Old Tupi language: Encyclopedia II - Old Tupi language - Early Tupi Scholarship

Old Tupi language - Early Tupi Scholarship

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

The first studies on Tupi were not made by trained linguists, but by Catholic missionaries imbibed with the will of understanding and converting to christendom those "wild savages" whose habits (like cannibalism, polygamy, body piercing, free love and the absence of clothing) strongly scandalised the European men of faith.

Therefore, the first (and the only contemporary) grammar of Tupi reflected the conditioning and the prejudices of both the religion and the science of Europe: despite the sheer inacuracy of Indo-European terminology to describe the categories of words in Tupi, they are used (and there was an apparent tendency towards regularising or grammaticalising the language). A good evidence of how inaccurate Indo-European "parts of speech" are is the fact that in Tupi it is the adjective (i.e. the word that expresses characteristics of the subject) instead of the verb (i.e. the word that expresses the actions of the subject) that bears the inflection of tense (past or future).

The first scholar to research Tupi was the Spanish Jesuit Jose de Anchieta --- who wrote a grammar and a glossary containing the vast majority of the few thousands of words (not all of them roots) that are known to us. He also demonstrated his mastering of the language (and the efficacy of his works) by translating copiously Catholic prayers, lives of saints and portions of the Bible. He even composed his own poems and plays in Tupi --- and his works are almost everything of Tupi that was left.

It is clear, then, that the research of Tupi is hampered by the scarcity of the surviving vocabulary, the inaccuracy of contemporary scholarship and the interference of the colonial view. Considering this, we can agree on the following characteristics of Tupi.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Early Tupi Scholarship", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki