Kipeá language
| Kipeá | |
|---|---|
| Kariri | |
.jpg?lang=en) | |
| Native to | Brazil |
| Region | Itapicuru River, northeastern Bahia[1] |
| Ethnicity | Kiriri people (2,806 Quiriris[2]) |
| Extinct | mid-20th century[citation needed] |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | None (mis) |
| Glottolog | kipe1235 |
Kipeá (or Kiriri) is an extinct Karirian language of Brazil. It is sometimes considered a dialect of a single Kariri language. A short grammatical treatise is available.[3][4]
Documentation and modern studies
Among the Kariri varieties, Kipeá is the best documented. There are two main sources for it, namely the Catecismo da doutrina christãa na lingua brasilica da nação kiriri and the Arte de grammatica da lingua brasilica da naçam kiriri, both composed by Italian Jesuit Luís Vincêncio Mamiani.[5][6] The Catecismo was published in 1698 with a facsimile edition issued by the Biblioteca Nacional in 1942, while the Arte was published in 1699 with a new edition released in 1877 also by the Biblioteca Nacional, and a German translation by C. von der Gabelentz in 1852 under the title Grammatik der Kiriri-Sprache.[6][a]
Jesuit João de Barros is said to have composed a catechism and a vocabulary of the language. Serafim Leite conjectured that the Arte and the Catecismo were in fact the work of Barros, merely studied and prepared for publication by Mamiani.[6] However, this assumption is considered unlikely, given what Mamiani himself states at the beginning of the Arte, where he writes he "did not deem it time wasted, nor an unnecessary occupation, but rather a very necessary one" to compose a grammar.[7] This is further supported by the testimonies of priests João Mateus Faletto and José Coelho, who granted approval for the publication of the work. Moreover, in the Catecismo Mamiani claims to have had "twelve years of experience with the language among the Indians".[8]
Lucien Adam published a comparative study of Dzubukuá, Kipeá, Pedra Branca, and Sabujá,[b] but his work is considered not to have brought any new contribution to the knowledge of Kipeá.[8] In 1965, Gilda M. Corrêa de Azevedo completed her master's thesis on it under the supervision of Aryon Rodrigues; it was the first one on an Indigenous language ever produced in Brazil. Later that year, however, the military regime's intervention at the University of Brasília led to the resignation of more than 200 professors, leaving only a few in the Department of Linguistics.[9]
Phonology
| Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Post- alveolar |
Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop | voiceless | p | t | ts | tʃ | k | ʔ |
| voiced | b | d | dz | dʒ | ɡ | ||
| Fricative | s | h | |||||
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | |||
| Approximant | w | ɾ | j | ||||
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | ɨ | u |
| Mid | e ẽ | o õ | |
| Open | æ æ̃ | a ã | ɑ̃ |
Grammar
The morphology of the Kipeá language is predominantly isolating and analytic, unusual for a language native to the Americas.[13]
Clauses with one-argument verbs show the verb–intransitive subject order, and those with two-argument verbs show verb–transitive (direct) object–transitive subject, where the transitive subject is marked by the ergative preposition no.[14]
Kipeá has prepositions but not postpositions. If an adposition relates to a pronoun, it may be prefixed to the adposition. Some adpositions have different allomorphs when they follow a pronoun or pronominal prefix.[15]
Notes and references
Notes
References
- ^ Azevedo 1965, p. II.
- ^ "Kiriri - Indigenous Peoples in Brazil". pib.socioambiental.org. Retrieved 2025-09-29.
- ^ Larsen, Thomas W. (1984-10-17). "Case Marking and Subjecthood in Kipeá Kirirí". Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 10: 189. doi:10.3765/bls.v10i0.1928. ISSN 2377-1666.
- ^ Azevedo 1965.
- ^ Rodrigues 1999, p. 170.
- ^ a b c Azevedo 1965, p. III.
- ^ Azevedo 1965, pp. III–IV.
- ^ a b Azevedo 1965, p. IV.
- ^ Seki 1999, p. 279.
- ^ Rodrigues 1999, p. 175.
- ^ a b Zwartjes 2011, p. 184.
- ^ Rodrigues 1999, p. 173.
- ^ "Feature 20A: Fusion of Selected Inflectional Formatives". WALS. Retrieved November 13, 2014.
- ^ a b c d e f Rodrigues 1999, p. 188.
- ^ Rodrigues 1999, p. 189.
Bibliography
- Adam, Lucien (1897). Matériaux pour servir à l'établissement d'une grammaire comparée des dialectes de la famille Kariri [Materials to serve for the establishment of a comparative grammar of the dialects of the Kariri family] (in French). Paris: Maisonneuve. Archived from the original on 21 May 2025.
- Azevedo, Gilda Maria Corrêa de (1965). Língua Kiriri: descrição do dialeto Kipeá [Kiriri language: description of the Kipeá dialect] (in Portuguese). Brasília: Universidade de Brasília. Archived from the original on 16 July 2025.
- Rodrigues, Aryon D. (1999). "Macro-Jê". In Dixon, R. M. W.; Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (eds.). The Amazonian Languages. Cambridge Language Surveys. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-57021-3. Archived from the original on 27 March 2025.
- Seki, Lucy (1999). "A Lingüística Indígena no Brasil" [The Indigenous Linguistics in Brazil]. D.E.L.T.A. (in Portuguese). 15 (special). doi:10.1590/S0102-44501999000300011. eISSN 1678-460X. ISSN 0102-4450. Archived from the original on 28 February 2024.
- Zwartjes, Otto (2011). Portuguese Missionary Grammars in Asia, Africa and Brazil, 1550–1800. Studies in the History of the Language Sciences. John Benjamins Publishing Company. doi:10.1075/sihols.117. ISBN 978-90-272-8325-2. ISSN 0304-0720. LCCN 2011033750.
Further reading
- Ribeiro, E. R. (2010). Tapuya connections: language contact in eastern Brazil. LIAMES: Línguas Indígenas Americanas, 9(1), 61-76. doi:10.20396/liames.v9i1.1463
External links
Media related to Kipeá language at Wikimedia Commons
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