A Description of the Sound System of Misiones Mbya

Abstract

The Sound System of Misiones Mbya de Paula, Matias N. Misiones Mbya is an indigenous language of South America spoken by the Mbya people in the Province of Misiones, Argentina. Although there are several studies in the literature about the Brazilian variety of this language, the linguistic information available about Misiones Mbya is extremely scarce. In this thesis I present a segmental analysis of the language (individual vowels and consonants) and a prosodic analysis of nasal harmony based on field data collected in three different communities in Misiones. The segmental analysis shows that this variety is very similar to the Brazilian variety of the language with only a few exceptions. The prosodic analysis of nasal harmony indicates that nasality fades with distance. It is also shown that some methods for carrying out acoustic analysis of nasality can yield results which can be confounded with stress.

"Ingeniero como vos": An analysis of the Mbyá-Guaraní Practices Associated with Engineering Design

“…They are also known to possess a wealth of resource management, extraordinary craftsmanship skills, build entire communities and water irrigation systems, and unquestionably hold a great amount of native scientific, including astronomical, knowledge [3]. There is, however, limited research that describes the language [8] and few studies describe transliterations processes in the community.…”