Reconstrução do Proto-Tupari: Revisão e Ampliação

Abstract

The Proto-Tupari language family, a Tupi trunk, is composed of the Ayuru, Akunsu, Makurap, Mekens (or Sakurabiat) and Tupari languages, whose synchronic similarities point to the same ancestry. This project aims to enlarge the corpus of the 5 languages of the Tupari family in the first version of the project and thus revise the reconstruction of the Prato-language of this family (MOORE AND GALUCIO, 1993). In this diachronic perspective, the Tupari family is important mainly because of its temporal depth and the number of languages spoken today, and it may, for example, strongly contribute to the reconstitution of the Proto-Tupi. We used as sources for the research the existing comparative database; audio files on Makurap and Ayuru languages provided by the Linguistics Department of the Emílio Goeldi Museum; audio recording and transcription in Akunsu language (GABAS Jr., 2004) and lexical items from the Mekcns database (GALUCIO). In this phase of the subproject, the phonetic transcription of 137 lexical items from the Ayuru language and 380 vocabulary items from Makurap was carried out. We also obtained a total of 173 new words from McKens and 82 from Akunsu. These data were entered and organized in the Excel database, which has 54 completed lexical items in all 05 languages of the family, 212 completed vocabulary items in at least 4 languages, 133 completed vocabulary items in 3 languages, and 294 word pairs in at least 2 of the languages. With these data, the number of cognates within the family was expanded considerably, which enabled the verification of sound correspondences and the reconstruction of proto-phonemes.