A PHONOLOGICAL SKETCH of OMAGUA Clare S. Sandy And
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A PHONOLOGICAL SKETCH OF OMAGUA Clare S. Sandy and Zachary O'Hagan San Jose´ State University and University of California, Berkeley 1 1 Introduction This article presents a sketch of the segmental and prosodic phonology of Omagua, a highly endangered Tup´ı-Guaran´ılanguage of northwest Amazonia with two known living speakers as of February 2019.1 Omagua (ISO 639-3: omg), along with its more vital sister language Kukama-Kukamiria (cod) (Faust 1972; Vallejos 2016), descends from Proto-Omagua-Kukama (O'Hagan 2011, 2014, 2019, to appear; O'Hagan et al. 2013, 2016), a Tup´ı-Guaran´ılanguage that underwent significant lexical and gram- matical restructuring due to language contact. Cabral (1995, 2007, 2011) and Cabral Rodrigues (2003) have proposed that Proto-Omagua-Kukama (POK) arose on Jesuit mission settlements, although more recently it has been shown that POK must be of Pre-Columbian origin (Michael 2014). Both traditional comparative work (Lemle 1971; Rodrigues 1958, 1984/1985) and more recent computational phylogenetic work (Michael et al. 2015a) have shown that POK is most closely related to Tupinamb´a, an extinct language originally spoken along the Brazilian Atlantic coast (Anchieta 1595; Figueira 1687). In the Jesuit and colonial periods, speakers of Omagua were likely in regular contact with speakers of several unrelated languages, including, at the western edge of their territory, Masamae, Peba, Yagua (Payne 1985), Yameo (Espinosa P´erez1955) (Peba-Yaguan); M´a´ıh`ık`ı(Tukanoan); Iquito (Zaparoan); and, at the eastern edge, the extinct and entirely undocumented languages Yurimagua and Aisuari. Arawak and Panoan groups populated the uplands to the north and south, respectively. 2 Of particular typological interest in Omagua is the presence of a genderlect sys- tem (Rose 2015), in which formal distinctions in certain subparts of the grammar and lexicon are made based on the gender of the speaker.2 We use the terms male speech (ms) and female speech (fs) to mark these distinctions, which are found in the following contexts: plural marking (=kana ms, =na fs), demonstratives (akia prox, yuk´a dist, ms; amai prox, yuk´u dist, fs), locative adverbs, `thus' and `also', and personal pronouns. In the remainder of this section we briefly review the history of the Omagua, the current sociolinguistic situation (x1.1), and describe our methodology (x1.2). Sections 2 and 3 describe the consonant and vowel inventories, respectively. Section 4 describes syllable structure, x5 stress, x6 a minimum word requirement, and x7 postlexical phonological processes. 1.1 Omagua History and Sociolinguistic Situation At the time of European contact in 1542, the Omagua demographically dominated the banks of the Amazon River from the mouth of the Napo in Peru to the mouth of the Juru´ain Brazil (de Carvajal [1542]1934). Subsequent European expeditions in 1561 (Sim´on1861) and 1639 (de Acu~na[1641]1891) show that these territorial bound- aries remained relatively stable, although by the middle 17th century (de la Cruz [1653]1900) Omagua settlements had relocated to riverine islands, likely in response to severe population decreases brought on by European disease (Myers 1992; also 3 Newsom 1996, Porro 1981). In late 1685, the Jesuit Samuel Fritz began proselytizing among the Omagua, going on to found nearly 40 mission settlements (Sp. reducciones), one of which was christened San Joaqu´ınde Omaguas (Anonymous [1731]1922). How- ever, by the late 1690s, disease and increasing Portuguese slave raids had nearly erad- icated the remaining Omaguas. Some fled into the forest in an area that would come to be controlled by Carmelite missionaries and the Portuguese monarchy (near S~ao Paulo de Oliven¸ca,Brazil), while others fled upriver, ultimately settling in a com- munity on the left bank of the Amazon River by the middle 1720s (see Michael and O'Hagan 2016 for details). This community, also known as San Joaqu´ınde Omaguas, became a prominent Jesuit settlement until the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 (Uri- arte [1776]1986). Around 1880, as part of the large-scale dislocation of indigenous people due to plantation-style labor and the rubber boom, the former Jesuit settlement was aban- doned, and San Joaqu´ınde Omaguas, along with most of the Omaguas there, moved slightly upriver to its current site. Others remained downriver, in areas that would be- come the modern-day communities of Paucarpata, Porvenir, Santa Catalina, Lucero, San Salvador de Omaguas, and Varadero de Omaguas, among others. However, by the 1920s, large-scale language shift had already begun to take hold in San Joaqu´ın de Omaguas, following some forty years of increased contact with and immigration of outsiders into the community and the later establishment of a Spanish-speaking school. As a result, children born in the 1930s seem to have been only passive first 4 language speakers of Omagua, and, unlike those born in the 1910s and earlier, used Spanish as a dominant language. Most monolingual speakers of Omagua seem to have passed away by the 1960s, although some lived as late as the 1990s. Many fully bilingual speakers lived to the end of the 20th century, using Omagua regularly as an in-group language among relatives and familiar community residents of the same age, and Spanish with younger individuals and outsiders. The youngest living speaker of Omagua was born in 1932, and today no one employs the language as a primary means of communication. Nevertheless, documentation has made important strides in reducing extreme social stigmatization of the language, and the speakers with whom we have worked show impressive degrees of fluency given the situation of language shift described here. 1.2 Data and Methods The data on which this paper is based was collected by the authors from some of the last remaining speakers of Omagua as part of the broader documentation of Omagua carried out by linguists at the University of California, Berkeley. Fieldwork was conducted in the community of San Joaqu´ınde Omaguas, located on the left bank of the Amazon River, as well as in the urban center of Iquitos, both in the Loreto region of Peru, from June to August 2010, June to August 2011, and in July 2013. The four primary consultants were Alicia Huan´ıoCabudivo (b. 1932), Lino Huan´ıoCabudivo (1936{2017), Amelia Huanaquiri Tuisima (b. 1930), and Arnaldo Huanaquiri Tuisima 5 (1933{2016). Documentary materials are archived in an open-access format with the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages and available online.3 Data was collected primarily in the form of targeted elicitation of lexical items and grammatical and phonological features, and, to a lesser extent, spontaneous speech and texts, due to the situation of language attrition. All sessions were recorded as WAV files using a Zoom H4N Handy recorder with professional-quality lapel microphones. Elicita- tion was conducted in Spanish, glosses were determined jointly by the consultants and researchers, and English translations of glosses were provided by the researchers. Lexical items elicited in isolation were also elicted in sentences to be sure of their phonological behavior in context, and were checked with multiple consultants for consistency. The text corpus was supplemented by recordings made by Edinson Hua- mancayo Curi and speaker Manuel Cabudivo Tuisima (1925{2010) in a pilot phase in 2004; these were transcribed and translated with our consultants. All lexical items and texts were entered into and parsed using FieldWorks Language Explorer.4 We made every effort to record as many speakers as possible, and worked with our principal consultants intensively (six days per week, between three and six hours per day), getting a real sense of their strengths and weaknesses over time. For instance, one consultant retained an excellent command of the morphology of the language but was unable to fluently narrate a story; another was the opposite. Despite experiencing different stages of attrition of a language that most of them had not used regularly 6 in over 50 years | and that had never been a dominant language for any of them | the phonologies of the various speakers were consistent. We recognize that, due to the paucity of speakers and the fieldwork setting (e.g., less-than-ideal recording conditions), this research cannot and does not attempt to make statistically significant phonetic generalizations. Rather, we present the most complete and accurate picture of the phonology of this moribund language possible at this moment in time. In addition to contributing to the documentation of Omagua, this work builds on an increasing amount of detailed research on the phonologies of languages of the region (Fleck 2003; Michael 2011; Michael Farmer submitted; Michael et al. 2013; Olawsky 2006; Overall 2007; Vallejos 2013; Thiesen Weber 2012). 2 Consonants In this section, we provide a consonant inventory, followed by evidence for contrasts between consonants, descriptions of consonant distributions, and allophonic processes. 2.1 Consonant Inventory Omagua distinguishes thirteen consonants at five places of articulation (Table 1), in addition to /n/, a nasal underspecified for place of articulation. There are no glottal consonants or voicing contrasts. We enclose /ts/ and /tS/ in parentheses to indicate that they occur in a small number of lexical items (see x2.3). Consonants do not generally form codas, with four exceptions: glides, analyzed as 7 Bilabial Alveolar Alveo-Palatal Palatal Velar Stop p t k kw Nasal m n n Fricative s S Affricate (ts) (tS) Flap R Glide w j TABLE 1: Omagua Consonant Phonemes underlyingly vocalic (x4.2); surface [N], analyzed as /n/(x2.4); a handful of mostly borrowed words, analyzed with underlying codas (Table 12); and cases of vowel syn- cope in fast speech (x7.2). 2.2 Stops and Flap Omagua contrasts simplex stops at three places of articulation, in addition to a labial- ized velar stop and an alveolar flap.5 Table 2 shows contrasts between these segments in both initial and medial positions.