Cubeo Grammar

Book excerpt: The Cubeo people live principally along the Vaupés, Cuduyarí, and Querarí Rivers in the northwestern Amazon River Basin. Although the Cubeos have had contact with people outside their communities since the sixteenth century, their language and culture have remained largely intact. In this fifth volume in the series of Colombia language studies, the reader gains an overview of Cubeo phonology and morphophonemics, word classes, clause structure, and subordination. The text is richly supplemented with examples. The various affixes presented in the text are listed in the first appendix with their glosses and a reference to the sections in which the affixes are discussed. In the second appendix, the practical orthography is summarized. This grammar is especially interesting for linguists studying languages of the Tuconoan language family. The distinctive features of Cubeo grammar are the extensive system of classifiers for nouns and their modifiers, the evidential system for verbs indicating the source or validity of the information communicated, and a basic division of all verbs into two categories-stative and dynamic.