draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

5.1.3 Cabral (1995)
Cabral’s (1995:372-383) re-analysis of the catechism fragment represents the first modern treatment
of this text, and indeed, the only modern treatment of any of the four Omagua ecclesiastical texts
other than our own. Cabral took Rivet’s (1910) text as the starting point for developing a phonemic
representation of the text, in much the same spirit as the phonemic re-interpretation we carry out
in the present work. Cabral’s analysis benefited from her fieldwork-based research on Brazilian
Kokama grammar, and she provides both morphemic segmentations and morpheme glosses for the
texts, as well as free translations.
Since Cabral’s re-analysis is the only other modern treatment of an Omagua ecclesiastical text,
we annotate the text presented below in some detail at those points where our analysis diverges
significantly from hers. In many cases, the divergences we remark on probably arise from the fact
that Cabral was relying on her analysis of modern Brazilian Kokama to parse the Old Omagua text.
Although modern Kokama and modern Omagua are closely related languages, they are not identical,
and the difference between modern Brazilian Kokama and Old Omagua is even greater. Cabral
also attempted to push the morphological segmentation as far as possible, in some cases yielding
segmentations that are, with the benefits of hindsight afforded by further work on the Kokama-
Kokamilla of Peru (Vallejos Yopán 2004, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2010a,b, 2012), Omagua (Michael et al.
in prep), and Proto-Omagua-Kokama (O’Hagan 2011; Wauters and O’Hagan 2011; O’Hagan and
Wauters 2012), clearly incorrect. It is important to point out, however, that despite these points,
Cabral’s analysis of this text constitutes a significant improvement over Rivet’s (1910) analysis.
5.2 Text of Catechism Fragment
(5.1) a. i. Icuata epe ta zupe, amititipa Dios?
ii. Icuata epe tazupe, amititipa Dios?
iii. ikuata epe tasupe, amititipa Dios?
ikua -ta 153 epe ta= =supe amiti =tipa Dios
know -caus 2pl 1sg.ms= =goal exst =interr God
close: ‘Teach me, does God exist?’
b. i. Amiti mura.
ii. Amiti mura.
iii. amiti muRa.
amiti muRa
exst 3sg.ms
close: ‘He exists.’
153 The use of ikuata here is unexpected. First, in modern Omagua, ikuata is best glossed as ‘tell’, and its use
presupposes that the recipient of the information related by the communicative action in question is unaware of
the state of affairs thereby related. This makes little sense in the context of a priest receiving answers to catechistic
questions. Rather, we would expect kumesa ‘say’ to be used, as it is in the full catechism (see (6.1a)). Second, the
argument structure that ikuata exhibits here would be incorrect for the modern language, and we strongly suspect
it to be incorrect for Old Omagua. In particular, the recipient of the information should be treated as the direct
object, not an oblique argument, as it is here. The sentence given here appears to extend the syntax of kumesa,
for which a recipient would be encoded with =supe (since the verb does not have a core recipient argument), to
ikuata. That the goal argument in ikuata should be encoded as a direct object follows from the fact that it is the
causativized form of ikua ‘know’.
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