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Old Tupi language - Phonology

Old Tupi language - Phonology: Encyclopedia II - Old Tupi language - Phonology

Old Tupi language - Vowels. Tupi has twelve vowel phonemes, oral and nasal variants of six basic vowels. The oral vowels are: A — similar to Spanish, according to Anchieta (IPA /a/). E — similar to the English E in "hell" (IPA /ɛ/). I — like EE in "seed" (IPA /i/). O — like the O of "hot" (IPA See also:

Old Tupi language: Encyclopedia II - Old Tupi language - Phonology

Old Tupi language - Phonology

Old Tupi language - Vowels

Tupi has twelve vowel phonemes, oral and nasal variants of six basic vowels. The oral vowels are:

A — similar to Spanish, according to Anchieta (IPA /a/).
E — similar to the English E in "hell" (IPA /ɛ/).
I — like EE in "seed" (IPA /i/).
O — like the O of "hot" (IPA /ɔ/).
U — like OO in "foot" (IPA /ʊ/).
Y — similar to Polish y, or Romanian î (to approximate this sound, pronounce an English "oo" sound (IPA /u/), but further forward in the mouth, with the lips less rounded; IPA /ɨ/).

Each of the six vowels has a nasalised counterpart (written below with umlauts instead of tildes due to text input restrictions):

Ä (IPA /ã/)
Ë (IPA /ɛ̃/)
Ï (IPA /ĩ/)
Ö (IPA /ɔ̃/)
Ü (IPA /ʊ̃/)
Ÿ (IPA /ɨ̃/)

It must be noted that the nasal vowels are fully vocalic, without any trace of a following M or N. They are vowels pronounced with the mouth open and the palate relaxed, not blocking the air from resounding through the nostrils.

These approximations, however, must be taken with a grain of salt, as no actual recording exists and it is known that Tupi had at least seven dialects.

Old Tupi language - Semivowels

There are three semivowels, usually written with the circumflex accent to make clear the vowel from which they derive.

Î — like Y in English. Often affricate, becoming similar to the French J (IPA /j/ or /ʒ/).
Û — like W in English (IPA /w/).
Ŷ — unique to Tupi (as far as the author knows), identic to Y, but pronounced fast, with the same duration of a semivowel.

It is unclear whether Ŷ really existed in all dialects .

Old Tupi language - Consonants

The most surprising feature of Tupi was the consonantal system, due to the following characteristics:

There are no voiced stops. The voiceless stops (P, T, K) are paired with prenasalised voiced stops (MB, ND, NG) which Anchieta called quite similar to M, N and Ñ.
There was a glottal stop, IPA /ʔ/, which was not written, but was automatically inserted between a sequence of two consecutive vowels and at the beginning of vowel-intial words (aba, y, ara, etc.). When indicated in writing today, it is generally written with an apostrophe, '.
There are four nasal consonants: M, N, Ñ and NG (IPA /m/, /n/, /ɲ/, as in Spanish ñ, and /ŋ/, as in English ng, respectively).
There are only two fricatives, S and X (both unvoiced, one dental and the other palatal, IPA /s/ and IPA /ʃ/, as in English sh, respectively).
The consonant written B was not pronounced with the mouth fully closed and had a distinctive fricative character (IPA /β/, similar to English v, but articulated using both lips, not the bottom teeth and the top lips); it was not the voiced equivalent of the bilabial stop "P").
The glottal fricative (H) is mostly absent and often pronounced S.
One rhotic consonant, a tap/flap (like the r of Spanish, or the t in American English city; IPA /ɾ/

The following 16 consonants are identified (with their IPA equivalents in parentheses):

B (/β/)
G (/ɣ/)
H (/h/)
K (/k/)
M (/m/)
N (/n/)
Ñ (/ɲ/)
NG (/ŋ/)
P (/p/)
R (/ɾ/)
S (/s/)
T (/t/)
X (/ʃ/)
MB (/ⁿb/)
ND ((/ⁿd/)
NG (/ⁿɡ/)

Old Tupi language - Considerations on the Writing System

It would be almost impossible to reconstruct the phonology of Tupi if Tupi did not have a wide geographic distribution. The surviving Amazonian Nheengatu and the close Guarani correlates (Mbyá, Nhandéva, Kaiowá and Paraguayan Guarani) provide material that linguistic research can make use of in order to achieve an approximate account of the language.

Scientific reconstruction of Tupi suggests that Anchieta largely simplified (or merely overlooked) the phonetics of the actual language when devising his grammar and his dictionary.

The writing system employed by Anchieta is still the basis for most modern scholars, despite its inaccuracy because it is easily typed with regular Portuguese or French typewriters (but not ISO-8859-1, which lacks ẽ, ĩ, ũ, and ỹ).

Its key features are:

The use of the circumflex (^) to indicate the semivowel derived from a vowel: I ==> Î.
The use of the tilde to indicate the nasalisation of the vowel: A ==> Ã
The use of the acute accent to indicate the stressed syllable when it can't be inferred from the context: abá ("man").
The use of X for the unvoiced palatal fricative (which is strange to most languages, except Portuguese and Old Spanish).
The use of hyphens to separate the roots present in a compound is dropped, except in the dictionary.