Reconstrução lexical e fonológica do Proto-Mondé

Abstract

The Mondé family, one of the ten languages that belong to the Tupi linguistic trunk, is formed by three languages, one of which is made up of four dialects. The pioneering results of research carried out in recent years and the recent discovery of the Salamãy language, one of the three that form the family, make it possible to reconstruct a phonological and lexical inventory of the mother tongue, Proto-Mondé, whose temporal depth is believed to reach two thousand years. The present study aims at realizing this inventory, in such a way that we may, in later works, favor the reconstruction of the Proto-Tupi, the mother tongue of all the languages that compose the current ten families of the trunk in question. To this end, we collected lexical data already collected in other works, such as Guerra's (2004) dissertation on the Suruí language. New items were audio recorded by Denny Moore and Maria Campé, an Indian from the Salamãy tribe. We submitted the Salamãy data to a computer program specialized in auditory phonetics for analysis, through which we reached conclusions about the tonal system of the language, indispensable for the reconstruction process. We know, for example, that Surui presents two phonologically distinctive tones, high and low, in short or prolonged syllables, which seems to be the case also in Salamãy. The reconstruction of vowels and consonants in Proto-Mondé is simpler than the reconstruction of pitch and vowel prolongation. It was possible to identify diachronic processes of nasal consonant voicing, palatalization, and changes in the liquid consonants, r and I. An interesting issue is the correspondence between dentals and laterals. A significant finding was the existence of the dissimilation rule that applies in high tone sequences and seems to be ancient.