draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

‘Portuguese, to the church!’
original: ‘¡Portugués, a la iglesia!’
(Uriarte [1776]1986:243)
8.2 Part II, Section 82
In August 1757, Uriarte is summoned to a house in San Joaquín where a young Omagua man named
Manuel has hanged himself. Uriarte, who does not initially suspect suicide, is struck by a comment
made by the young man’s grieving mother: “‘Se habría acordado que otros hartos parientes se
mataban en el monte”’ (Uriarte [1776]1986:253). 265 To get to the bottom of the matter, Uriarte
asks the question in (8.2a). The mother responds in (8.2b). In the end Uriarte denounces the
suicide, indicating to the family that the man will not be buried in the church, and that they may
throw his body in the river.
(8.2) a. i. Aiquara gue ca agua rati-ti ayucarann?
ii. Aiquara gueca agua ratiti ayuca rann?
iii. aikiaRa w1ka awa Ratiti ayuka Ranu?
aikiaRa w1ka 266 awa Ra= titi ayuka Ranu 267
dem.prox.ms be.strong person 3sg.ms= be.alone kill 268 3pl.ms
‘Did this strong man kill himself?’
b. i. Roaya amua pua zui nunanuzenom.
ii. Roaya amua puazui nunanuzenom.
iii. Roaya amua puasui R[a]umanusenuni.
Roaya
neg
amua
other
pua =sui Ra= 269 umanu =senuni
hand =abl 3sg.ms= die =purp
‘So that he wouldn’t die from another hand.’
(Uriarte [1776]1986:253)
The Omagua in (8.2) exhibits a number of grammatical inconsistencies, and unfortunately,
the in-text translation that appears following each of these two passages does not appear to be
264 This word appears to have been adopted by several distinct linguistic groups by the middle of the 18th century
as an ethnonym for the Portuguese, and is also attested in a mid-18th-century grammar of Secoya (a Tukanoan
language) (see Cipolletti (1992:191)). Uriarte comments, with regard to this form, “los blancos carayoas (así
entienden, portugueses)” (Uriarte [1776]1986:242). The modern Omagua term for a white man is mai.
265 Translation (ours): “‘He must have remembered that so many other relatives killed each other in the forest’.”
266 Based on Omagua and the other ecclesiastical text we would expect the stative verb w1ka ‘be strong’ to be
nominalized with =mai here, as stative verbs must be nominalized in order to function as nominal modifiers.
267 See footnote 162.
268 In modern Omagua, ayuka means ‘hit’, though it is clear from cognates in other Tupí-Guaraní languages that
Proto-Omagua-Kokama *ayuka meant ‘kill’. Synchronically, ‘kill’ is umanuta (i.e., umanu ‘die’ and -ta caus).
269 Here we change to R and insert a. Our alteration is motivated by the deduction that the subject must be third
person, since we assume it to be coreferential with the subject of the preceding sentence (see main body discussion).
The lack of a final vowel in Ra= in the original text is presumably due to an instance of heteromorphemic vowel
hiatus resolution (a trait of fast speech), which is unusual in the ecclesiastical texts (see footnote 129).
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