Kipeá language

Kipeá (or Kiriri) is an extinct Karirian language or dialect of Brazil. A short grammatical treatise and a catechism were produced in 1698–1699 by the Italian Jesuit priest . It exhibits a verb–object–subject word order and an ergative–absolutive alignment, and is typologically analytic, using very few suffixes, which is unusual for the region it was historically spoken in. Modern-day descendents of the Kiriri people have used Kipeá, as well as in conjunction with its sister language/dialect Dzubukuá, as the basis for reviving their language.

History

Documentation Among the Kariri varieties, Kipeá is the best documented. There are two main sources for it, namely the and the , both composed by Mamiani. The was published in 1698 with a facsimile edition issued by the in 1942, while the was published in 1699 with a new edition released in 1877 also by the , and a German translation by C. von der Gabelentz in 1852 under the title .

Jesuit João de Barros is said to have composed a catechism and a vocabulary of the language. conjectured that the and the were in fact the work of Barros, merely studied and prepared for publication by Mamiani. However, this assumption is considered unlikely, given what Mamiani himself states at the beginning of the , where he writes he "did not deem it time wasted, nor an unnecessary occupation, but rather a very necessary one" to compose a grammar. This is further supported by the testimonies of priests João Mateus Faletto and José Coelho, who granted approval for the publication of the work. Moreover, in the , Mamiani claims to have had "twelve years of experience with the language among the Indians".

Modern studies Lucien Adam published a comparative study of Dzubukuá, Kipeá, Pedra Branca, and Sabujá in 1897, but his work is considered not to have brought any new contribution to the knowledge of Kipeá itself. In 1965, Gilda M. Corrêa de Azevedo completed her master's thesis on it under the supervision of Aryon Rodrigues; it was the first one on an Indigenous language ever produced in Brazil. Later that year, however, the military regime's intervention at the University of Brasília led to the resignation of more than 200 professors, leaving only a few in the Department of Linguistics.

Revival The Kariri-Xokó people of Porto Real do Colégio, Alagoas, have been engaged in language revival since 1989 of the Kipeá and Dzubukuá varieties of Kariri, though primarily relying on the latter. In doing this, they have combined lexical material from both varieties; Kipeá is better documented grammatically, and Mamiani's grammar of it had been used in language revival efforts.

Phonology and orthography According to Azevedo, there is no evidence that allows for reliable statements about the realization of the phonemes, since there are no oral sources, only written documents. She cautions against possible inaccuracies on Mamiani's part, given that he was a 17th-century missionary without specialized phonetic or linguistic training. Azevedo argues the phonological analysis presented in her work does not go beyond a "rudimentary interpretation" of the texts.

Consonants + Consonantal system of Kipeá (after ) Labial Dental Alveolar Alveo-palatal Velar Glottal Stop voiceless voiced ( ) Fricative Nasal Approximant

is more often transcribed with , although examples in which words are also written with can be found. Azevedo adopted the affricate instead of as the standard for the phoneme because it "fits perfectly within the symmetry of the phonemic system". She states the realization "would fluctuate" between and . Ribeiro disagrees with Azevedo's reanalysis, which proposes a contrast between and . He argues and occur without a preceding in only six words across the entire Kipeá corpus, three of which are "likely" loans and one an interjection, where sounds not found elsewhere in a language's phonemic inventory commonly appear. Ribeiro thus proposes that and represented allophones of a single phoneme.

Vowels + Vowel system of Kipeá Front Central Back Close Mid Open

Mamiani describes as "an intermediate vowel between A and E". Azevedo proposes , with the realizations and , the latter occurring in unstressed words, as in . Zwartjes, however, cautions that for both this intermediate vowel and its nasalized counterpart, there are other possible candidates, such as , , and , and states the information provided by Mamiani is not precise enough to allow for a definitive conclusion.

Orthography Mamiani admits only two diacritics in the theoretical introduction, the circumflex and the acute, but also employs the grave throughout his grammar. Zwartjes notes that, although the distinction between them is unclear, there was probably none at all, since on the same page one finds both and . Mamiani also occasionally uses the symbol , but provides no information regarding this diacritic. Seabra points out that an occurrence of in a Latin sentence ("") allows one to conclude the symbol was used in place of to save space in the line; indeed, the typesetter often employed the tilde to replace the letters "n" and "m" to fit the text into columns wide.

Syllable patterns and stress There are three syllable patterns in Kipeá: V, CV, and CɾV, with the first two being the most frequent. The CɾV pattern is rarer. All consonants, except , occur in initial position before a vowel, and all occur in medial position before a vowel; only , , and occur before . No consonant occurs in final position, except for , which appears in the interjections and – a usage that Azevedo considers to be an analogy with the spelling of the Portuguese interjections and . Vowels occur in initial, medial, and final positions, with some restrictions.

Stress in Kipeá is considered to have a "purely demarcative, phonemically non-relevant" function, as it regularly falls on the final syllable of the word. There are however some unstressed words that are interpreted as enclitics.

Grammar The morphology of the Kipeá language is predominantly isolating and analytic, unusual for a language native to the Americas.

Clauses with one-argument verbs show the verb–intransitive subject order, and those with two-argument verbs show verb–transitive (direct) object–transitive subject, where the transitive subject is marked by the ergative preposition .

Kipeá has prepositions but not postpositions. If an adposition relates to a pronoun, it may be prefixed to the adposition. Some adpositions have different allomorphs when they follow a pronoun or pronominal prefix.

Noun classifiers Nouns are not overtly marked for class in Kipeá. Instead, classifiers are attached to quantifiers, which are placed before the head noun, and adjectives describing "dimension, consistency and colour, according to the shape of the noun's referents", found after the noun. 12 classifier prefixes are found in Kipeá. +Kipeá noun classifiersglossClassifierhills, stools, dishes, foreheads, etc.birds, stones, stars, round objects (e.g. beads, fruit, eyes. etc.)liquids, riversclusters, bunchessticks, legs, wooden objectsropes, vines, threads, snakes, iron objects, bones, pointed thingsedible roots, holes, wells, mouths, fields, valleys, fenced spacesclothes, fabric, fursroads, conversations, speeches, storieshouses, arrows, containers, corncobs, living beings excluding birds, all otherwise unspecified nouns

Sample text Below is the Lord's Prayer in Kipeá, according to Luís Vincêncio Mamiani in his 1698 catechism:

Notes and references Notes

References

Bibliography

Kipeá language

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