Paumarí is an Arauan language

Arauan languages

Arawan is a family of languages spoken in western Brazil and Peru.-Family division:Arauan consists of 8 or 9 languages:...

 spoken in Brazil

Brazil

Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

 by about 700 people. It is spoken by the Paumari Indians, who call their language “Pamoari”. The word “Pamoari” has several different meanings in the Paumarí language: ‘man,’ ‘people,’ ‘human being,’ and ‘client.’ These multiple meanings stem from their different relationships with outsiders; presumably it means ‘human being’ when they refer to themselves to someone of ostensibly equal status, and ‘client’ when referring to their people among river traders and Portuguese speakers.

Increasingly, speakers of Arawan languages, particularly Paumarí (whom have had the most contact with non-natives) are beginning to speak Portuguese. The result, for many of the speakers in Paumarí, is a hybrid of Portuguese and Paumarí, incorporating vocabulary from both languages while retaining the syntax of neither (Chapman, a researcher from the Summer Institute of Linguistics, claims that, at the time of her arrival in 1964, all Paumarí spoke a mixture of Paumarí and Portuguese). Out of the Paumarí group that inhabits the Tapauá River, the youth, which makes up nearly a majority of the population, spoke only Portuguese in 1964. This ‘linguistic Creole’ tendency in the Paumarí language highlights exactly why languages such as Paumarí are endangered.

It is a largely head-marking language

Head-marking language

A head-marking language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads of the phrase in question, rather than the modifiers or dependents. In a noun phrase, the head is the main noun and the dependents are the...

 with unmarked VOS order and a ergative

Ergative

The term ergative is used in grammar in three different meanings:* Ergative case* Ergative-absolutive language* Ergative verb...

 alignment for marking of noun

Noun

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...

s combined with accusative marking of pronouns.

Paumarí has only two open word classes - nouns and verb

Verb

A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...

s. However, it also has numerous closed classes including fourteen adjective

Adjective

In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....

s, adposition

Adposition

Prepositions are a grammatically distinct class of words whose most central members characteristically express spatial relations or serve to mark various syntactic functions and semantic roles...

s, interjection

Interjection

In grammar, an interjection or exclamation is a word used to express an emotion or sentiment on the part of the speaker . Filled pauses such as uh, er, um are also considered interjections...

s, conjunctions and demonstratives. Paumarí nouns are elaborately divided into over one hundred possessed nouns and a larger number of free nouns. Furthermore, each free noun has grammatical gender

Grammatical gender

Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...

 - being either masculine or feminine, with feminine being the unmarked gender and indicated by the suffix

Suffix

In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...

 -ni.

Verb roots have a up to fifteen suffix positions, but all are only optionally filled. Most of these refer to location or aspect, plus a negative suffix -ra.

Phonology

Paumarí has a larger consonant inventory than most languages of the Amazon Basin, and is notable for featuring bilabial and coronal implosives

Implosive consonant

Implosive consonants are stops with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism. That is, the airstream is controlled by moving the glottis downward in addition to expelling air from the lungs. Therefore, unlike the purely glottalic ejective consonants, implosives can...

, which have been lost from other Arauan languages

Arauan languages

Arawan is a family of languages spoken in western Brazil and Peru.-Family division:Arauan consists of 8 or 9 languages:...

 but are reconstructed clearly for the protolanguage of the family. It is one of very few languages in the New World to contrast implosives with other voiced stop consonants: similar contrasts are known only for a few other Amazonian languages. However, it has a very simple vowel system with only three contrastive vowels, the back one of which can range from [o] to [u].

Consonants

		Bilabial	Alveolar	Palato-alveolar / Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...  and affricates Affricate consonant Affricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative rather than directly into the following vowel.- Samples :...	aspirated Aspiration (phonetics) In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ...		[tʰ]		[kʰ]
	plain	[p]	[t]	[t͡ʃ]	[k]	[ʔ]
	voiced Voice (phonetics) Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts. Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which the vocal cords vibrate...	[b]	[d]	[dʒ]	[ɡ]
	implosive Implosive consonant Implosive consonants are stops with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism. That is, the airstream is controlled by moving the glottis downward in addition to expelling air from the lungs. Therefore, unlike the purely glottalic ejective consonants, implosives can...	[ɓ]	[ɗ]
Fricatives Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...	voiceless	[f]	[s]			[h]
Nasals Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...	voiced	[m]	[n]
Flap Flap consonant In phonetics, a flap or tap is a type of consonantal sound, which is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator is thrown against another.-Contrast with stops and trills:...	voiced		[ɾ]
Approximants Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no...	voiced			[j]	[w]

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	[i]
Mid			[o]
Low		[a]

Paumarí syllable structure is limited to a ‘nuclear vowel’ V, which may or may not be preceded by a consonant (CV); this is consistent among all Arawan languages (Dixon(1999), 295). Often a sequence will contain two vowels, CVV, however, the length of the resulting syllable will often make a phonetic difference between the two vowels, and the syllable’s duration will correspond to the amount of vowels, reflecting a moraic structure also common in Japanese. Often in the Paumarí language, when an identical vowel occurs word-final and then word-initial in two sequential words, one of the two vowels will be dropped within the phrase.

Syntax

Paumarí tends to be a head-final language. Typically, in intransitive phrases (those without direct objects) the order is VS. The SV intransitive order also occurs, although only when the Subject is marked for informational prominence (the demonstrative (DEM) is occluded in such SV phrases). In transitive phrases, the word order is mainly SVO, in which the ergative case marking system tends to be used. The affix used for ergative marking is the suffix “-a”, and the object of the sentence is preceded by a word denoting a demonstrative case. These demonstrative case nouns are either “ada” for male, or “ida” for female. The gender and number of the object noun, not the subject, dictates the gender and number suffixes on the verb .

Two other word orders that occur in Paumarí transitive phrases are OVS and SOV. In these cases, the object is marked with a suffix denoting it as such (-ra) and is placed directly before the verb. In these cases, it is thought that the accusative system has taken over, as the subject of the sentence no longer receives the ergative suffix ‘-a’ and is free to occur at the beginning or end of the phrase (but not directly before the verb). This shows the split ergativity evident in Paumarí language – they employ the ergative system for some word orders and the accusative system for others. In the accusative phrases, the subject governs the gender, class, and number suffixes of the verb – in direct contrast to the ergative phrases.

Adjectives always follow the noun that they describe and if there is also a number in the clause, it follows the adjective (“Three big dogs” becomes “dogs big three”). The Paumarí language has very few words that act as adverbs, but several ways of changing other words into adverbs via affixes. Adverbs do not modify adjectives in the Paumarí language.

Morphology

Paumarí is primarily an agglutinative language, and primarily suffixing, although many prefixes are also used. Prefixes on verbs are usually reserved for obligatory pronoun incorporation, whereas verb suffixes denote many different things. There exist affixes, mainly suffixes, to denote gender, number, and noun classes in verbs. The appropriate affixes are added to the verb to agree with the sentence’s noun (either the Subject or Object depending on whether the ergative or accusative system are being used) in each case.

Portuguese Contact

There are some portions of the Paumarí language that have been irreversibly changed by Portuguese influence. For example, Paumarí use Portuguese narrative words such as dai “from there” and então “then” often in their speech. Also, Paumarí have difficulty expressing equality/inequality within their own language. At the time of the 1964 SIL arrival, they used the Portuguese word “mais” (more) in conjunction with adjectives to compare things and the researchers could not find anything in native Paumarí tongue that served the same function in their language. Often, root duplication serves as a way for the Paumarí to express that something is less like or becoming or trending towards another thing. This is an odd use of reduplication, as in many other languages, reduplication serves to strengthen the word; make it more immediate or intense. For adjectives, often the suffix –ki will be added to tag the word as descriptive. Reduplication of adjective roots denotes less of the description.

Stress Accent System

Dan Everett of the University of North Dakota has extensively studied the accent/stress system of the Paumarí and has claimed that the Paumarí’s accent system violates some of the most basic theories put forward by linguists with regards to stress systems. Paumarí has iambic feet, which means the accent tends towards the right, or latter, portion of the word or syllable set, and they are not weight-sensitive. Everett theorizes that stress placement and syllables in the Paumarí language are more exclusive from one another than many modern theories believe. Two types of accents are distinguished in Paumarí, primary stress and secondary stress. Primary stress is characterized by a sharp increase in intensity (volume) and by somewhat higher pitch, although the latter is difficult for non-speakers to distinguish and was found by digital analysis of sound wave of native speakers. Secondary stress in Paumarí is characterized by a slight increase in intensity and often an increase in syllable duration. The final syllable of a word always has one of the two of these and therefore is always somewhat stressed. The stress system starts at the final syllable and works its way to the left, or the beginning of the word, skipping every other syllable. In disyllabic words, the primary stress is placed on the final syllable. In polysyllabic words, the primary stress is assigned to the antepenult (third from last) syllable, and the last syllable is assigned secondary stress. If the polysyllabic word is five syllables or more, every odd syllable (leftward) from the antepenult syllable is also assigned secondary stress. Therefore, regardless of how many syllables a word has, the primary stress is always on the last or antepenult syllable. The beginning syllable for a word will only have primary stress if it is a three-syllable word, and will have secondary stress only if it contains an odd-number (5, 7, 9, etc.) of syllables.