Siko's Stories

Introduction

Siko

Siko¹ was a great storyteller, and he knew a lot of old stories. He not only knew many old Jarawara stories, but his repertory was also enriched by his wife, Amoro, who was originally from a neighboring ethnic group, the Wa Yafis; so he told many of their stories as well. One of Siko's distinctives as a storyteller was his ability to use sound effects. Sound effects are common in Jarawara stories, and many of them can be seen as regular sound words in the language; but Siko used them like no other, and many of his sound effects were undoubtedly original with him.

Siko was born in about 1923, reportedly at Assado, a former village on the Faha Biri (Rio Preto) river.² His first wife was Isi Biriki, and they had three daughters. One daughter, Inarinaha, did not survive childhood, but their other two daughters, Bata Kani and Morena, married and had children. Both are dead now. Bata Kani's son and his children and grandchildren live in the Jarawara villages. Morena married a Brazilian and lived outside of the Jarawara area, and her children and grandchildren live in Estação, a community on the Purus River, and in the nearby town of Lábrea.

Siko and Amoro

After Isi Biriki died, Siko married Amoro, who was one of a group of Wa Yafis that fled their village when they were attacked by Apurinãs, probably in the 1940's (Maizza 2009:182). Some fled to Jamamadi villages and others to Jarawara villages, and many Jarawaras today are their descendents. Amoro and Siko did not have any children, but Amoro had been widowed twice and had children and grandchildren from her first two marriages (the first with a Wa Yafi and the second with a Jarawara). Siko died in 1994 in Casa Nova village, and Amoro died in 1999, also in Casa Nova.

Siko was a first (parallel) cousin of Yowao, another prolific storyteller, who died in 2002. Some of Yowao's stories have been published in volumes 1 and 2 of the Jarawara texts I have made available online (Vogel 2012; 2019), and I am presently working on a volume of his stories that will include many more.

The stories in this volume have almost all been previously published in the two volumes of texts that I have mentioned, except for five stories,³ which have not been previously published. A good number of revisions have been made in the analyses presented in the previously published stories.

I began recording the texts in 1987. The texts were originally recorded on cassette tape, and transcribed with the help of a number of literate Jarawaras. Many remaining questions were resolved in sessions with Okomobi and Bibiri, both of whom have a true gift for language. The recordings were made in Casa Nova village.⁴ The texts were interlinearized using Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx).⁵

I make a practice of getting written permission from Jarawara authors of texts to use the texts for non-commercial purposes, but I did not start doing this until after Siko was already dead; so for these texts the permissions were signed by relatives of his.

These texts should not be seen as polished written texts. All of the texts are originally oral texts, none are originally written. The recordings are unedited, and the transcriptions reflect the recordings as exactly as possible. This means, for example, that false starts, repetitions of words, and occasional grammatical mistakes are retained in the transcription. Some of these are discussed in footnotes, but most are not.

The texts are divided into two groups, personal experience narratives and traditional stories. With very few exceptions, Siko's personal experience stories are told in the third person, and not in the first person.⁶ That is, they are not his own personal experiences, but events involving people he knew personally, or at least people he knew his connection to. For example, a number of Siko's stories are about his grandfather Bono Wiyo, who apparently died before Siko was born. The traditional stories, in contrast, involve characters in the more distant past.

The following format is used for each text. First a free translation is given of the text, and this is followed by the text in interlinear format. The first line of the interlinear format is orthographic. The second line represents underlying forms⁷ and morphemic divisions, the third line morpheme-by-morpheme glosses, the fourth line word classes, and the last line a sentence by sentence translation. The sentence by sentence translation is as literal as possible, in contrast to the free translation at the beginning of each text, which seeks to express the meaning of the text in more natural English. In the free translation, some implied information is added, participant reference (e.g. choice of a pronoun or an NP) follows the conventions of English, and some repetition is omitted.

Note that some Jarawara sentences are very long, because of the way many "dependent clauses" are sometimes strung together. For more information on dependent clauses, see Dixon (2004) and Vogel (2009).

The Jarawara orthography is pretty much phonemic and transparent, except that long vowels are not distinguished. For an explanation of the orthography, see my Jarawara-English Dictionary, which is online. In the line for underlying forms, the symbol I is used to represent a morphophoneme that is realized as i or e, depending on the number of moras preceding in the word, i if the preceding number of moras is even and e if the preceding number of moras is odd (cf. Dixon (2004:40ff)).

In the orthographic line I have used punctuation in the normal ways, with one significant exception. Whereas the normal use of commas is to indicate grammatical pauses, I have used commas to indicate phonetic pauses. Some readers may find this awkward, since the pauses are often in the middle of a phrase and are not for any grammatical reason – speakers often pause just to think of what to say next – but I wanted to register this information, and could not think of any other way to do it.

The following abbreviations are used:

1 - first person

FP - far past

O - direct object

1EX - first person plural exclusive

F.PL - plural and feminine

OC - O-construction

1IN - first person plural inclusive

fpropn - feminine proper noun

PFUT - past in future

2 - second person

FUT - future

PL - plural (i.e. two or more)

3 - third person

HAB - habitual

pn - inalienably possessed noun

adj - adjective

HYPOTH - hypothetical

POSS - possessor/possessive

ADJU - adjunct

IMMED - immediate

post - postposition

adv - adverb

IMP - imperative

pron - pronoun

antip - antipassive

INT - intentive

prt - particle

AUX - auxiliary

interj - interjection

RECIP - reciprocal

BKG - backgrounding

interrog - interrogative pro-form

REFL - reflexive

CAUS - causative

IP - immediate past

REP - reported

CH - change of state

IRR - irrealis

result - resultative

COMPL - complement

LIST - list construction

RP - recent past

COMIT - comitative

LOC - locative

S - subject

conj - conjunction

+M - masculine agreement

SEC - secondary verb

CONT - continuative

mpropn - masculine proper noun

SG - singular

CNTRFACT - contrafactual

N - non-eyewitness evidentiality

sp - species

CQ - content question

NEG - negative

sound - sound word

DECL - declarative

NEG.LIST - negative list item

SUPER - superlative

DEM - demonstrative

nf - feminine noun

vc - copular verb

DIST - distal

NFIN - non-finite

vd - ditransitive verb

DISTR - distributive

nm - masculine noun

vi - intransitive verb

DUP - reduplication

NOM - nominalized clause

voc - vocative

E - eyewitness evidentiality

NPQ - noun phrase question

vt - transitive verb

+F - feminine agreement

Those wishing more information on the syntax, morphology, and phonology of Jarawara may consult R.M.W. Dixon’s (2004) grammar, The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia, and the introduction to my Jarawara-English Dictionary.

I welcome any comments or questions, and I can be reached at [email protected].

Footnotes

1 Siko's Jarawara name was Bai Abono, but all his relatives used his name in Portugese, Chico Fernandes. Some said Siko Fenani, but most just said Siko.

2 For a map of present and former Jarawara villages, see Maizza (2009:192).

3 The previously unpublished stories are "Many Battles" in the second section, and the following in the first section: "Weko", "The Brazilians Killed Kawi Yife", "Five Yimas Came", and "The Aba Fish of the Curiá River".

4 The approximately 230 speakers of Jarawara live on the Jamamadi-Jarawara reservation in the municipality of Lábrea in the state of Amazonas, Brazil.

5 FLEx is available for free download from the SIL International site (sil.org).

6 The one exception is "They Made a Bark Canoe". Also, "Towisawa Rowi" is a marginal exception, in that Siko refers to the fact that Towisawa told the story to him.

7 The second line is intended to represent underlying phonological forms, including long vowels, which are not represented in the Jarawara orthography. However, in some cases the underlying form is more morphological than it is phonological. There are vowel alternations of Jarawara verbs that are reflexes of grammatical processes, namely gender agreement and the derivation of non-finite forms. Where an underlying morphological form can be determined, I use it instead of all the forms that result from grammatical processes. For example, the suffix -ma 'back' typically has only this one form in contexts where there is no gender agreement, and typically has a -ma/-me alternation in other contexts to show feminine and masculine agreement, respectively. I use -ma as the underlying form in all contexts, but show gender agreement on the second line ('-back+F' or '-back+M') in all contexts where the form indicates the normal gender agreement found in finite clauses.

Similarly, a non-finite form is derived by changing a final a to i, but I use the form with a as the underlying form even when it is a non-finite form, and I indicate that the form is non-finite by adding NFIN. For example, I give the underlying form of fawa 'to drink', which is fawi, as fawa.NFIN. One of the advantages of doing things this way is that a search for all the tokens of a particular morpheme is made much easier. Also, this way it is possible to indicate that a form is non-finite even if there is no a to i change, which is the case for verbs ending with o, i, or e.

In Jarawara there is a construction called a "list construction", and one of the exponents of this construction is the obligatory absence of gender agreement in the verb stem. Whenever this is the case, I indicate this on the second line. For example, when fawa is in a list construction, this is indicated on the second line as fawa.LIST. This way, the reader knows the reason that a at the end of the verb does not indicate feminine agreement. (Since the items in a list construction can sometimes be NPs, the same notation is used to mark these.)

There is one more construction that is marked on the second line, i.e. nominalized clauses. These verb forms are marked with NOM, along with the gender when this is indicated in the form, i.e. NOM+F or NOM+M. This gender agreement is thus distinguished from the normal gender agreement of finite clauses.

References

Dixon, R.M.W. 2004. The Jarawara language of Southern Amazonia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Maizza, Fabiana. 2009. Cosmografia de um mundo perigoso: espaço e relações de afinidade entre os Jarawara da Amazônia. PhD dissertation, Universidade de São Paulo.

Vogel, Alan. 2009. Covert tense in Jarawara. Linguistic Discovery 7:43-105.
http://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/xmlpage/1/article/333

Vogel, Alan. 2012. Jarawara interlinear texts vol. 1.
https://www.silbrazil.org/resources/jarawara_interlinear_texts_vol_1

Vogel, Alan. 2016. Jarawara-English dictionary.
https://www.silbrazil.org/resources/archives/72031

Vogel, Alan. 2019. Jarawara interlinear texts, vol. 2.
https://www.silbrazil.org/resources/jarawara_interlinear_texts_vol_2