE, CASSAVA (final syllable), FLESH/MEAT (final syllable)

*u10 u u u ∅ u/∅ u u URINE (final syllable) *u11 u u ˆ u ˆ u BLOOD *u12 u ˆ u u u u GIVE (final syllable) *u13 ˆ u u/∅ u/∅ u ∅ u DRINK (N) *u14 u ∅? u u u ASH *u15 ∅ ∅ ∅ ∅ u u ∅ SKIN/BARK (middle syllable) *u16 ˆ u ˆ u ∅ ˆ ˆ ˆ FRUIT *u17 ˆ ˆ ˆ u ∅ u MAN, WE (INCL) *u18 u u e u ∅ u u u FOREST *u19 ∅ u e ∅ ∅ u o ˆ SKY *u20 e u u u/ˆ ∅ ∅ u e ROAST (final syllable) *u21 u ∅ ∅ u e ∅ GIVE (first syllable) *u22 u ∅ o u ∅ ∅ o) GRANDFATHER *u23 o u u o u u u TONGUE

The vowel u in Cariban languages tends to be rather unstable, especially at mor-

pheme boundaries. Morphophonological processes frequently either create it (e.g.

from ˆ) by assimilation, or make it disappear by syllable reduction. The ∅’s and ˆ’s in Table 14 (and the ∅’s and u’s in Table 15 below) can almost all be attributed to these processes, generally with language-specific idiosyncratic outcomes. This makes the reliable reconstruction of *u (and of *ˆ) especially difficult: even when most reflexes agree (e.g. most are *u, or most are *ˆ), assimilation and reduction processes are so frequent that the possibility of independent parallel changes (*ˆ > u or *u > ˆ in many languages) cannot be excluded and must ultimately be judged on a case-by-case basis.

The best candidates for reconstruction as *u are *u1-*u15, since all reflexes are u, ˆ, or ∅. Unanimous agreement makes *u1 an obvious case. Language-specific syllable reduction is the cause of the ∅’s and ˆ’s (Gildea [pers. comm.] suggests that reduction to ˆ may be the first step of the process, prior to vowel loss), which, in *u1-*u15, are a minority.

In *u16-*u17, there are more ˆ’s than u’s, which suggests reconstruction as *ˆ. How-ever, the environments in question do not seem especially conducive to *ˆ > u assimila-tion (i.e. there are no labial consonants, nor u’s or o’s in adjacent syllables). It thus seems slightly more likely that these correspondences represent cases of *u, with a number of (independent, language-specific) *u > ˆ changes.

In *u18-*u24, vowels other than ˆ or u occur as reflexes. In *u18 (FOREST) and *u19, Hixkaryana e is irregular. As was said before (cf. discussion of *t in Sec. 4.1), Hixkar-yana tSetSa ‘forest’ is probably not cognate; but Hixkaryana kahe ‘sky’ looks perfect-ly cognate in all respects except its final e, which remains unexplained. Other unex-plained e’s can be found Yukpa and Kuikuro in *u20 (ROAST), and in Ikpeng in *u21 (GIVE).

There are also several o’s. Ikpeng o in *u19 (SKY) is the only surprising element in an otherwise quite regular cognate (kapo); it remains unexplained. In *u23 (TONGUE), we are dealing with a highly irregular word, as was already said in Secs. 4.2 and 4.3 above. For *u22 (GRANDFATHER), one can mention the synchronic existence of o- and u-variants in the same language (e.g. Tiriyó i-tamu ‘his grandfather’ vs. tamo ‘grand-father! (VOC)’, ‘my grandfather’); it may be that an u-form and an o-form will be re-constructed here.

Since there were no regular changes in the southern languages (Proto-Cariban *u was either preserved or idiosyncratically reduced to ˆ or ∅), there are no new arguments in favor of a southern branch. Notice the presence of three ˆ’s in the southern languages in *u16: this is another case of agreement between them. However, as in the other cases, this one is rather discutable: there is only one example, and, even if one assumes that it is a change (i.e. that *u16 is a case of *u, not *ˆ, with *u > ˆ in the southern languages), *u > ˆ is a plausible first step in syllable reduction and therefore a good candidate for parallel innovation (cf. the ˆ’s in Hixkaryana and Yukpa). It is also not implausible that semantically close terms may have exerted some influence (cf. Tiriyó epˆ ‘trunk, tree’; cf. the discussion of *e15 above).

Table 15. Correspondences reconstructible as Proto-Cariban *ˆ.

PC Yu Ti Hk Mk Pn Bk Ik Kk EXAMPLES *ˆ1 ˆ ˆ ˆ ˆ ˆ ˆ ˆ ˆ ARROW-1, AX, NECK (final syllable), SLEEP *ˆ2 ∅ ˆ ˆ ∅ ∅ ˆ ∅ ˆ EXCREMENT, FAT, NAME, THIGH, WHO *ˆ3 ˆ/∅ ∅ ∅ ˆ ˆ ˆ ROOT/VEIN *i4 ˆ ˆ ˆ ∅ ∅? ˆ? ˆ BREAST *ˆ5 ˆ ˆ ˆ ˆ u ˆ VAGINA *i6 ˆ ˆ u ˆ u u TIP/BEAK *i7 ˆ/u ˆ/u/∅ ˆ/u ˆ ∅ ˆ/u ∅ ˆ/u POS *ˆ8 ˆ u i ˆ i NAVEL *i9 ˆ ∅ ˆ ∅ ˆ ˆ i DRINK (V) (final syllabe) *i10 ˆ ˆ ˆ ∅ ∅ i FIND *ˆ11 ˆ u ˆ u ˆ ∅ ∅ ∅ FATHER (initial syllable) *i12 ˆ ˆ ˆ ∅ ∅ ∅ COME *i13 ∅ ˆ ∅ ∅ ∅ ∅ ∅ ∅ BONE, PERSON, TOUCAN *i14 ˆ ∅ ˆ ∅ ∅ ˆ ∅ MOUTH-1 *i15 ∅ ∅ ˆ ∅ ˆ/∅ ∅ ∅ NEG *i16 ˆ ˆ ∅ ∅ ∅ ∅ ∅ ∅ I *i17 ˆ ˆ ∅ ∅ ˆ ˆ MOUNTAIN (final syllable) *i18 ˆ ˆ ∅ ˆ/∅ ˆ ˆ NECK (first syllable) *ˆ19 o ∅ ˆ ∅ ∅ ˆ ˆ ˆ FATHER (final syllable) *ˆ20 u ´ ˆ ˆ ∅ ∅ ∅/ˆ TAKE *ˆ21 ∅ ˆ o ∅ ´ ˆ ∅ ˆ LOUSE *ˆ22 ˆ ˆ e ˆ ˆ ˆ ˆ i/ˆ WHAT, WIFE (first syllable) *ˆ23 ˆ/∅ e ∅ ∅ ˆ ∅ ˆ WIFE (final syllable) *i24 ˆ ˆ e ∅ ∅ u ∅ ∅ HAIR *ˆ25 e ˆ ˆ e ∅ ˆ ∅ ˆ LEAF *i26 e ˆ ˆ ˆ ∅ ∅ ˆ BRING *i27 e ˆ ∅ ˆ ˆ ˆ ∅ ˆ BATHE (TR) *i28 ˆ ∅ i i ˆ ∅ ˆ SHAMAN *i29 ˆ ∅ ˆ i ∅ ∅ ∅ DRINK (V) (middle syllable) *i30 ˆ ∅ o TAIL (final syllable)

The vowel ˆ, like u, is quite unstable and tends to disappear, in various environ-

ments, due to syllable reduction, which explains the frequent ∅’s in Table 15. The pre-ponderance of ˆ’s in most correspondences is the basic reason for reconstructing *ˆ, especially in *ˆ1-*ˆ4 and *ˆ12-*ˆ18, in which no other vowels occur. In *ˆ5-*ˆ6, *ˆ11, and *ˆ24, the higher frequency of ˆ reflexes leads to reconstruction as *ˆ, but the presence of u’s makes *u not implausible (especially for *ˆ6); but note that assimilation of *ˆ > u is not impossible, given that, in many cases, the preceding syllable has a back round vowel (o or u). In *ˆ7, there is synchronic alternation between u- and ˆ-forms of the possession-marking suffix (usually -rˆ ~ -ru), with the u-form occurring on stems end-ing in back round vowels (u or o); both forms are here reconstructed to Proto-Cariban.

In *ˆ8-*i10, there are some rather surprising cases of Kuikuro i instead of ˆ (and note also Makushi i in *ˆ8, and Panare i in *ˆ29); there is no clear explanation for them (but note that, in all cases, the preceding consonant is *n or *r, so that the unexpected vowel may be involved in the evolution of these sounds; cf. Sec. 4.3, 4.4 above). The

cases of i in *ˆ28, on the other hand, probably result from assimilation to the following *j (cf. Sec. 4.4).

In *ˆ19-*ˆ21, there are cases of o or ´ (< *ô; cf. below). It is at least plausible that they represent cases of *ô which were reduced to ˆ in the other languages. In some cases, this is not very likely (e.g. *ˆ19, with only one o in Yukpa, a language which has a number of irregularities); in others, it is definitely a possibility (e.g. *ˆ20-*ˆ21). In fact, for TAKE (*ˆ21), one might suggest that an earlier *arô could become *arˆ under the influence of the possession-marking suffix -rˆ on possessed ∅-nominalized forms. In *ˆ30, the final o in Kuikuro might reflect *o (not *ô; cf. below), but since the preceding syllable also has o, assimilation (*ˆ > o) remains a possible hypothesis.

In *ˆ22-*ˆ24, Hixkaryana e is surprising (note also Kuikuro i in one case, WIFE). In two cases, it occurs in the vicinity of another e (WIFE: ro-he-tSe; WHAT: etenˆ), which suggests sporadic cases of assimilation; the third case (HAIR: kˆ-hpo-tSe) has the same possession-marking suffix -tSe as WIFE. It does not seem best to reconstruct *e for these correspondences; there are sufficient signs of deviation (compare e.g. etenˆ with the other words in WHAT) to suggest that this e is a Hixkaryana innovation.

Yukpa e in *ˆ25-*ˆ27 is also unexpected. In BRING, assimilation is a plausible hypo-thesis, since the two preceding syllables also have e (m-enepe ‘you brought it’). In BATHE (TR), that is not the case; in LEAF, there is even another e in Makushi. Given the overwhelming predominance of ˆ reflexes, it still seems better to reconstruct *ˆ; but *e (especially for LEAF), although less likely, cannot be ruled out.

Given the absence of any regular changes involving the southern languages (Proto-Cariban *ˆ was either conserved or lost via syllable reduction), there are no new argu-ments in favor of a southern branch.

Table 16. Correspondences involving the vowel o.


*o1 o o o o o o o o CAUS, COL, DRINK (N), EARTH, FIELD/GRASS, FIND, HUSBAND, NAVEL, MOUTH-2, NIGHT (first syllable), SPIDER (first syllable), TAIL (middle syllable), WORM

*o2 o o o o o ∅ o/∅ o COL (first syllable) *o3 ∅ o o/∅ o o o/∅ o o CIRC.NZR (first syllable) *o4 o o/∅ o ∅ ∅ o(/∅) o/∅ ∅ CIRC.NZR (final syllable), COL (final syllable) *o5 o o o o a(/o) o o o PERSON (middle syllable), EARTH *o6 o o ∅ o ∅ ∅ o PERSON (final syllable) *o7 e o o a/o o o o RAIN (first syllable) *o8 o o o o ∅ ∅ o RAIN (middle syllable) *o9 o o ∅ ∅ ´ o o RAIN (final syllable) *o10 o o o o ´ o TIP/BEAK *o11 o ∅ o o WORM *o12 o ∅ o ˆ ´ ∅ o WHO (middle syllable) *o13 ∅ o o/a ∅ o o SPIDER (middle syllable) *o14 o o o u (o?) a o BIRD (first syllable) *o15 o o o ∅ (o?) i o BIRD (middle syllable) *o16 o o o o ∅ o o OTTER *o17 ∅ o o o o u u u HAIR *o18 o/u ∅ o u ∅ ∅ o GRANDFATHER *o19 a o o ∅ o/a o o FIRE

PC Yu Ti Hk Mk Pn Bk Ik Kk EXAMPLES *o20 o o ∅ ∅ ∅ ∅ ∅ o NIGHT (final syllable) *o21 o o ∅ ∅ ∅ ˆ ∅ ∅ LIQ.IN

*o22 o ´ o ˆ ´ ´ o e ABOUT/ERG, ARROW-2, FLEA, GO, HIGH, I, IMPER, LEAVE (TR), MOON, SHOOT, TOAD (middle syllable), YOU (final syllable)

*o23 u ´ o ˆ ´ ´ u(/∅) e SEIZE, STAR, THAT (INAN) (first syllable) *o24 ´ o ˆ a ´ o e SNAKE (first syllable) *o25 ´ o ˆ e ´ o e SNAKE (middle syllable) *o26 ´ o i ) o e PIRANHA *o27 ´/o o i i ´ o e PECCARY (first syllable) *o28 ´ u ˆ ´ ˆ ∅ o SKIN/BARK *o29 a ´ o a a ´ o e YOU (first syllable) *o30 ´ o ´ u TOAD (first syllable) *o31 o ´ o ˆ o u? ´? e STONE *o32 ´ o ˆ ∅ ´ o e HORSEFLY (middle syllable) *o32 ´ o ˆ ∅ ´ ∅ e COMIT, THAT (INAN) (final syllable) *o34 o ´ o ∅ ´ ´ ∅ e BEE/HONEY, HORSEFLY (final syllable), LIANA *o35 ´ o ˆ ∅ ´ ∅ e TWO (final syllable) *o36 o ´ o ˆ ˆ e e i WOMAN *o37 o ´ a e ∅ ) a a PATH *o38 ˆ e o e ´ e e i TOOTH *o39 o e o e ´ i i i BONE *o40 e o ˆ ´ ∅ ∅ ∅ PECCARY (final syllable) *o41 ∅ a? o a ∅ ´ o WHO (first syllable) *o42 a? e ˆ ´ a WHAT

The correspondences in Table 16 seem to fall into three natural groups: *o1-*o21,

*o22-*o37, and *o38-*o40. Notice the almost perfect agreement between Tiriyó, Bakairi and Kuikuro: in the first group, Tiriyó o : Bakairi o : Kuikuro o; in the second group, Tiriyó ´, Bakairi ´, Kuikuro e; in the third group, Tiriyó e : Bakairi e : Kuikuro i. Ex-cept in the cases of syllable reduction, Makushi also agrees quite well, with o in the first group, ˆ in the second, and e in the third. To these languages Yukpa, Hixkarana and Ikpeng can be opposed, all of which have mostly o in the three groups.

The first group (*o1-*o21) is the best candidate for reconstruction as Proto-Cariban *o — notice the many examples in the identity correspondence *o1 —, with the following remarks (∅’s are attributed to syllable reduction):

(a) Panare a in *o5 (EARTH), *o7 (RAIN), and *o19 (FIRE) are rather surprising.

Note, however, that there is dialectal variation (for RAIN, kono/ and kano/ come from different dialects, as do also wahto and wahta in FIRE); one may suggest o as the normal development and a as a consequence of more recent Panare dialectal history.

(b) There are several irregularities in RAIN (*o7-*o9). Aside from Panare a, men-tioned above, there is Yukpa e and j in kejopo, a word for which cognate status may seem discutable (but the overall similarity of kejopo to the other words in this set render the idea of excluding it quite uncomfortable). Note that there is at least one more Venezuelan language with deviating vowels in the first two syllables: Tamanaku (kejopo ‘rain’). Furthermore, there is also Bakairi final ´

(also found in Wayana kop´ ‘rain’, identical with its Bakairi cognate), unex-pected in this group. The precise history of this word is here left unresolved.

(c) Panare ´ in *o10 and *o12 is irregular (the normal Panare reflex would be o, as seen in *o1). Since Panare is rich in irregular vowel developments (cf. also u in *o18), it seems best to attribute the ´’s to the history of this language and to reconstruct *o for Proto-Cariban.

(d) Ikpeng i in *o15 (BIRD) is quite irregular; but, as was noted above (cf. the dis-cussion of *n in Sec. 4.2), both vowels in talim are unexpected, as well as the final m; this word is probably not cognate.

(e) The three u’s in the southern languages in *o17 (HAIR) represent another case of agreement on a single example. There is no obvious environment that could account for them in this case.

(f) Tiriyó ´/o in *o27 (PECCARY) marks dialectal variation (ponjeke, pńjeke). (g) Ikpeng u in *o3o (TOAD) is unexpected; one possible cause may be the labializ-

ing influence of the preceding p (not a very satisfying explanation, though). The second group (*o22-*o37) presents, as was said above, a very impressive agree-

ment between Tiriyó, Kuikuro, and Bakairi (and even Makushi). In other works on the history of Cariban languages (e.g. Girard 1971, Gildea 1998), it was always taken for granted that the middle vowel ´, in the languages that have it, was a reflex of Proto-Cariban *o (Girard does not even consider it independently, since his sources for languages with ´ were, in general, quite unreliable). It is, however, quite difficult to propose an environment which would allow the prediction of whether a given *o would develop as in the first group (with o’s in all languages) or as in the second group (with ´’s, ˆ’s and e’s in some languages). There is a certain tendency for the cognates in the first group to have more than one *o (e.g. RAIN, COL, EARTH, WORM, SPIDER, NIGHT), while those in the second group tend to have only one *o (MOON, FLEA, IMPER, SHOOT, STONE, BEE/HONEY). However, exceptions to these patterns are discouragingly many: FIELD/GRASS, FIND, HUSBAND, NAVEL, OTTER in the first group have only one *o, and ABOUT/ERG, HORSEFLY, TOAD, SNAKE in the second group have two *o’s; there are also specific irregularities, such as Bakairi final ´ in RAIN and Panare o in STONE. Factors such as stress placement, about which nothing has been reconstructed so far, may conceivably have affected the development of Proto-Cariban *o; but it is also possible that the difference between the two groups should be reconstructed as such to Proto-Cariban (as, for instance, *o and *´). Current knowledge is insufficient to decide exactly how to answer this question. Meira 2002 proposed two reconstructions, *o1 (the first group) and *o2 (the second group), without further phonetic details (so that *o2 might end up being *´, or ‘unstressed *o’, or *o + a ‘schwa-coloring laryngeal’, or any other future solutions). This temporary solution is also adopted here, but with *ô instead of *o2 for the second group, to avoid confusion with the *o2 correspondence in Table 16.

The following difficult cases remain in the second group: (a) In *o29 (YOU), there are a’s in Yukpa, Makushi, and Panare. This correspond-

ence is probably best reconstructed as *a (cf. the discussion of the initial vowel of the first-person pronoun I in *a2 above), with the o and ´ reflexes resulting from assimilation to the second vowel.

(b) Bakairi u in *o31 is further evidence that tuhu ‘stone’, as was proposed in the discussion of *p in Sec. 4.1, is not cognate; a better candidate, tú ‘big water-fall’ (also the name of a place with big rocks), has the regular reflex ´.

(c) In *o23, Yukpa u (in STAR: Seku and SEIZE: m-apuje) and Ikpeng u (in THAT: mun) are irregular developments, without obvious conditioning environments.

(d) In *o27 (PECCARY), Panare and Makushi i may result from the influence of a palatalized *nj [¯] on the preceding *ô (cf. Tiriyó ponjeke, pńjeke, Hixkar-yana ho¯ko): *pôinôkô > *pinôkô > Makushi pinkˆ, Panare pink´).

(e) As in the first group, Panare has a number of unexpected vowel reflexes (a in *o24, e in *o25, i in *o26-*o27, o in *o31, ˆ in *o37), taken here as evidence that the history of this language was rather complicated. The regular Panare reflex is assumed to be ´, found *o22, the basic correspondence for this group.

(f) In *o36 (WOMAN), we observe a curious situation: northern cognates follow the pattern of the second group (*ô: Tiriyó ´, Makushi ˆ), while the southern lan-guages seem to have reflexes of *e (Bakairi e, Ikpeng e, Kuikuro i). This is re-miniscent of the cases of e in the southern languages that correspond to a in the northern languages (cf. *a8, *a11 above). These examples may be related to the Cariban ablaut pattern, which often involves e and o/´ (< *ô), but some-times also a and o/´. This would imply the possible reconstruction of two ablaut forms, possibly with different syntactic distribution. Another possibility is that semantically related terms (e.g. ‘younger sister’: Hixkaryana awetSu, Wayana w´rˆ Si, Apalaí orˆ Si) may have influenced the pronunciation of WOMAN. This question is here left unresolved.17

(g) In *o37 (PATH), the irregular a’s and e’s are apparently due to assimilation. Assuming a protoform *ôtema, one could derive the Hixkaryana cognate with two assimilations (*ôtema > *ôsama > asama) and the Makushi cognate with one (*ôtema > *esema > *esma > e/ma). Kuikuru ama and Ikpeng anma followed a path similar to Hixkaryana asama (e.g. *ôtema > *asama > *asma > Ikpeng anma, Kuikuro ama).

The third group (*o38-*o40) is more heterogeneous. The examples in *o16-*o17 may

be ultimately related (TOOTH and BONE may be historically related: cf. e.g. Tiriyó je ‘tooth’ and jetˆp´ ‘bone’, in which -tˆp´ may be an old form of the nominal past suf-fix, so that ‘bone’ = ‘ex-tooth’). It is hardly possible to reconstruct *o16-*o17 as *o, since there is only one o reflex, in Hixkaryana. The best solution is apparently to ascribe these correspondences to *e, and to consider Hixkaryana o and Panare ´ as ablaut variants, still in need of explanation. The same e/o ablaut variation can be ob-served in *o40 (compare the final syllables of Tiriyó ponjeke with e.g. Wayana pín´k´ 17 Kuikuro itão ‘woman’ has a complicated history. At first sight, it does not seem to be cognate with any words in this group. However, if a protoform *wôrˆti is reconstructed (cf. Tiriyó w´ri, Hixkaryana wosˆ ‘woman’, worˆs-komo ‘women’, with the collective marker komo), it is only necessary to start with a collective form *wôrˆti-amo ‘(all the) women’ (a collective suffix *-amo is elsewhere attested) for most of the evolution to be based in changes already postulated to have happened in Kuikuro. The development could have been (other orders are possible): *wôrˆti-amo > *wôrˆtamo > * ôrˆtamo (loss of initial *w; cf. Sec. 4.4) > *ôrtamo > *ôtamo (syllable reduction) > *ôtão (loss of *m; cf. Sec. 4.2). From *ôtão, the expected form would be *etão, but we find itão instead (agreeing with the e’s in the other southern languages). The semantic change from collective to non-collective (=singular) is relative-ly frequent in the Cariban family: cf. e.g. ‘boy’ in Hixkaryana (bˆrjekomo) and in Waiwai (rikomo) — non-collective terms which have incorporated the collective marker komo —, or the cases of collective pronouns with double collective marking (e.g. Wayana kunm´ramkom ‘all of us’, with -am and -kom, two collective markers; cf. the non-collective kunm´ ‘the two of us’). The other southern languages also have old collective markers as part of the word for ‘woman’: Ikpeng pet-kom, Bakairi pe-ko-do (-ko < *komo, -do < *tomo, both well-attested collective markers elsewhere in the family).

and Apalaí poinoko). The ∅’s in the southern languages indicate the lack of the final element -njeke, -¯ko, -nkˆ, -nk´, which may have been an independent morpheme.

The final correspondences represent idiosyncratic cases, with unexpected a’s among the reflexes. For WHO and WHAT, Meira 2000 reconstructs ´-initial forms for Proto-Taranoan and derives Tiriyó a from analogy with a:no ‘which one?’ and the many interrogatives that it forms with postpositions (po ‘locative’ → an-po ‘where?’; pé ‘ablative’ → an-pé ‘from where?’; tae ‘perlative’ → an-tae ‘by where?’).

With respect to the hypothesis of a southern group, there are several possibilities: (a) *o and *ô were distinct in Proto-Cariban, and *ô = [´]. In this case, *o was

conserved in the three languages, while *ô was conserved as ´ in Bakairi, merged with *o in Ikpeng, and became e in Kuikuro. In this case, there are no shared innova-tions and thus no new arguments in favor of a southern branch.

(b) *o and *ô were distinct in Proto-Cariban, but *ô ≠ [´]. In this case, *ô was changed in both Bakairi (*ô > ´) and in Kuikuro (*ô > e). These are still, in principle, two different changes, not a shared innovation. One could imagine, however, that the Kuikuro change went through a schwa phase (*ô > *´ > e), and that the first part of this change was shared with Bakairi. Since, however, there is so far no evidence that Kuikuro ever had a schwa, this idea would be at best speculative.

(c) *o and *ô were not distinct in Proto-Cariban. In this case, there was only *o, which was conserved as such in Ikpeng, and changed in Kuikuro (*o > e) and Bakairi (*o > ´) in precisely the same (still undetermined) environments. The agreement be-tween Kuikuro and Bakairi becomes more significant: since the environments would have to be the same, it becomes plausible to assume that part of the Kuikuro change (say, the first phase in a putative *o > *´ > e) was shared with Bakairi. However, the occurrence of ´ in other languages (e.g. Tiriyó, Wayana) in precisely the same environ-ments means that parallel development must be assumed for at least some languages. Thus, parallel innovation is at least a definite possibility for Kuikuro and Bakairi.

5. Conclusion

In the previous section, a number of Proto-Cariban segments were (tentatively) reconstructed: eight consonants (*p, *t, *k, *m, *n, *r, *w, *j) and seven vowels (*a, *e, *i, *ˆ, *ô, *u, *o). This system differs in several important ways from the one pro-posed in Girard (1971). Since, however, the main goal of this paper is not Proto-Cariban phonology per se, but the existence of a southern branch, we will leave further considerations on the Proto-Cariban system for other works and concentrate on the possibility of finding innovations shared by the southern languages.

Table 17. Diachronic changes proposed for the southern languages.

Bakairi Ikpeng Kuikuro *p > p / #__, C__ > w / V__V, > ∅ / __u, h_(u, o)

*p > p / #__, C__ > w / V__V

*p > p / C__ > h

*k > k / #__, C__ > g / V__V

*k > k / #__, C__ > g / V__V

*k > g / N__ > k

*t > s, z / __e > S, Z / __i > d / V__V [≠ e, i] > t / #__V [≠ e, i] / C__V [≠ e, i]

*t > tS / __ e, i > r / V__V [≠ e, i] > t / #__V [≠ e, i] / C__V [≠ e, i] / __#

*t > ts / i__ > d / N__ > t

*m > ∅ / V__V > m *m > m

*m > ¯ / i__ > m / C__, > ∅

*n > r~ / #(C)V__V# > ∅~ / V__V > ∅ / __(p, k) > n / m__, __(r, n)

*n > N / __r > n

*n > n / __C, C__ > N

*r > r, l *r > r, l *r > ƒ, l

*w > p / #__, > u / __#, > ∅ / V__V

*w > m / __# > p / #__(sometimes) > w

*w > ∅

*j > ∅ *j > j *j > ∅

*a > a *a > a *a > a

*e > e *e > e *e > i

*i > i *i > i *i > i

*o > o *ô > ´

*o > o *ô > o

*o > o *ô > e

*u > u *u > u *u > u

*ˆ > ˆ *ˆ > ˆ *ˆ > i, ˆ

In Table 17, there are no candidates for the status of innovations shared by all three southern languages. There is, therefore, no argument favorable to the inclusion of these three languages in a single subgroup, other than agreement on certain appa-rently idiosyncratic lexical developments (e.g. the e in WOMAN, TOOTH, BONE, SAY).

There are, however, candidates to innovations shared by pairs of languages (Bakairi-Ikpeng, Bakairi-Kuikuro, Ikpeng-Kuikuro).

Bakairi-Ikpeng: (a) the changes involving *p, *k, and *t in intervocalic position (assuming *t > *d > r in Ikpeng, with the first part shared with Bakairi); (b) *r > l in certain (undetermined) environments (i.e. the cases of Bakairi l : Ikpeng l : northern languages r). (c) *w > p / #__ (in Ikpeng, not always) (d) *t > tS / __e, i (and then tS > S, Z, s, z in Bakairi)

(e) the possible change *nu-ru > *n-ru > Ikpeng Nu, Bakairi nu Bakairi-Kuikuro: (f) *ô > ´ in Bakairi and *ô > e in Kuikuro (assuming *ô > *´ > e in Kuikuro, with the first part shared with Bakairi); (g) *j > ∅. Ikpeng-Kuikuro (h) *n > N in certain (undetermined) environments. Clearly, the more numerous agreements between Bakairi and Ikpeng are more

convincing than the others. In Sec. 4, where (f-h) were discussed, we had always ob-served that there were alternative explanations; the same does not seem to be possible for at least (a), and maybe also (b). Even if one does not add to (a-e) the — admittedly weak — lexical affinity between Bakairi and Ikpeng (Sec. 3), a Bakairi-Ikpeng branch is clearly more plausible than a Bakairi-Kuikuro branch. A southern (Bakairi-Ikpeng-Kuikuro) group, on the other hand, receives no substantive support. We therefore pro-pose the existence of two independent southern sub-branches in the Cariban family, one including only Kuikuro (and its co-dialects Matipu, Nahukwa, Kalapalo), and the other including Bakairi and Ikpeng (and its co-dialect/language Arara). For the latter sub-branch, we propose the name Pekodian, from the words for ‘woman’, Bakairi pekodo and Ikpeng petkom. We attribute the affinities between these two branches, and especially between Bakairi and Kuikuro, to borrowings (note that a large number of Bakairi speakers lived, until the 1920’s, in the Xingu Indigenous Reservation, where the Nahukwa, speakers of a co-dialect of Kuikuro, were their closest neighbors). We choose our analyses accordingly; for instance, we reject the idea that Kuikuro e < *ô and Bakairi ´ < *ô could be shared innovations.

It goes without saying that further morphological and syntactic comparisons are still necessary to reveal other possibly shared features. For instance, the three southern languages possess a verbal tense-aspect-mood suffix with the form -lˆ or -ƒˆ, not found in the northern languages. It is not clear whether this fact is a shared innovation, or simply a borrowed (perhaps areal) feature.

Last but not least, we mention that the classification of southern languages has consequences for currently debated ideas about the origin and migrations of Cariban groups. Marshall Durbin (1977) defends the hypothesis of a north-Amazonian origin, with the southern languages resulting from more recent expansions, while Aryon Ro-drigues (personal communication), following a hypothesis first proposed by von den Steinen (1886:308, 1894:395), defends the idea of a south-Amazonian homeland, based, among other facts, on an apparently higher degree of linguistic diversity in the southern languages when compared to the relative homogeneity of their northern relatives, which would indicate a longer time of occupation by Cariban speakers in the south. This argument would become more convincing if the number of independent branches

in the south were large: consider the case of the Tupian family, which has 6 of its 10 sub-branches in the State of Rondônia (5 of which are exclusively found in that State). If, however, the hypothesis presented in the present work is correct, there are only two independent sub-branches of the Cariban family in the south: Pekodian (Bakairi-Ikpeng) and Kuikuro. The degree of diversity that this situation reflects would then not appear to be higher than, for instance, in Venezuela, in which at least Yukpa, and possibly also Panare and De’kwana, may belong to different sub-branches. The results presented here tend, therefore, to weaken the south-Amazonian origin hypothesis.

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Appendix

This appendix contains all cognates on which the conclusions of this paper are based. The spelling of each source was retranscribed with IPA symbols to facilitate comparisons. The original symbols which do not match their IPA equivalents were:

Yukpa: ü = /ˆ/, sh = /S/, ch = /tS/, y = /j/ Tiriyó: ï = /ˆ/, ë = /´/, j = /j/ Hixkaryana: tx = /tS/, x = /S/, y = /j/, ry = /rj/, ny = /¯/ Makushi: î = /ˆ/, ’ = ///, y = /j/ Panare: ï = /ˆ/, ë = /´/, ’ = ///, j = /h/, y = /j/, ch = /tS/, ñ = /¯/ Bakairi: y = /ˆ/, â = /´/, V+n = / v)/, x = /S/, nh = /¯/, j = /Z/, gu + e, i, y = /g/ Ikpeng: y = /j/ Kuikuro: ü = /ˆ/, g = /ƒ/, ng = /N/, nkg = /Ng/, nh = /¯/, j = /dj/ The sources for the cognates presented here are: Derbyshire 1965, 1979, 1985

(Hixkaryana), Abbott 1991, Amodio and Pira 1996 (Makushi), Muller 1994 (Panare), Pachêco 1997, 2001, Campetela 1997 (Ikpeng), field data (Meira: Yukpa, Tiriyó; Franchetto: Kuikuro).

A. Swadesh list

Here are the terms with the meanings specified in the 100-word Swadesh list. Note that, to translate ‘we’, there are two terms, one inclusive (1+2) and one exclusive (1+3); only the exclusive (1+3) term was considered.

Terms assumed to be cognates are in bold and have the same underline style. So, when a given meaning corresponds to more than one cognate set, each is underlined dif-ferently. For instance, meaning no. 003 ‘we (exclusive)’ has a cognate set formed by the first five terms (nana, anja, amna, anna, ana), another set including the two next terms (Sina, tSimna), and a final term without cognates (tisuge). Parentheses indicate optional parts of words (or parts that were not present in all sources); diagonal bars in-dicate varation (e.g. pa/e shows that both pa and pe occurred in the available sources). When a given meaning is expressed by more than one morpheme in a given language, the most frequent or unmarked one is chosen. For instance, meaning no. 008 ‘not’ (= negation markers) has several exponents in Tiriyó: the verbal negative suffix -sewa, a rarer adverbial negative suffix -:ra, and a non-verbal negative particle ta(ki). In this case, the first suffix (-sewa) was chosen as the most unmarked negation marker, despite the fact that the rarer second suffix (-:ra) is clearly cognate with most of the other negation markers in this row (-:ra was listed as a cognate in Table B below, in the NEG cognate set).

Yukpa Tiriyó Hixkaryana Makushi Panare Bakairi Ikpeng Kuikuro 001 I awˆ wˆ uro u:rˆ ju ur´ uro uƒe 002 you amo ´m´ omoro amˆrˆ amń ´m´ omro e:ƒe 003 we (EXCL) nana anja amna anna ana Sina tSimna tisuƒe 004 this (INAN) ma(S) ser´ onˆ se:nˆ sˆ(h) Sir´ nen iƒe 005 that (INAN) ake m´r´ moro mˆrˆrˆ ´m´ m´r´ mun eƒe 006 what nop atˆ etenˆ ˆ/ n´/ ´dˆ arˆ tˆ 007 who no akˆ onokˆ anˆ(/) n´/ )gˆ onok tˆ 008 not pra -sewa -hˆra pra -/ka -pa/-ba, -pˆra -pra, -wa -la 009 all tuwara amera:r´ omeroro tamˆ/nawˆrˆ atawń idń´r´ ompan tatute 010 many ape ijeta the¯ehra tu/ka kura, kure toe)zepa itˆN kakˆNi 011 one kuma-rko tínken towe¯Sa tiwin titjasa 18 tokal´ nane aetsˆ 012 two kosa ´:kń´ asako (a)sa:kˆne asa/, asak azag arak takeko 013 big Sape mono me hor me j kure/nan tose¯ im´sedo oke(p) tsekeƒˆ 014 long mesene maa kawo kusan tank´tSike im´sedo ˆkap19 tamitsi-¯ˆ 015 small kamtSe pijan atSke(tSko) si(/)mˆri(k)kˆ pˆtSa ime)bˆrˆ tˆriN, ˆka, tSika indzo¯o 016 woman worepa w´ri wosˆ ~ worˆs wˆri/ wˆnkˆ/ pekodo petkom ita)o) 017 man kˆpa kˆrˆ kˆrˆ warajo/ apo/ uguo)do ugwon 20 018 son wˆSˆnˆ ji-mmuku ro-mu-ru u-nmu ~ mumu nuwan ´-mu-ru i-mu-n u-mu(ku)-ƒu 019 fish poSe kana kana moro/ kana ka)ra) wot kaNa 020 bird peSa tonoro torono toron tunko konopio talim tolo 021 dog/jaguar eSo kaikui kamara kaikusi ak´r´ udodo akari ekeƒe 022 louse waja jamˆ ajamo ajan ajam´ emˆ ajam a)Æ) 023 tree/wood we wewe wewe jei ije, aje se jaj i 024 seed opˆrˆ putup´ natho/natˆ it-ena/pˆ jahp´ ewˆ — aƒˆ 025 leaf wehtSare itu arˆ arˆ jare tjan, -jan sarˆ ampo(n) taƒˆ 026 root/vein eSe i-mi(tˆ) ˆ-mSa-rˆ u-kara mi/ i-w"‚dˆ e-mirˆ "):(n)dzˆ 027 bark eS pihp´ u-hutShu-ru pi/pˆ pihp´, pih´ sa-tubˆ pitu hidjo 028 skin eS pihp´ k-hutShu-ru pi/pˆ pihp´, pih´ i-tubˆ i-put, pitu u-hidjo 029 flesh/meat aw ju-pu-ru pun k-hunu u-pun -pu u)ru) umi huNu 030 blood aw ju-muru-rˆ munu kamsuku mˆn ~ u-mˆnˆ metSu/ unu i-mˆN-ru uNu 031 bone aw jowˆ-rˆ i-jetˆp´ jotSho/ˆ u-je/pˆ j´hp´ ibˆrˆ i-itpˆn-kom u-ipˆƒˆ 032 egg nˆpˆ i-:mo ˆ-hme pˆmoi ju/mo´ ¯o)ro) -mu i-hu)") 033 grease/fat aw kaka-rˆ i-katˆ ˆ-katˆ i-kaiwan(o) ka/, kat i-gadˆ — katˆ 034 horn jˆtowata i-retˆ waSuru ret(t)ˆ panasˆkˆn i-wa)e)kˆ — ƒikˆƒˆ, i-sikˆƒˆ035 tail awˆkˆ arokˆ matkˆ it-aukˆ t-jatˆkń w-o)wÆ‚ arog-rˆ i-ƒoko-ƒu 036 feather ju-pu(-ru) ap´ri ahotSe j-apˆrˆ i:po/ ˆ-a)gahudu wugut, arogrˆ tolo iƒokoƒupe037 hair anˆ-ptˆ ji-putup´ 21 kˆ-hpo-tSe u-pu/pai si/po u/ i:po/ ˆ-a)ga-hudu eretput ipuƒu 038 head aw wasa-rˆ ji-putup´ ku-jhuthu-ru u-pu/pai u/, jˆ-pu-n ˆ-a)gahu i-mum-tSi u-ƒitˆ-ƒˆ 039 ear aw pana i-pana k-hana-rˆ u-pana ju pana-n i-wa)ta-rˆ i-wana-n u-haNa-ƒˆ 040 eye aw j-enu enu enu-ru uj-enu ju j-o-n enu eN-ru u-iNu-ƒu 041 nose aw j-ena o:na k-owna-rˆ uj-euna j-´wa-n j-ena-rˆ g-eNna-n u-inata-ƒˆ 042 mouth aw pota-rˆ mˆta ~ i-nta kˆ-mta-rˆ u-nta -(n)ta i-ta-rˆ ˆ-wora-n u-nda-ƒˆ

18 But cf. Pn tiwin ‘once’. 19 Also ‘high’; cf. the table in B below. 20 Cf. ‘person’. 21 Also ‘head’; cf. ji-hpo(tˆ) ‘my (body) hair’, mostly used in compounds.

Yukpa Tiriyó Hixkaryana Makushi Panare Bakairi Ikpeng Kuikuro 043 tooth aw jˆ-rˆ i-je jo u-je j-´ ´-e-rˆ to-e-n u-i-ƒˆ 044 tongue aw konatre i-nore tu-¯u-ru u-nu j-i¯o-n ˆ-lu o-lu u-Nuƒu 045 claw am etakSu-ru i-:roi hroSo pu/pˆ i-hta-njon w-o)da-rˆ i-pro-n u¯-ombi-ƒˆ 046 foot aw peSe i-hpu kˆ-hro-rˆ u-/pu pata, -htan u-hu-ru i-pu-n tapˆ-ƒˆ 047 knee j-emekre i-were:na esokna u-jese/mo/u tSe/mu eze)u)ru i-pjagumi u-iƒipaNa-ƒˆ 048 hand aw j-ema enja amo uj-enja e¯a ema-rˆ i-mja-rˆ u-i¯atˆ-ƒˆ, a)tˆ 049 belly aw pose i-waku kˆ-jwe ro/ta patSe/ i-d´hu g-eremin u-tehu-ƒu 050 neck aw pˆmˆ-rˆ i-hpˆmˆ kˆ-hmˆ-rˆ pˆmˆ, u-/mˆ jˆ-pˆmˆ-n i-wˆmˆ — u-tiNa-ƒˆ 051 breast aw SeSe i-manatˆ manatˆ i-mana(/)tˆ ma/ iwa)rˆ maNa(t) u-aNatˆ-ƒˆ 052 heart/guts aw ju-watru-ru ewanˆ ewa-nˆ uj-ewan j-awa-e ˆ-a)gahu i-wˆn momtSi u-Nunoho 053 liver jˆ-t-ore ere erje uj-ere, ut-ere j-inke¯ ere-rˆ g-ere-n u-tilu 054 drink (V) aw enape w-enˆrˆ en-hˆra enˆrˆ a¯-eni-/ka m-enˆ m-eNgrˆ-t 22 ili-tsaƒˆ 055 eat aw enape 23 n-éwetˆ emtakma entamo/ka atSere:ma k- )"‚g-lˆ otSimtagrike ut-i amba-taƒ 056 bite am m-eseka w-e:ka n -eska-je j-e/ka a¯-ehka-/ka ˆ-´-tai etpore-lˆ itsi-taƒˆ 057 see am m-esare w-ene n-e¯e-je era/ma (e/i)¯e-/ka m-e-tai eneN-lˆ u-iNi-taƒˆ 058 hear am m-eta w-eta n-e¯tSa-je eta-to/ etja-/ka S-ida-tai iraN-lˆ ta-taƒˆ 059 know wano wa:r´ u-hutwa-hra epu(/)tˆ intSa t-utu-ze t-orempan uhu-taƒˆ 060 sleep am m-ˆnˆke n-´:nˆkˆ nˆ-nˆk-no wetun oketi/ok´ti ˆkˆ-lˆ ˆnkˆ-lˆ u-ˆNgˆ-lîNo 061 die eka wa w-ei wajeh-no sa(/)manta o/kepˆ n-igi-aki i-rompo-lˆ apˆNu 062 kill 24 etSoka wa wˆ-rˆ n-etaha-no (i)wˆ(/) ama S-ˆ´ wo e-lˆ 063 swim — — — u-pˆnˆnu tˆnahkua t´ i-w´-ru — — 064 fly — — — a-wainamu tap´ke t´ — awmtatke-lˆ alun-daƒˆ 065 walk pˆta j-urakana atarjeknohˆ asarˆ patampo t´ u-d´-lˆ k-aran-tSi hˆlun-daƒˆ 066 come mˆ-ta w-épˆ n-omok-no i:pˆ ´pˆ-/ka k-é-tai m-arep e:-tsaƒˆ 067 lie etka tupae tˆraho esenumˆ, ait. — egekˆ tSu, otkitime iNa, ti:taho 068 sit ˆtˆta tahpa erjewta ere(u)ta ana po 25 ekadˆbˆ tSiN-ko tâkandi 069 stand anke pˆreme osowaSehto satti pe pi(/)ka Sˆdˆk war´ eNkwam tika¯i 070 give utu ekarama ˆmˆ i-tˆrˆ an-tu-/ka S-udu-aki t-eru-lˆ tu-nˆƒˆ 071 say mˆ-ka wˆ-ka ˆ-ka-no ta: ka-/ka au-ge-lˆ ke-lˆ u-ki-taƒˆ 072 sun wetSo wei kamˆmˆ wei etSerkun SiSi tSitSi ƒiti 073 moon kuno nunn´ nuno kapoi w´:n´ nun´ nuno Nune 074 star Seku sirik´ Serjko sirikˆ tjakń Simuk´ tˆriN kandi¯oko 075 water kuna tuna tuna tuna tˆna paru ga tuNa 076 rain kejopo konopo tuna kono/ k(a/o)no/ kop´ koNpo koNoho 077 stone top t´pu tohu tˆ(/) to/ tuhu ˆwˆ tehu 078 sand sasare samu sakarara saka-pan mitSin sagunu reNmun ¯etune 079 earth nono nono jukrjeka non ano o)ro) oroN NoNo 080 cloud kamuru ikapurutu kahrutunu katupuru ka/ tamu¯... eunu jumtSigru kamundu 081 smoke werasku ´rent´ esˆnˆ wˆre/sin wahta itSi eunu ˆmtigru ƒititse 082 fire wehta mahto weheto apo/ wahto/a peto atSi ito 083 ash weerusa erein ˆsˆnˆ runu/ˆ(/)pˆ tu/k´:n´ pelup´ tompilem ilumbe 084 burn (INTR) ureka ni-jatu at-ak-¯ohˆ e/potˆ, aramˆ atˆ-/ka ˆ-adu-lˆ g-aru-lˆ atu-lˆ 085 path osema éma asama e/ma tS(ˆ/a)ma )wa anma ama 086 mountain owamptarˆ pˆ: ˆhˆ wˆ/ i/ iwˆ — tehu ondˆhˆƒˆ

22 Attested with the meaning ‘eat liquid’ (e.g. porridge) or ‘smoke’ (e.g. tobacco). 23 Meaning: ‘consume’ (i.e. not only liquids, but also solid food). 24 The cognates in bold actually mean ‘shoot’, ‘kill by shooting’, and are listed in Appendix B under ‘shoot’. 25 Meaning: ‘on the ground’. Panare does not have a simple verb ‘to sit’, but expressions like asamaeka ana pana ‘to put oneself onto the ground’.

Yukpa Tiriyó Hixkaryana Makushi Panare Bakairi Ikpeng Kuikuro 087 red kuSumtSe ta:mi:re tutSurje su(:)ju tu/kinke tapabile)"‚ ratpano tˆkahisi-¯ˆ 088 green Sepe kurikuriwet tˆswaje rora tuku/jake tukue)"‚ tereN, irwalˆ taƒˆ huNu 089 yellow arawupa kananame t Sk w t k e a/mutun ta/pinke, ... tapadure)"‚ anagriwan kuadja huNu 090 white sˆw tˆko:roje buk¯e aimutun tamu/¯e tapeke)"‚ taprigem talaki-¯ˆ 091 black korowtSe sikinme thurme (a)ri(k)ku/ˆtun tupuru/ke t mˆgˆne)"‚ k r tpo tuhuseuki¯ˆ 092 night koko koko kohsaja ewaron sˆpa:w´ kopae kok koko 093 hot temeSne atuma tak¯e a/ne/ tap´ht´ t´d´pige ˆrˆp atuNu 094 cold koje-pe tˆnome tˆtSenot¯e komi(/) tˆ/nat´ke ig´wˆnu komtSimpe keˆnti 095 full — tńna:se twahurje intapˆkˆrˆ tu/ka, tu/ke tumˆke totupit ale-nˆƒ , tuƒupotsi096 good patume kure ohSe morˆ pe kara koend´ karake atˆtˆ 097 new kuSpa kainan Se¯eno amenan pi/ iwelo enu i¯iNo 098 round tuwiriri mokame tamno¯e amoko(/wa)rˆ tˆmuru/kuke tˆd´pńe)"‚ putereN tˆƒâki-¯ˆ 099 dry sansan tunne sororohe (aw)a/pi/ta(/p ) tu:t´ iladˆbÆ‚e) j-umne-lˆ tahutsekimbˆNˆ100 name aw j-ese eka esotˆ j-ese/ itSe/ ezedˆ eret ititˆ

B. Cognate sets

All sets used in this work are listed here (including those already listed in the Swadesh list in Appendix A above, as long as they contain at least one cognate from a southern language). In each set, presumed cognates are in bold (note that some of them are, in the various sections of this paper, dismissed as true cognates); words in normal type are not assumed to be cognates, despite having the same meaning as the others in the same row. Cognates which deviate in meaning from the other words in the same row have their meaning indicated in footnotes. An empty cell indicates that the word in question occurs in some other row (i.e. it is not cognate with its synonyms in the other languages, but it is cognate with some other group of words in this table). For instance, in the ‘sun-2’ row, the Yukpa, Tiriyó and Makushi cells are empty because the corresponding terms for ‘sun’ occur in the ‘sun-1’ row (the Hixkaryana and Panare terms for ‘sun’ are indicated in normal type because they are non-cognate; they were not indicated in ‘sun-1’ because there were other terms — weju ‘tar’ and we ‘light’, respectively — which are cognate with the other words in ‘sun-1’). A long dash (—) in a cell indicates that no word with the corresponding meaning was found in the available sources of the language in question. Square brackets indicate phonetic transcriptions. Cases of complementary distribution (phonologically or morphological-ly conditioned) are marked with a tilde (~); pronunciation variants (both inter- and intra-dialectal) are separated by commas, or indicated by parentheses (e.g. Panare (e/i)¯epˆ-/ka in the ‘bring’ row represents two variants, e¯epˆ-/ka and i¯epˆ-/ka).

Yukpa Tiriyó Hixkaryana Makushi Panare Bakairi Ikpeng Kuikuro 001 3 jˆ- i- ˆ- i- t- i- i- i- 002 3R t- t- t- t- t- 26 t- t- t- 003 about/ERG po ~ poko p´ ~ p´k´ hoko pˆ/ p´/ w´g´ wok heke 004 agouti kasare akuri akurje akuri aku¯ aki aki akuƒi 005 armpit aw juwahtarˆ i-jahta k-jahta-rˆ jewa(/)ta ju j-ahta-n ˆ-ataba-rˆ apta-kgwam u-idjata-ƒˆ

26 Synchronically, t- is one of the allomorphs that mark the simple (non-reflexive) third person in Panare.

Yukpa Tiriyó Hixkaryana Makushi Panare Bakairi Ikpeng Kuikuro 006 arrow-1 mekwe pˆrú wajwˆ pˆrû ka/kapo¯mń pˆrú pˆrom hˆƒe 007 arrow-2 mekwe-rˆ i-:re ij-ehre — — i-pˆ i-prˆ i-hˆƒi 008 ash weerusa erein ˆsˆnˆ runu/ˆ(/)pˆ tu/k´:n´ pelup´ tompilem ilumbe 009 ax waSa wˆwˆ jawaka wa/ka tSihtj pˆ, ˆ-wˆ-rˆ wˆm 27 ˆ 010 bat piSikattSa nere rjerje marapa ninke, nink´ semimu rere atsidji, adjua 011 bathe (TR) m-ajepe (INTR) w-ˆpˆ t-ˆh-ta e/-pˆ (INTR) an-ˆpˆ-/ka m-ˆ-tai m-ˆp-lˆ hˆ-lˆ 012 bee/honey wano wan´ ~ i-weni weno wan wan´ pe)r ) paNmomtSi 28 iNe 013 bird peSa tonoro torono toron tunko konopio talim tolo 014 bite am m-eseka w-e:ka n-eska-je j-e/ka a¯-ehka-/ka ˆ-´-tai etpore-lˆ itsi-taƒˆ 015 blood aw ju-muru-rˆ i-munu kamsuku mˆn ~ u-mˆnˆ metSu/ unu i-mˆN-ru uNu 016 bone aw jowˆ-rˆ i-jetˆp´ jotSho/ˆ u-je/pˆ j´hp´ ibˆrˆ i-itpˆn-kom u-ipˆƒˆ 017 breast aw SeSe i-manatˆ ˆ-manatˆ-r 29 i-mana(/)tˆ ma/ iwa)rˆ i-maNarˆ u-aNatˆ-ƒˆ 018 bring m-enepe w-enepˆ n-ek-je ine:pˆ, enepˆ (e/i)¯epˆ-/ka ene-k´ anep-ko iNi-nˆƒˆ 019 burn (INTR) ureka ni-jatu at-ak-¯ohˆ e/potˆ, aramˆ atˆ-/ka ˆ-adu-lˆ g-aru-lˆ atu-lˆ 020 cassava po uru uj-uru ikei, kˆse j-un ´-uru tarˆwe uƒu 021 CAUS — -po -ho — -po, -pa -ho -po — 022 CIRC.NZR -tpo -to(h) ~ -topo -toho ~ -tho -to/, -nto -to/ -ho, -to -(t)pot ~ -poto -toho 023 claw am takSu-ru i-:roi hroSo pu/pˆ i-hta-njon w-o)da-rˆ i-pro-n u¯-ombi-ƒˆ 024 cloud kamuru ikapurutu kahrutunu katupuru ka/ tamu¯... eunu jumtSigru kamundu 025 COL -ko -kon ~ -komo komo -kon -kon -mo -kom ~ -Nmo -ko 026 come mˆ-ta w-épˆ n-omok-no i:pˆ ´pˆ-/ka k-é-tai m-arep e:-tsaƒˆ 027 COMIT pkano ak´:r´ akoro j-arakkˆrˆ j-a/ ag´ pak ~ wak ake 028 corn me a:nai nasˆnasˆ a/nai ke/¯a/, ke/¯ai a)Zi anat ana 029 daughter aw j-eSe e:mi emsˆ-rˆ uj-ensi j-ˆnsˆ-n j-eSi-rˆ g-emtSi-n u-indi-sˆ 030 dog/jaguar eSo kaikui kamara kaikusi ak´r´ udodo akari ekeƒe 031 drink (N) tuhka i-jokˆ woku wo/ ~ u-wuku o/ ~ j-uku-n pogu, woku w-ok 30 oku-ƒu 032 drink (V) aw enape 31 w-enˆrˆ en-hˆra enˆrˆ a¯-eni-/ka m-enˆ m-eNgrˆ-t 32 ili-tsaƒˆ 033 dry sansan tunne sororohe (aw)a/pi/ta(/p ) tu:t´ iladˆbÆ‚e) j-umne-lˆ tahutsekimbˆNˆ034 ear aw pana i-pana k-hana-rˆ u-pana ju pana-n i-wa)ta-rˆ i-wana-n u-haNa-ƒˆ 035 earth nono 33 nono jukrjeka non ano o)ro) oroN NoNo 036 egg nˆpˆ i-:mo ˆ-hme pˆmoi ju-/mo´ ¯o)ro) -mu i-hu)") 037 excrement aw we wat´ ~ wetˆ wetˆ-tho we-ka 34 wat´ ~ we/ ˆ-edˆ oet ite 038 eye aw j-enu enu enu-ru uj-enu ju j-o-n enu eN-ru u-iNu-ƒu 039 father aw jˆmo jun-me k-jˆmˆ u-jun jˆm u-Æ‚ i-mˆ u)-Æ) 040 field/grass pawa oi tSu∏u 35 etei wana/ poZi wotSi-put oti 041 find m-upuje w-eporˆ ehorˆ eporˆ an-apo-/ka — i-woN-lˆ hoƒi-tsaƒˆ 042 fire wehta mahto weheto apo/ wahto/a peto atSi ito 043 fish poSe kana kana moro/ kana ka)ra) kaNa 36 kaNa

27 Meaning: ‘stone ax’; cf. oke ‘ax’. 28 Meaning: ‘bee sp.’. Given Ikpeng mumtSi ‘head’, one may propose an (etymological) analysis as paN-momtSi ‘honey-head’. 29 Attested as manata in Derbyshire 1979, but as manatˆ in more recent materials (health and literacy booklets for Hixkaryana speakers). The form manatˆ is more regular; manata is probably a misspelling (possibly due to the fact that the current Hixkaryana orthography spells ˆ as <à>). 30 Attested with the meaning ‘café’ (=‘coffee’); it probably also means ‘drink (in general)’. 31 Meaning: ‘consume’ (i.e. not only liquids, but also solid food). 32 Attested with the meaning ‘eat liquid’ (e.g. porridge) or ‘smoke’ (e.g. tobacco). 33 Meaning: ‘sand’. 34 Verb stem: ‘to defecate’. 35 Cf. wosu ‘grass, savanna’ from Katxuyana, a Cariban language closely related to Hixkaryana. 36 Meaning: ‘kingfisher (bird sp.)’.

Yukpa Tiriyó Hixkaryana Makushi Panare Bakairi Ikpeng Kuikuro 044 flea keSepo sik´ sˆko sikˆ tSik´ Sig´ — sike 37

045 flesh/meat aw ju-pu-ru i-pun k-hunu u-pun pu-to u)ru) umi 38 huNu 046 foot-1 aw peSe i-hpu kˆ-hro-rˆ u-/pu u-hu-ru i-pu-n 047 foot-2 pata, ´-hta-n tapˆ-ƒˆ 048 forest tuwetSa itu tSetSa ju/ ihpa idu iru itsuni 049 fruit j-opˆrˆ 39 eperu eherˆ eperu ipe¯ ewilˆ ewilˆ ihi-sˆ 050 give utu w-ekarama ˆmˆ i-tˆrˆ an-tu-/ka S-udu-aki t-eru-lˆ tu-nˆƒˆ 051 go aw to wˆ-tń n-to-je u:-tˆ wˆtń ju u-d´-lˆ ero-lˆ u-te-taƒˆ 052 good patume kure ohSe morˆ pe kara koend´ karake atˆtˆ 053 grandfather papˆtˆ tamo ~ i-tamu ro-tam-ru u-tamo a-tamu-n tako uk-tam-ru ku-tãõpˆ-ão 054 grandson — i-pa ro-ha-rˆ u-pa(/) junke¯ nke¯ ´-we-rˆ ˆ-we-n e-hi-ƒˆ 055 grease/fat aw kaka-rˆ i-katˆ ˆ-katˆ i-kaiwan(o) ka/, kat i-gadˆ — katˆ 056 hair anˆ-ptˆ 40 ji-hpo(tˆ) kˆ-hpo-tSe si/po i:po/ enu-hudu 41 eretput ipuƒu 057 hand aw j-ema enja amo uj-enja e¯a ema-rˆ i-mja-rˆ u-i¯atˆ-ƒˆ 058 hear am m-eta w-eta n-e¯tSa-je eta-to/ etja-/ka S-ida-tai iraN-lˆ ta-taƒˆ 059 high kaje 42 kaw´ kawo 43 kawˆ-ne44 kaw´ iwage ˆkap 45 kapehe 060 horsefly kˆjaku tur´k´ tˆroko turˆ/ tunk´ tur´g´ turok tuƒeke 061 house mˆnˆ pakoro owto ~ ewto 46 wˆttˆ ~ uj-ewˆ/ a-jˆwˆ/ ´t´, j-etˆ owro, ewrˆ ete ~ u-itu 47 062 aw ˆtSarˆ husband i-njo ro-¯o i-njo ~ nijo-no/ jˆ-tamu-n u-so ˆ-mrejum u-¯o, Niso 063 I awˆ wˆ uro u:rˆ ju ur´ uro uƒe 064 IMPER -k ~ -ko -∅ ~ -h ~ -k´ -h ~ -k ~ -ko -∅ ~ -kˆ -∅ ~ -k´ -k´ ~ -g´ -ko ~ -k -ke 065 INSTR kan(o) ke ke ke ka, ke ke ~ ge ke ~ ge ki 066 jacu bird — marasi maratˆ mara:si — — — aƒatˆ 067 knee j-emekre i-were:na esokna u-jese/mo/u tSe/mu eze)u)ru i-pjagumi u-iƒipaNa-ƒˆ 068 know wano ni-pu:n´pˆ 48 u-hutwa-hra epu(/)tˆ intSa t-utu-ze t-orempan uhu-taƒˆ 069 leaf wehtSare itu arˆ arˆ jare t-jan sarˆ ampo(n) taƒˆ 070 leave (TR) am m-ejo wi-nń mˆ-nom-no nˆmˆ-u-ja anˆ-pˆnka-/ka m-i ) m-ino-t u-Nondi-l

071 l inat iana menupa siminat´ mamrˆ 49 si/na(/) ke/¯at´ Sie)d´ inte 50

072 LIQ.in — hkao gwam kwawo ka hkua ikaˆ kwa 073 liver jˆt-ore ere erje uj-ere, ut-ere j-inke¯ ere-rˆ g-ere-n u-tilu 074 louse waja jamˆ ajamo ajan ajam´ emˆ ajam a)Æ) 075 man kˆpa kˆrˆ kˆrˆ warajo/ apo/ uguo)do ugwon 51 076 moon kuno nunn´ nuno kapoi w´:n´ nun´ nuno Nune 077 mother aw jˆ-Sa ipa-i-je 52 ˆ-jo-nˆ u-san ~ jan a-san´ ~ jan´ ˆ-ze je, uk-te, ugu-re tˆ-ti 078 mountain owamptarˆ pˆ: ˆhˆ wˆ/ i/ iwˆ ˆwˆ 53 tehu ondˆhˆƒˆ

37 Meaning: ‘ant (sp.)’. 38 Also ‘game’. 39 j-opˆrˆ means also (and more often) ‘seed’. 40 Meaning: ‘eyelash’. 41 Meaning: ‘eyelash’. 42 Also ‘fast’. The second syllable is probably cognate with Hixkaryana karje; cf. also Apalaí kae, Tiriyó kae (originally directionals, not locatives). 43 Usually ‘long’; sometimes also ‘high’. The most frequent word for ‘high’ in Hixkaryana is karje. 44 Meaning: ‘high place’. 45 Also ‘long’. 46 Meaning: ‘village’. 47 Meaning: ‘village’. 48 Meaning: ‘think’, ‘ponder’, ‘learn’, ‘understand’. 49 Cf. Katxuyana tSi/noto, Waiwai SiSinatˆ, Wayana sihnat. 50 Meaning: ‘timbó’ (poisonous liana). 51 Cf. ‘person’. 52 Tiriyó ipaije means ‘daughter-in-law’, from *i-pa i-je ‘grandson’s mother’ (je ‘mother’ is not synchronically attested in this language). 53 Meaning: ‘stone’, ‘rock’.

Yukpa Tiriyó Hixkaryana Makushi Panare Bakairi Ikpeng Kuikuro 079 mouth-1 mˆta ~ i-nta kˆ-mta-rˆ mˆta ~ u-nta -nta-n i-ta-rˆ mˆra ~ mta 54 u-nda-ƒˆ 080 mouth-2 aw pota-rˆ hota 55 ˆ-wora-n 081 name aw j-ese e:tˆ 56 esotˆ j-ese/ itSe/ ezedˆ eret ititˆ 082 navel aw pusku-ru i-ponˆ k-honu-ru u-poni po:wa ˆ-w )e)ka-rˆ polˆ ~ ˆ-wolˆ u-honi-tˆ 083 neck aw pˆmˆ-rˆ i-hpˆmˆ kˆ-hmˆ-rˆ pˆmˆ ~ u-/mˆ jˆ-pˆmˆ-n i-wˆmˆ — u-tiNa-ƒˆ 084 NEG (=not) pra -sewa; -:ra -hˆra pra -/ka -p/ba ~ -pˆra -pra, -wa -la 085 night koko koko kohsaja ko/-mamˆ 57 ko/-mamˆ 58 kopae kok koko 086 nose aw j-ena o:na k-owna-rˆ uj-euna j- wa-n j-ena-rˆ g-eNna-n u-inata-ƒˆ 087 otter saroro saro sororo soro/ sanko saro — taƒo 088 path osema éma asama e/ma tS(ˆ/a)ma )wa anma ama 089 peccary kapo p(o/´)njeke ho¯ko pinkˆ pink´ pú pow he)u) 090 person jukpa wˆtoto toto to/ 59 tato, toto 60 udo 61 urot 62 toto 63 091 piranha — pńe ho¯e arai pi¯e p )re) pone heNi 092 POS -rˆ ~ -ru -r ~ -ru ~ -∅ -rˆ ~ -ru -rˆ ~ -∅ -n -rˆ ~ -ru -n -ƒˆ ~ -ƒu ~-sˆ 093 PTCP -∅ (?) 64 -se ~ -je ~ -e -so ~ -Se -i ~ -se -se / -tSe -ze -t ~ -te -ti 094 rain kejopo konopo 65 kono/ k(a/o)no/ kop´ koNpo koNoho 095 roast mu-pure wi-puru ∅-huru-je puru, purˆ-/pˆ anˆ-pu-/ka mi-hu-agi je-pru-lˆ hule-taƒˆ 096 root/vein aw eSe i-mi(tˆ) ˆ-mSa-r 66 u-kara mi/ i-w"‚dˆ e-mirˆ "):(n)dzˆ 097 sand 67 samu sakarara saka-pan mitSin sagunu reNmun ¯etune 098 saliva j-etaSku-ru j-etaku k-otak-ru j-etaku (n)taritSukun j-edaku ˆ-lag-lu itaku-ƒu 099 say mˆ-ka wˆ-ka ˆ-ka-no ta: ka-/ka au-ge-lˆ ke-lˆ u-ki-taƒˆ 100 scrotum aw j-emu j-emu k-om-ru uj-emu amu ~ j-ˆmu-n emu g-em-ru u-i¯uti-tˆ 101 see am m-esare w-ene n-e¯e-je era/ma (e/i)¯e-/ka m-e-tai eneN-lˆ u-iNi-taƒˆ 102 seed j-opˆrˆ putup´ natho, natˆ it-ena/pˆ jahp´ ewˆ — aƒˆ 103 seize m-apuje w-apí n-ahosˆ-je j-api/sˆ an-ap´sˆ-/ka s-aw´-k´ — 68 u-ihe-taƒˆ 104 shaman tuwano pˆjai jas-komo pia/san pijan pâZi — hâti 105 shoot mˆ-wo69 mˆ-w´ ˆ-wo-no i-wˆ an´-w´-/ka ´-ze t-wo-lˆ u-e-taƒˆ 106 sieve — manare manarje manari upa manare manan manaƒe 107 skin/bark eS pihp´ u-hutShu-ru pi/pˆ pihp´, pih´ i-tubˆ i-put, pitu u-hidjo 108 sky kamuru kapu kahe ka/ ka/ kau kapo kahˆ 109 sleep am m-ˆnˆke n-´:nˆkˆ nˆ-nˆk-no wetun oketi ˆkˆ-lˆ ˆnkˆ-lˆ u-ˆNgˆ-lîNo 110 snake kerepo ´kí okoje ˆkî ake, ahke ´gú ogoj eke 111 son wˆSˆnˆ ji-mmuku ro-mu-ru mumu ~u-nmu nuwan, nken ´-mu-ru i-mu-n u-mu(ku)-ƒu 112 song (o)majkˆ ´remi ~ eremi 70 eren ware, je/ ´remu ~ eremu orem ~ eremu eƒi ~ iƒˆ-sˆ 113 spider araja moi mojosˆ mojoi, mojai ankaja moZi mojot osoti

54 Meaning: ‘word’, ‘talk’, ‘language’. 55 Meaning: ‘door’. 56 An old word for ‘name’, also for ‘sound’ (made by something). The current word for ‘name’ is the non-cognate eka. 57 Meaning: ‘stay’, ‘spend the night’; cf. also ko/-man-pra ‘yesterday’, ko/-ma(mˆ)ija ‘afternoon’, ‘evening’. 58 Meaning: ‘become dark’, ‘fall (night)’. 59 Meaning: ‘they’ (pronoun). 60 Meaning: ‘non-Indigenous person’. 61 Meaning: ‘Indigenous person (non-Bakairi, non-White)’. 62 Meaning: ‘wild Indigenous person’. 63 Meaning: ‘man’. 64 In the few examples of participials in Yukpa, only a t- prefix occurred, without any accompanying suffix (e.g. t-ema ‘bought’, t-ehtSa ‘broken’). 65 Cf ‘water-1’. 66 Cf. Waiwai ji-mitSi-nˆ ‘root’, ‘vein’. 67 Cf. ‘eath’. 68 But cf. aboti-lˆ ‘he caught it’ in Arara, a co-dialect of (or language closely related to) Ikpeng (Souza 1993:22). 69 Meaniing: ‘hit’. 70 Cf. Waiwai erem ‘curse’, ‘spell’, ‘charm’.

Yukpa Tiriyó Hixkaryana Makushi Panare Bakairi Ikpeng Kuikuro 114 star Seku sirik´ Serjko sirikˆ tjakń Simuk´ tˆriN kandi¯oko 115 stingray ma(h)Si sipari Sarje supare/, sipare panke/ Siware tSiwan tihaƒi 116 stone top t´pu tohu tˆ(/) to/ tuhu, tú 71 72 tehu 117 sun-1 wetSo wei weju 73 wei we 74 imbo 75 118 sun-2 kamˆmˆ etSerkun SiSi tSitSi ƒiti 119 tail awˆkˆ arokˆ matkˆ it-aukˆ t-jatˆkń w-o)wÆ‚ arog-rˆ i-ƒoko-ƒu 120 take m-aru w-ar´ w-arˆ-je j-arˆ j-an-sa/ n-a-d´ j-arˆ-lˆ iƒe-taƒˆ 121 that (INAN) ake m´r´ moro mˆrˆrˆ ´m´ m´r´ mun eƒe 122 thigh aw Saku i-petˆ k-he-tˆ i-pe/ ju pe/ i-wedˆ i-wet u-hitˆ 123 this (INAN) ma(S) ser´ onˆ se:nˆ sˆ(h) Sir´ nen iƒe 124 tip/beak potˆ-rˆ i-potˆ hotu-ru potˆ p´tu-n j-opi-rˆ hotu-ƒu 125 toad kupittSu p´r´ru hororu peretuku kˆwo p´r´ru puron paƒapaƒa 126 tongue aw konatre i-nore tu-¯u-ru u-nu j-i¯o-n ˆ-lu o-lu u-Nuƒu 127 tooth aw jˆ-rˆ i-je jo u-je j-´ ´-e-rˆ to-e-n u-i-ƒˆ 128 toucan Sa(h)tre kˆjapoko kjakwe kuja/ke tSopoko pawaru jakwe kahoko 129 tree/wood we wewe wewe jei ije se jaj i 130 two kosa ´:kń´ asako (a)sa:kˆne asa/, asak azag arak takeko 131 urine aw Suku ji-suku ku-Sku-ru su/ su/ ~ jˆ-suku-n i-Ziku ˆ-tSitetke-l 76 ƒitsu 132 vagina j-orˆ erˆ mo¯e 77 pi/pu, pare/ arˆ, j-ˆrˆ-n j-elˆ pilu u-iƒˆ-ƒˆ 133 water-1 kuna tuna tuna 78 tuna tˆna ga tuNa 134 water-2 paru paru 79 135 what nop atˆ etenˆ ˆ/ n´/ ´dˆ arˆ tˆ 136 we (EXCL)-1 nana anja amna anna ana tisuƒe 137 we (EXCL)-2 Sina tSimna tisuƒe 138 we (INCL) ˆ(h)pˆ kˆm´ kˆwro u:rˆ’kon juto, juta kur´ ugro kukuƒe 139 who no akˆ onokˆ anˆ(/) n´/ )gˆ onok tˆ 140 wife aw ˆtSarˆ ji-pˆ(tˆ) ro-hetSe i-no/pˆ ju pˆ/ tˆ-wˆdˆ i-wˆt u-hitsˆ 141 woman worepa w´ri wosˆ ~ worˆs wˆri/ wˆnkˆ/ pekodo petkom ita)o) 142 woodpecker sakurare wetu hetu tu/pra ehporo sedu weru itu 143 worm komeSa moto ekewrˆ mo/ modo arajNmo oto 144 you amo ´m´ omoro amˆrˆ amń ´m´ omro e:ƒe

71 ‘Big waterfall’; the name of a place where there is a big waterfall. ‘Stone’ is tuhu, a deceivingly similar but probably non-cognate word. 72 Cf. ‘mountain’. There is a possible cognate topkˆn ‘stone for making arrowheads’: the initial syllable top might be related to an earlier word for ‘stone’. However, it might also be related to the word for ‘bow’ (topkak). 73 Meaning: ‘tar’ (i.e. a substance which is burned for illumination). 74 Meaning: ‘light’. 75 Meaning: ‘light’. 76 Meaning: ‘I urinated’ (a verb). 77 Cf. Waiwai erˆ-rˆ ‘vagina’. 78 Also ‘rain’. 79 Paru is an old-fashioned word; the normal word for referring to water is ga.

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The Southern Cariban Languages and the Cariban Family

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