draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

(5.2) a. i. Maraitipa Dios mura?
ii. Maraitipa Dios mura?
iii. maRaitipa Dios muRa?
maRai
what
=tipa Dios muRa
=interr God 3sg.ms
close: ‘What is God?’
b. i. Eguate mai ritama, aiquiara tuyuca ritama, upacatu maraincama mucui, yaguequetara,
guacutatara: yenenara semai viranu, muriai Dios mura.
ii. Eguatemai ritama, aiquiara tuyuca ritama, upacatu maraincamamucui, yaguequetara,
guacutatara: yenenarasemai viranu, muriai Dios mura.
iii. 1watimai Ritama, aikiaRa tuyuka Ritama, upakatu maRainkanamukui, yaw1k1taRa,
wakutataRa, yeneyaRasemai weRanu, muRiai Dios muRa.
1wati =mai Ritama aikiaRa tuyuka Ritama upa =katu
be.high.up =inact.nomz village dem.prox.ms 156 land village all =intsf
maRain 154 =kana =mukui yaw1k1 -taRa wakuta -taRa
thing =pl.ms =com make -act.nomz carry.in.arm -act.nomz
yene= yaRa =semai weRanu 155 muRia -i Dios muRa
1pl.incl= master =verid 157 coord thus -? 158 God 3sg.ms
close: ‘He who makes the high village, this land village and all things, he who
holds [us] in his arm, as well as our true master, thus is God.’
target: ‘The Creator of Heaven, Earth and all things, the protector, and our true
Lord as well, thus is God.’
154 Note that when maRai ‘thing’ is followed by =kana pl.ms in the ecclesiastical texts, an (orthographic)
appears between these two morphemes. We take this to be evidence that Old Omagua retained traces of the
nasality that was historically associated with the final vowels of these words, as attested in cognates in other
Tupí-Guaraní languages such as Tupinambá maRã ‘thing’ (Lemos Barbosa 1951:83). In modern Omagua, nasality
never surfaces in this word. We represent the form in question as maRain in the interlinearization.
155 The etymology of weRanu has confounded many authors, beginning with Adelung (1813:609-610). Hervás y Panduro
(1787a), Adelung (1813) and Rivet (1910) all translate it as ‘also’, but no author gives any obvious reason for
doing so. Cabral (1995:374) does not provide a gloss for this form. However, as we discuss in §2.3.6.1, weRanu has
clear Tupí-Guaraní cognates that justify it being glossed as ‘also’.
156 Our analysis of this form differs from Cabral (1995:374), who segments it as aikia + Ra ‘this’ + loc. Cabral’s
analysis is questionable for a number of reasons. First, there is no known locative Ra in Omagua (according to
our own work on the language) or in Kokama-Kokamilla (Cabral herself does not describe one, nor does Vallejos
Yopán (2010a:279-318). Second, morphemes with spatial semantics in Omagua are NP enclitics, and as such,
do not attach to prenominal elements such as demonstratives (as it does according to Cabral’s analysis), but
rather to the right edge of the entire NP (most typically the noun). And third, the demonstrative is invariably
aikiaRa in the ecclesiastical texts, even when there is no location expressed anywhere in the sentence, as is the
case here. Note that we reconstruct the masculine speech proximal demonstrative to Proto-Omagua-Kokama as
*aikia (cf., Omagua akia and Kokama-Kokamilla ikia (Vallejos Yopán 2010a:214)). We currently cannot account
for the presence of a final Ra in the Old Omagua form, and have found no obvious cognates in other Tupí-Guaraní
languages (e.g., see Jensen (1998:550-552)).
157 Here our analysis differs significantly from Cabral (1995:374), who segments =semai as se + mai ‘sweet’ + rel
‘sweet, who is sweet’. While this is a possible segmentation of this sequence of phonemes (i.e., Omagua see ‘be
sweet’ and =mai inact.nomz), we argue that the form that appears here is actually the monomorphemic veridical
marker =semai ’true, truly’. There are several pieces of evidence that support this conclusion. First, =semai
is cognate to the morpheme -tseme, found in varieties Kokama-Kokamilla spoken in Peru, which Vallejos Yopán
(2010a:269) describes as an emphatic marker. Second =semai is attested in these texts as appearing on elements
in which a construal of ’sweetness’ is implausible, such as numerals (see (5.10b)). Finally, in modern Omagua, see
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