Historical-Ecological Influences on the Word for Cacao in Ka'apor  

Oleh:

Balee, William

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Anthropological Linguistics (ada di JSTOR) vol. 45 no. 3 (Mar. 2003), page 259-280.
Fulltext: Vol. 45, No. 3 , pp. 259-280.pdf (2.96MB)

Isi artikel

Factors of historical ecology seem to have affected plant nomen- clature in Ka'apor, a Tupi-Guarani language of eastern Amazonia, specifically the term for cacao. Several languages in at least three different subgroups of Tupi-Guarani have terms for a widespread nondomesticated species of cacao as well as for domesticated cacao that are superficially similar to reconstructed Mesoamerican terms for domesticated cacao. Ka'apor seems to have borrowed with phonologically conventional methods a term for cacao. Such a borrowing is counterintuitive because cacao was a preexisting plant of Amazonia and it was evidently not significant in aboriginal Ka'apor culture or economy. After the term had been borrowed by Spanish from a Mesoamerican donor language, it arguably followed this path: from Spanish to Portuguese, from Portuguese to Lingua Geral Amazonica (a Tupian creole spoken widely in the colonial Amazon region at a time when cacao was its major export crop) and from there to Ka'apor. In contrast, an observed similarity of the cacao terms in several other Tupi-Guarani languages to Mesoamerican terms for cacao does not seem to be the result of borrowing from Lingua Geral Amaz6nica, but rather of an autoch- thonous linguistic process in Amazonia. The borrowing of an ultimately Meso- american term for cacao by Ka'apor but not by other Tupi-Guarani groups supplies evidence of intricate contact between Ka'apor society and colonial Luso-Brazilian society of the eighteenth century. The economic and ecological significance of the cacao export sector of the eighteenth-century colonial Ama- zon when comprehended together with Lingua Geral Amaz6nica as the contact language helps illuminate nuances of Ka'apor vocabulary regarding natural things, the history of Ka'apor migrations, and close connections of the Ka'apor to the geographically distant Wayapi people.

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