Yucuna

Last Updated: 2019-06-28

Background

Language Family: Arawakan / Maipuran / Northern Maipuran / Upper Amazon / Western Nawiki / Yucuna

• Yucuna is spoken in southern Colombia.

Phonology

Consonants

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p pʰ	t tʰ			k	ʔ
Affricates			tʃ
Fricatives		s				h
Nasals	m	n		ɲ
Flaps		ɾ
Approximants	w	l		j
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are plain, whereas those on the right are aspirated.

Vowels

• Although vowel nasalization is contrastive in a few rare cases, overall it is not considered a phonemic feature (Schauer and Schauer 1967, 66).
• Adjacent vowels do not form diphthongs (Schauer and Schauer 1967, 67).
• Stress is denoted by accented vowels; however, we do not account for stress, so accented vowels will be transcribed to their plain representations.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Alphabet

• Orthographies disagree slightly at a few points; older, more Spanish-influenced texts use ⟨hu, c, qu⟩ where newer orthographies tend to use ⟨w, k, k⟩ respectively. Based on the Crúbadán corpus, both patterns are still in wide usage, so I have included rules for both.

Grapheme	Phoneme
a	/a/
c	/k/
e	/e/
’	/ʔ/
i	/i/
j	/h/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
ñ	/ɲ/
o	/o/
p	/p/
r	/ɾ/
s	/s/
t	/t/
u	/u/
w	/w/
y	/j/
Digraph
ch	/tʃ/
hu	/w/
ph	/pʰ/
qu	/k/
th	/tʰ/

Syllable Structure

• Yucuna has a syllable structure of (C)V(C) (Schauer and Schauer 1967, 66–67).
  • The only consonants that appear in syllable codas are /n/ and /h/.

Lenition Rules

• In some words, /pʰ/ spirantizes to [ɸ] (Schauer and Schauer 1967, 64; Schauer et al. 2005, 15).
• Many speakers debuccalize /s/ to [h] (Schauer et al. 2005, 15).
• Word-initial /j/ is sometimes deleted (ibid.).

Misc. Rules

• /k/ labializes to [kʷ] after /u/, and palatalizes to [kʲ] after /i/ (Schauer and Schauer 1967, 64).
• /k/ and [kʰ] exist in free variation in some words (ibid.).
• /n/ assimilates to the place of following velars (Schauer and Schauer 1967, 65).
• Before consonants, /h/ is realized as [x] (ibid.).
• Word-final vowels nasalize in syllables of the pattern V or hV (Schauer and Schauer 1967, 66; Schauer et al. 2005, 15).
• Epenthesis of [ʔ] occurs intervocalically (Schauer et al. 2005, 15).

References

Schauer, Stanley, and Junia Schauer. 1967. “Yucuna Phonemics.” In Phonemic Systems of Colombian Languages, edited by Benjamin F. Elson, 61–72. Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Schauer, Stanley, Junia Schauer, Eladio Yucuna, and Walter Yucuna. 2005. Meke Kemakánaka Puraáka’aloji Wapura’akó Chu, Eyaá Karíwana Chu: Diccionario Bilingüe Yukuna-Español Español-Yukuna. Bogotá: Editorial Fundación para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Marginados.