Guarani language

History

While Guarani, in its Classical form, was the only language spoken in the expansive missionary territories, Paraguayan Guarani has its roots outside of the Jesuit Reductions.

Modern scholarship has shown that Guarani was always the primary language of colonial Paraguay, both inside and outside the reductions. Following the expulsion of the Jesuits in the 18th century, the residents of the reductions gradually migrated north and west towards Asunción, a demographic shift that brought about a decidedly one-sided shift away from the Jesuit dialect that the missionaries had curated in the southern and eastern territories of the colony.

By and large, the Guarani of the Jesuits shied away from direct phonological loans from Spanish. Instead, the missionaries relied on the agglutinative nature of the language to formulate new precise translations or calque terms from Guarani morphemes. This process often led the Jesuits to employ complicated, highly synthetic terms to convey European concepts. By contrast, the Guarani spoken outside of the missions was characterized by a free, unregulated flow of Hispanicisms; frequently, Spanish words and phrases were simply incorporated into Guarani with minimal phonological adaptation.

A good example of that phenomenon is found in the word "communion". The Jesuits, using their agglutinative strategy, rendered this word "Tupârahava", a calque based on the word "Tupâ", meaning God. In modern Paraguayan Guarani, the same word is rendered "komuño".

Following the out-migration from the reductions, these two distinct dialects of Guarani came into extensive contact for the first time. The vast majority of speakers abandoned the less colloquial, highly regulated Jesuit variant in favor of the variety that evolved from actual use by speakers in Paraguay. This contemporary form of spoken Guarani is known as Jopará, meaning "mixture" in Guarani.

Political status

Widely spoken, Paraguayan Guarani has nevertheless been repressed by Paraguayan governments throughout most of its history since independence. It was prohibited in state schools for over 100 years. However, populists often used pride in the language to excite nationalistic fervor and promote a narrative of social unity.

During the autocratic regime of Alfredo Stroessner, his Colorado Party used the language to appeal to common Paraguayans although Stroessner himself never gave an address in Guarani. Upon the advent of Paraguayan democracy in 1992, Guarani was established in the new constitution as a language equal to Spanish.

Jopará, the mixture of Spanish and Guarani, is spoken by an estimated 90% of the population of Paraguay. Code-switching between the two languages takes place on a spectrum in which more Spanish is used for official and business-related matters, and more Guarani is used in art and in everyday life.

Guarani is also an official language of Bolivia and of Corrientes Province in Argentina.

Phonology

Guarani syllables consist of a consonant plus a vowel or a vowel alone; syllables ending in a consonant or containing two or more consonants together do not occur. This is represented as (C)V.

In the below table, the IPA value is shown. The orthography is shown in angle brackets below, if different.

Consonants

The voiced consonants have oral allophones (left) before oral vowels, and nasal allophones (right) before nasal vowels. The oral allophones of the voiced stops are prenasalized.

Some linguists additionally include the phoneme (written ), though it is considered controversial as it appears exclusively in the suffix -nte. Nonetheless, it is typically included in the Guarani alphabet.

Oral may be realized as , , , , , depending on the dialect, but the nasal allophone is always .

The palato-alveolar sibilant is often articulated closer to alveolo-palatal .

The dorsal fricative is in free variation between and .

The approximant may be nasalized and partially labialized , and may also be realized as a fricative or a fully labialized approximant .

From Spanish loanwords, what had originally been a typical alveolar trill (written ) became a retroflex sibilant . The alveolar lateral also entered Guarani phonology through Spanish loanwords, but is now a typical phoneme (unlike , which is considered marginal). The consonants , , and may also appear in loanwords.

All syllables are open, viz. CV or V, ending in a vowel.

Glottal stop

The glottal stop, called puso in Guarani, is only written between vowels, but occurs phonetically before vowel-initial words. Because of this, some words have several glottal stops near each other that consequently undergo a number of different dissimilation techniques. For example, "I drink water" ʼaʼyʼu is pronounced hayʼu. This suggests that irregularity in verb forms derives from regular sound change processes in the history of Guarani. There also seems to be some degree of variation between how much the glottal stop is dropped (for example aruʼuka aruuka aruka for "I bring"). It is possible that word-internal glottal stops may have been retained from fossilized compounds where the second component was a vowel-initial (and therefore glottal stop–initial) root.

Vowels

correspond more or less to the Spanish and IPA equivalents, although sometimes the open-mid allophones , are used more frequently. The grapheme represents the vowel . Considering nasality, the vowel system is perfectly symmetrical, each oral vowel having a nasal counterpart (most systems with nasals have fewer nasals than orals).

Nasal harmony

Guarani displays an unusual degree of nasal harmony. A nasal syllable consists of a nasal vowel, and if the consonant is voiced, it takes its nasal allophone. If a stressed syllable is nasal, the nasality spreads in both directions until it bumps up against a stressed syllable that is oral. This includes affixes, postpositions, and compounding. Voiceless consonants do not have nasal allophones, but they do not interrupt the spread of nasality.

For example,

: → : →

However, a second stressed syllable, with an oral vowel, will not become nasalized: : → : →

That is, for a word with a single stressed vowel, all voiced segments will be either oral or nasal, while voiceless consonants are unaffected, as in oral vs nasal .

Orthography

Main article: Guarani alphabet}}{{unref section

Grammar

Guarani is a highly agglutinative language, often classified as polysynthetic. It is a fluid-S type active language, and it has been classified as a 6th class language in Milewski's typology. It uses subject–verb–object (SVO) word order usually, but object–verb when the subject is not specified.

Nouns

Guarani exhibits nominal tense: past, expressed with -kue, and future, expressed with -rã. For example, tetã ruvichakue translates to "ex-president" while tetã ruvicharã translates to "president-elect." The past morpheme -kue is often translated as "ex-", "former", "abandoned", "what was once", or "one-time". These morphemes can even be combined to express the idea of something that was going to be but did not end up happening. So for example, paʼirãgue is "a person who studied to be a priest but didn't actually finish", or rather, "the ex-future priest". Some nouns use -re instead of -kue and others use -guã instead of -rã.

Pronouns

Guarani distinguishes between inclusive and exclusive pronouns of the first person plural.

Reflexive pronoun: je: ahecha ("I look"), ajehecha ("I look at myself")

Conjugation

Guarani stems can be divided into a number of conjugation classes, which are called areal (with the subclass aireal) and chendal. The names for these classes stem from the names of the prefixes for 1st and 2nd person singular.

The areal conjugation is used to convey that the participant is actively involved, whereas the chendal conjugation is used to convey that the participant is the undergoer. However, the areal conjugation is also used if an intransitive verb expresses an event as opposed to a state, for example manó 'die', and even with a verb such as ké 'sleep'. In addition, all borrowed Spanish verbs are adopted as areal as opposed to borrowed adjectives, which take chendal. Intransitive verbs can take either conjugation, transitive verbs normally take areal, but can take chendal for habitual readings. Nouns can also be conjugated, but only as chendal. This conveys a predicative possessive reading.

Furthermore, the conjugations vary slightly according to the stem being oral or nasal.

Negation

Negation is indicated by a circumfix n(d)(V)-...-(r)i in Guarani. The preverbal portion of the circumfix is nd- for oral bases and n- for nasal bases. For 2nd person singular, an epenthetic -e- is inserted before the base, for 1st person plural inclusive, an epenthetic -a- is inserted.

The postverbal portion is -ri for bases ending in -i, and -i for all others. However, in spoken Guarani, the -ri portion of the circumfix is frequently omitted for bases ending in -i.

The negation can be used in all tenses, but for future or irrealis reference, the normal tense marking is replaced by moʼã, resulting in n(d)(V)-base-moʼã-i as in Ndajapomoʼãi, "I won't do it".

There are also other negatives, such as: ani, ỹhỹ, nahániri, naumbre, naʼanga.

Tense and aspect morphemes

• -ramo: marks extreme proximity of the action, often translating to "just barely": Oguahẽramo, "He just barely arrived".
• -kuri: marks proximity of the action. Haʼukuri, "I just ate" (ha'u irregular first person singular form of u, "to eat"). It can also be used after a pronoun, as in ha che kuri, che poʼa, "and about what happened to me, I was lucky".
• -vaʼekue: indicates a fact that occurred long ago and asserts that it's really true. Okañyvaʼekue, "he/she went missing a long time ago".
• -raʼe: tells that the speaker was doubtful before but he's sure at the moment he speaks. Nde rejoguaraʼe peteĩ taʼangambyry pyahu, "so then you bought a new television after all".
• -rakaʼe: expresses the uncertainty of a perfect-aspect fact. Peẽ peikorakaʼe Asunción-pe, "I think you lived in Asunción for a while". Nevertheless, nowadays this morpheme has lost some of its meaning, having a correspondence with raʼe and vaʼekue. The verb form without suffixes at all is a present somewhat aorist: Upe ára resẽ reho mombyry, "that day you got out and you went far".
• -ta: is a future of immediate happening, it's also used as authoritarian imperative. Oujeýta ag̃aite, "he/she'll come back soon".
• -ma: has the meaning of "already". Ajapóma, "I already did it". These two suffixes can be added together: ahátama, "I'm already going".
• -vaʼerã: indicates something not imminent or something that must be done for social or moral reasons, in this case corresponding to the German modal verb sollen. Péa ojejapovaʼerã, "that must be done".
• -ne: indicates something that probably will happen or something the speaker imagines that is happening. It correlates in a certain way with the subjunctive of Spanish. Mitãnguéra ág̃a og̃uahéne hógape, "the children are probably coming home now".
• -hína, -ína after nasal words: continual action at the moment of speaking, present and pluperfect continuous or emphatic. Rojatapyhína, "we're making fire"; che haʼehína, "it's ME!".
• -vo: it has a subtle difference with -hína in which -vo indicates not necessarily what's being done at the moment of speaking. ambaʼapóvo, "I'm working (not necessarily now)".
• -pota: indicates proximity immediately before the start of the process. Ajukapota, "I'm near the point at which I will start to kill" or "I'm just about to kill". (A particular sandhi rule is applied here: if the verbs ends in -po, the suffix changes to -mbota; ajapombota, "I'll do it right now").
• -pa: indicates emphatically that a process has all finished. Amboparapa pe ogyke, "I painted the wall completely". This suffix can be joined with -ma, making up -páma: ñande jaikuaapáma nde remimoʼã, "now we came to know all your thought".
• -mi: customary action in the past: Oumi, "He used to come a lot". These are unstressed suffixes: -ta, -ma, -ne, -vo, -mi; so the stress goes upon the last syllable of the verb or the last stressed syllable.

Other verbal morphemes

• -se: desiderative suffix: (Che) añemoaranduse, "I want to study".
• te-: desiderative prefix: Ahasa, "I pass", Tahasa, "I would like to pass." te- is the underlying form. It is similar to the negative in that it has the same vowel alternations and deletions, depending on the person marker on the verb.

Spanish loans in Guarani

The close and prolonged contact Spanish and Guarani have experienced has resulted in many Guarani words of Spanish origin. Many of these loans were for things or concepts unknown to the New World prior to Spanish colonization. Examples are seen below:

Guarani loans in English

English has adopted a small number of words from Guarani (or perhaps the related Tupi) via Portuguese, mostly the names of animals or plants. "Jaguar" comes from jaguarete and "piraña" comes from pira aña ("tooth fish" Tupi: pirá 'fish', aña 'tooth'). Other words are: "agouti" from akuti (which means "individual that eats standing up"), "tapir" from tapira, "coati" from kuatĩ (which means "what is scratched, or gashed; what has stripes across the body"), "açaí" from ĩwasaʼi ("[fruit that] cries or expels water"), "warrah" from aguará meaning "fox", and "margay" from mbarakaja'y meaning "small cat". Jacaranda (y-acã-ratã, "that which has a firm core or heartwood" or "hard-headed"), guarana and manioc are words of Guarani or Tupi–Guarani origin. Ipecacuanha (the name of a medicinal drug) comes from a homonymous Tupi–Guarani name that can be rendered as ipe-kaa-guené, meaning a creeping plant that makes one vomit. "Cougar" is borrowed from Guarani guazu ara.

The name of Paraguay is itself a Guarani word, as is the name of Uruguay. However, the exact meaning of either placename is subject to varied interpretations. (See: List of country-name etymologies.)

Example text

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Guarani: :Mayma yvypóra ou ko yvy ári iñapytyʼyre ha eteĩcha tekoruvicharenda ha akatúape jeguerekópe; ha ikatu rupi oikuaa añetéva ha añeteʼyva, iporãva ha ivaíva, tekotevẽ pehenguéicha oiko oñondivekuéra. :

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English: :All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Literature

A more modern translation of the whole Bible into Guarani is known as Ñandejara Ñeʼẽ.

In 2019, Jehovah's Witnesses released the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures in Guarani, both in print and online.

Recently a series of novels in Guarani have been published:

• Kalaito Pombero (Tadeo Zarratea, 1981)
• Poreʼỹ rape (Hugo Centurión, 2016)
• Tatukua (Arnaldo Casco Villalba, 2017)

Institutions

• Guarani Language and Culture Athenaeum
• Yvy Marãeʼỹ Foundation

Notes

Bibliography

Sources

References

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30. [[Teodoro Fernandes Sampaio. Teodoro Sampaio]], [https://bdor.sibi.ufrj.br/handle/doc/429 O tupi na geografia nacional], p. 308
31. [[Teodoro Fernandes Sampaio. Teodoro Sampaio]], [https://bdor.sibi.ufrj.br/handle/doc/429 O tupi na geografia nacional], p. 263
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42. (20 August 2019). "Jehovah's Witnesses Release New World Translation in Guarani". Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania.
43. "¿Orekópa umi testígo de Jehová ibíblia tee?". Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania.
44. "Ñandejára Ñeʼẽ La Biblia". Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania.