Philological evidence for phonemic affricates and diachronic debuccalization in Early Terena (Arawak)

2019

Folia Linguistica

The goals of the present paper are: to improve the reconstruction of Proto-Mojeño (PM) by reconstructing a synchronic morphophonological alternation; to provide a clearer picture of the relations between PM and some of its closest relatives and to better understand the historical development of the Trinitario dialect, arguably the least conservative of the attested varieties of Mojeño. I show here that an antecedent stage of PM, Pre-PM, was subject to a contextual merger (primary split or split-merger) of *k and *s, yielding a morphophonological alternation *k ~ *s in PM. Apparent exceptions to the Pre-PM change *k>s provide evidence for the reconstruction of a non-palatalizing contextual vowel, possibly *ɨ, that was merged with *i in PM and with e in Terena, possibly PM’s closest relative. A preliminary comparison of certain verb stem formatives and deverbal nominalizers in PM and Terena is also presented. Finally, I show that a context-dependent development involving k in the Trinitario dialect, this time a secondary split yielding the fricative ç, resulted in alternations k ~ ç, thus creating a second, diachronically separable layer of palatalization/coronalization in the phonology of Trinitario.

The diachrony of velar coronalization in Mojeño (Arawakan)

2019

Folia Linguistica

The historical phonology of Paunaka (Arawakan)

Bol. Mus. Para. Emílio Goeldi. Ciênc. hum.

2018

Self Cite

This paper applies the comparative method to unravel the historical development of the segmental phonology of Paunaka, an Arawakan language of Bolivia. Although the Paunaka vowel system features a single back rounded vowel, it is rather simple to show that it derives from a system with two back rounded qualities *u and *o, but that the former segment shifted to a high central unrounded vowel ɨ. The language has lost *r unconditionally, implying that Paunaka items with r are probable loanwords. Paunaka underewent a spirantization of *ts, thus merging this affricate with the fricative *s. Although Paunaka shares a coronalization of *k > s with Proto-Mojeño, most of the phonological developments that affected Paunaka are either recurrent in the Arawakan language family or only superficially similar to developments in related languages, and thus provide little weight as evidence for subgrouping. An Appendix is also included, with 105 etymologies matching Paunaka lexical and grammatical morphemes with their cognates in Proto-Mojeño, the two extant Mojeño dialects (Ignaciano and Trinitario) and Terena.

Demorphologization of the proto-arawakan privative *ma- in Terena

LIAMES: Ling. Indig. Am.

2019

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This paper discusses the etymology of two lexical items of Terena, an Arawakan language from southwestern Brazil. Etymologization of the nouns mojénoti ‘orphan’ and moʃêu ‘barren, sterile’ shows that they preserve traces of the Proto-Arawakan Privative prefix *ma-, now demorphologized as part of synchronically unanalyzable roots. Since PA *ma- appears as mo- in Pre-Terena, Proto-Mojeño and Baure, the present work also provides evidence for the shared development *a > o, of still unclear conditioning, for the Bolívia-Paraná subgroup of the Arawakan language family, improving on an earlier formulation by Payne (1991). Other developments directly related to the comparative equations supporting each etymology are also discussed. A direct implication of these findings is that the hypothesis that PA *ma- > o- in Terena, advanced by Danielsen, Dunn & Muysken (2011), can be safely rejected.