Old Tupi language: Encyclopedia II - Old Tupi language - Grammatical Structure

Old Tupi language - Grammatical Structure

Unlike most European languages, Tupi was an agglutinating language — with some polysynthetic features — that depended on the noun for most of its meaning.

It lacked proper verbs, did not know of adverbs, prepositions or articles and had very limited role for adjectives (as they could not be used alone and could not be made into abstract nouns).

The Tupi verb (i.e. the noun that appeared with verbal meaning in the sentence) was inflected by prefixation, but this inflection was not relative to "time" or "tense" but to linking the verb to the subject and defining the definiteness of the action.

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

• abá í taba (man + tiny + our + village) = kid from the village
• taba í abá = man from the small village (or "the man from Smallville"...)

However, reduplication was not known.

Besides being highly agglutinating, Tupi had no means to inflect words for number or gender.

The notion of plural was expressed by adjectives or numerals:

• abá = man; abá eté = many men

The notion of gender was expressed so:

• îagûara (jaguar) ; îagûara kuñã (female jaguar) ; îagûara apŷaba (male jaguar)

Unlike European languages, the noun was not implicitly masculine, except for those provided with natural gender: "abá" (man) and "kuñã[tã]" (woman/girl); for instance.

Without proper verbal inflection, all Tupi sentences are in the present. When needed, time is indicated by adjectives like "koara" (this day).

Adjectives and nouns, however, do have temporal inflection:

• abáûera (he who was once a man)
• abárama (he who shall be a man someday)

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