Reconstrução do proto-tupari: revisão e ampliação

Abstract

The Tupari family belongs to the Tupi trunk and consists of five languages - Akunsu, Ayuru, Mekéns, Makurap, Tupari. These languages are spoken in the state of Rondônia by small groups of people. Galucio and Moore (1993) proposed the reconstruction of a black language - the Proto-Tupari - that would be the common ancestor among the present languages of the Tupari family. The present research is a preliminary attempt to revise and extend Moore and Galucio's work. The reconstruction of Proto-Tupari is important to prove that the languages mentioned above really belong to a common family and to make comparisons with other black languages of the Tupi trunk, aiming at the reconstruction of the ancestral language of the whole trunk, the Proto-Tupí. In this first phase of the project, a database was created between three languages of the Tupari family, using original data collected by MPEG researchers Moore, Galucio and van der Voort, and the languages were compared using the historical-comparative method (Ieffers and Lehiste, 1986, Gabas 2001). The database contains 627 words in Mekéns, 260 in Ayuru and 636 in Tupari. The corpus used in the comparison is 532 lexical items, among which 140 cognate words were found. The comparison of the results with Moore and Galucio's data allows us to confirm the rules proposed in the 1993 reconstruction: nasal consonant de-nasalization before oral vowel, deafening of obstruents (occlusive consonants) in Mekéns and Ayuru, simplification of labiovelar consonants through delabialization or loss of the velar feature, permanence of the pre-consonantal (*h) only in Tupari, and disambiguation of African consonants in Ayuru and Makurap