Jorá (Hora) is a possibly extinct Tupi–Guaraní language of Bolivia. It is closely related to Sirionó and Yuqui and is a member of Group II. Its speakers were exterminated in a genocide perpetrated against them in the mid-20th century, and survivors of the Jorá do not use the language. Only 165 entries, including words and short sentences, were documented of the language. As a consequence, little of its grammatical structure is known.
History The Jorá people and language were never numerically large. In the 1940s, the Austrian anthropologist found out that the Jorá were being "hunted like animals" in a "systematic genocide". Previously, the Jorá had lived around near the town of Baures, inhabited by the Baure people, who feared their attacks. The Baure say they felt threatened by the Jorá and were therefore justified in their killings. The remaining Jorá were captured, "exposed like in a human zoo", and adopted by local families or sold into slavery, and the last speaker of their language is reported to have died in 1963, although the German anthropologist found five speakers as late as 1974. By 1995, only five Jorá remained. In 2002, Mily Crevels said that Jorá was "most probably extinct". The remaining descendants of the Jorá do not bring up their memories, even if asked. In one case, a Jorá woman who had been found orphaned as a child next to the dead bodies of her parents had been repeatedly asked to elicit some vocabulary of the Jorá language.
Documentation The Jorá language is known solely from various vocabularies, mainly collected by non-linguists, totaling 165 "items, words, and short sentences"; the first was collected by Hanke and published in 1959, another was collected by François-Xavier Béghin in 1951 and published in 1980, and secondary data was collected in 2009 and 2011 from Baure people who had lived with the Jorá in the 1940s and 1950s.
Classification Jorá is a Tupi–Guarani language belonging to Group II of the family, within a subgroup with Sirionó and Yuqui. It has, in some classifications, been grouped as a dialect of Sirionó.
Phonology
Vowels Despite the fact that it is unattested in the corpus, the vowel was reported to have been much used by the Jorá, according to the Baure who remembered characteristics of Jorá. This vowel has been completely lost from Proto-Tupi-Guarani in Yuki and swapped with in Sirionó. It is thus assumed that was simply not distinguished by the collectors of the data.
Morphology Due to the poor attestation of Jorá, very little of the morphology can be identified of the language.
Person marking A few personal or possessive markers may be postulated for Jorá:
+Personal prefixes in JoráJorá / / , ?? / ? /
Tense–aspect–mood The optative marker may be identified in Jorá:
Modifiers Modifiers in Jorá follow the noun, as is typical for languages of Group II of Tupi–Guarani:
Augmentative The augmentative suffix in Jorá is found to be productive, and derives from Proto-Tupi-Guarani * 'big':
Reflexive The reflexive prefix in Jorá is , identical to that of Sirionó.
Vocabulary +Swadesh list for JoráNumberJorá24; 10; 192023262733; 34; 35; 374146; 50; 52; 545557596267; 70727480818283869197; 98;
References