Arte verbal e música na língua Gavião de Rondônia: metodologia para estudar e documentar a fala tocada com instrumentos musicais

Abstract

Resumo: Em uma língua com tom e prolongamento distintivos, como Gavião de Rondônia, a primeira questão sobre a fala tocada com instrumentos musicais é a relação entre as melodias e a fonologia suprassegmental das palavras correspondentes na fala cantada e na fala normal. A forma cantada serve para aprender e explicar os toques musicais. Ela é influenciada pelos recursos fonológicos da forma falada e pelos recursos musicais da forma instrumental, sendo intermediária entre as duas. Esta arte é executada com vários instrumentos musicais tradicionais na cultura Gavião de Rondônia. O papel da fala cantada instrumental é artístico, para acompanhar festas, e também prático, para ajudar a manter o patrimônio oral de uma cultura não escrita. Esta prática representa um patrimônio sociocultural do substrato tradicional das culturas da Amazônia, pouco estudado e ameaçado de extinção. Na Terra Indígena Igarapé Lourdes, usamos uma metodologia original para documentar este fenômeno nos instrumentos musicais identificados como 'falantes' ou 'cantantes' pelos colaboradores Gavião. As sessões de gravação e de transcrição necessárias para esse tipo de trabalho foram explicadas aqui. Elas revelaram a relação de iconicidade acústica que existe entre as palavras e a música. A análise linguística permite entender a natureza fonética e fonológica da iconicidade.Palavras-chave: Gavião de Rondônia. Música. Instrumentos musicais. Fala instrumental. Fala cantada. Tom da fala. Abstract:In a language with distinctive tone and length, such as Gavião of Rondônia, the first question about speech played by musical instruments is the relation between the melodies and the super-segmental phonology of the corresponding words in sung speech and in normal speech. The sung speech is useful for learning and explaining the musical notes. It is influenced by the phonological possibilities of the spoken form and by the musical possibilities of the instrumental form, being intermediate between the two. This art is performed with various Gavião traditional musical instruments. The role of the instrumental sung speech is artistic and also practical, to help to maintain the oral heritage. This practice represents a little-studied and threatened cultural heritage of the traditional substratum of the cultures of Amazonia. On the Indigenous Reserve Igarapé Lourdes we used an original methodology to document this phenomenon in the musical instruments which the Gavião collaborators identified as 'speaking' or 'singing'. The recording and transcription sessions necessary for this type of research will be explained here. They show the relation of acoustic iconicity which exists between the words and the music. Linguistic analysis makes it possible to understand the phonetic and phonological nature of the iconicity.

A Flute, Musical Bows and Bamboo Clarinets that “Speak” in the Amazon Rainforest; Speech and Music in the Gavião Language of Rondônia

“…This distinction between speaking mode and singing mode of the drums also exists in Amazonia, and it has been mentioned for example in the culture of the Bora (Thiesen, 1969;Meyer et al, 2012;Seifart et al, 2018). For the Gavião of Rondônia, an equivalent distinction exists between whistled speech, which serves to imitate spoken speech in the case of long-distance communication, and instrumental speech, which imitates songs presented in this study (and see also Meyer and Moore, 2013;Moore and Meyer, 2014;Meyer, 2015).…”

“…Indeed, according to the few existing surveys of the literature about instrumental speech and language surrogates with musical instruments (Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok, 1976;Bagemihl, 1988), the phenomenon of downstep was not found until recently in instrumental speech forms emulating a tone language. Up to now, as far as we know, it was described first in Serepewa Luth playing Akan language (Nketia, 1994), in Gavião instrumental speech forms (Meyer and Moore, 2013) and, more recently, in Yoruba talking drums (Akinbo, 2020), as well as in Northern Toussain Balafon (Struthers-Young, 2021) and sometimes in singing Balafon forms of Seenku language (McPherson and James, in press). Some recent results analyzing the statistical correspondence between tones of Mooré language and the way they are beaten with the traditional royal Bendré drum also suggests congruence with the surface terracing properties of the tonal Mooré system (Dentel and Meyer, 2020) but confirmation with detailed linguistic analysis remains to be done.…”

“…Such instrumental emulation of sung speech has been little studied in Latin America, though the Amazonian basin is one of the rare areas with a great diversity of indigenous languages still expressed in this manner. Some publications indicate that this particular practice was observed in the past in the region (Whiffen, 1915;Izikovitz, 1935), while other more recent references show that it still exists in different forms at least in the cultures of the Bora (Thiesen, 1969;Meyer et al, 2012), Cinta Larga (Ermel, 2004), Gavião (Mindlin et al, 2001;Meyer and Moore, 2013;Moore and Meyer, 2014), Kuikuro (Franchetto and Montagnani, 2011), Pirahã (Everett, 1983), Wakuenai (Hill, 1993), andAikanã (van der Voort, 2016).…”

“…Three other steps were: (1) storing the data in two professional linguistic archives [one international (Meyer, 2014) and one national (Moore and Meyer, 2015)], (2) editing video documents for the Gavião villages to return the data to the community in a ready-to-use form (edited documents on CDs, DVDs, pen drives, printed forms that can be used in families, schools, associations), and (3) making the results of the study primarily accessible both locally to the Gavião community-in accordance with the fieldwork authorizations delivered (see next section "Ethics and Permits")-and nationally to the Brazilian community by publishing them in Portuguese (except young Gavião children and very old people, all speak some Portuguese) (Meyer and Moore, 2013). These steps were important because these singing Gavião musical instruments represent a sociocultural patrimony threatened by extinction.…”

Estruturas interrogativas polares e informacionais na língua Zoró (família linguística Mondé, tronco Tupí)

“…O presente trabalho de pesquisa se justifica pela urgência de estudos sistemáticos referentes a essa língua indígena, principalmente porque não há trabalhos linguísticos aprofundados a seu respeito. Os trabalhos acerca das línguas desta família linguística podem ser vistos em W. Bontkes (1978), Meer (1981Meer ( , 1982Meer ( , 1983Meer ( , 1985, Moore (1984Moore ( , 1985Moore ( , 1989Moore ( , 1995Moore ( , 1997Moore ( , 1999Moore ( , 2002Moore ( , 2005Moore ( , 2006Moore ( , 2009Moore ( , 2012Moore ( , 2018, W. Bontkes e Dooley (1985), C. Bontkes (1985), Stute (1985Stute ( , 1987, Tressmann (2000), Ribeiro (2000), Guerra (2004), Rodrigues (2011), Meyer (2012), Meyer e Moore (2013), Silva (2013), Cabral et al (2014), Suruí (2016), Sona-Gavião (2019), Cinta-Larga (2019), entre outros.…”