Reflections on 'Yurimagua'
This brief post summarizes some curious similarities between the
Proto-Omagua-Kokama word *tsuɾema
'poison' (cf. Omagua suɾɪma,
Kokama
tsuɾima),
the colonial era ethnonym 'Yurimagua', the name of a Kubeo (Eastern Tukanoan) sib, and the modern-day
Brazilian designation for the Amazon River between the Peruvian
border and the Rio Negro, namely 'Solimões'. The post is inspired
by the following passage from Porro (1983:24-25).
'"A mais conhecida e belicosa nação de todo o rio Amazonas, que atemorizava a esquadra portuguesa em sua primeira entrada, e que é a de Yoriman" (Acuña, 1874:118) aparece, em meados do século XVII, com os nomes de Culiman em Rojas, Yoriman em Acuña, Joriman em Laureano de la Cruz e Sorimões em Heriarte (Rojas, 1880-89:443; Acuña 1874:118-119; Cruz, 1900:109-110; Heriarte, 1975:184). A última forma, em sua corruptela Solimões, iria se fixar no português a partir do fim do século, inclusive para designar o curso do Amazonas acima do rio Negro.'
Amended to this passage is the following footnote (ibid.:25).
'Solimões significando para alguns autores rio dos venenos nada mais é que uma curiosa convergência lingüística: solimão, do latim sublimatum, era o nome popular do sublimato corrosivo (bicloreto de mercúrio) ou "qualquer poção venenosa ou letifera" que os eruditos do século XVIII associaram às flechas evenenadas de algumas tribos do rio Amazonas.'
Now, a first approximation is to say that Proto-Omagua-Kokama (POK) *tsuɾema is a Portuguese loanword, but – barring borrowing – why should it reconstruct to the proto-language, which was clearly spoken well before the arrival of Europeans (Michael to appear). (That said, there are clear Portuguese loans in at least Omagua, e.g., ʃapɪwa 'hat' (cf. Port. chapeu), so it seems we should keep the borrowing possibility open.) Relatedly, it is noteworthy that POK *tsuɾema has no known cognates in other Tupí-Guaraní languages, so it is in fact either a loan from Portuguese or from another indigenous South American language.
Second, three of the four mentions of this ethnonym that Porro cites come from men (Acuña, Heriarte, Rojas) describing the same voyage, that of Pedro Teixeira, in 1636, although only Acuña was attached to the voyage itself; Heriarte's account was published significantly later than the others, in 1662. Acuña and Rojas were Spaniards, while Heriarte was a Portuguese (see Fernandes and Gomes Filho (2014) and Newsom (1996) for more details). Laureano de la Cruz, a Spaniard, was in the region extensively between 1647 and 1649 (de la Cruz 1900[1653]). Thus we have the forms Culiman, Yoriman, and Joriman from Spaniards, and Sorimões from a Portuguese. Only the latter closely resembles the Portuguese word for 'poison' (i.e., with an initial alveolar fricative and vowel qualities in the final syllable that suggest a singular form solimão). This smacks to me, then, of a folk etymology on the part of a native Portuguese speaker, as Porro himself hints at. But if it's a folk etymology, then why should such a similar word mean 'poison' in Omagua and Kokama (assuming of course that it is a loan)?
To this end it
is useful to point out that, among Kubeo sibs, there is one with the name yuremawa.
Furthermore, it is know that some Arawak groups that lived on the
Amazon and lower Rio Negro in the colonial period fled into the
Rio Negro headwaters and ultimately incorporated into the Kubeo (Santos-Granero 2002:34-35).
Chacon (p.c.) indicates that yuremawa is decomposable into yurema 'boa' + -wa, an animate plural, that the root is a borrowing from an Arawak language, perhaps Curripaco, and that the sib in question used to speak an Arawak language.
I would like to simply throw out the possibility that POK *tsuɾema is a borrowing from an Arawak language, perhaps Yurimagua itself, that either at or posterior to the time of borrowing came to mean something like 'venom', thence denoting any venomous or poisonous substance. Whether the Kubeo yuremawa are actual descendants of the colonial-era Yurimagua is a separate question that I will not address here.
Lastly, I want to mention that the ethnonym Yurimagua may also be decomposable as yurema 'boa' + *awa, the POK word for 'person, people'. The likelihood of this is perhaps increased by the fact that, according to the Jesuit missionary Samuel Fritz, the Yurimagua revered the boa as a God-like figure, a feature that would presumably have been salient to Omagua speakers. Under this account, 'Yurimagua' would have been the Omagua designation for the Yurimagua. Furthermore, if Yurimagua is the source language for yurema, this lends some credence to the idea that Yurimagua was an Arawak language, which makes good geographic sense. Unfortunately there are no records of Yurimagua whatsoever.
References:
de la Cruz, Laureno. 1900[1653]. Nuevo descubrimiento del río de Marañón llamado de las Amazonas, hecho por la religión de San Francisco, año de 1651 ... escrito por la obediencia de los superiores en Madrid, año de 1653. Madrid: La Irradiación.
Fernandes, Maria Luiza and Gregório Ferreira Gomes Filho. 2014. A expedição de Pedro Teixeira e a "descoberta" do Rio Branco. Revista Territórios y Fronteiras 7(1):147-164.
Michael, Lev. to appear. On the Pre-Columbian Origin of Proto-Omagua-Kokama. Journal of Language Contact.
Newsom, Linda A. 1996. Between Orellana and Acuña: A Lost Century in the History of the North-West Amazon. Bulletin de l'Institut Francais d'Études Andines 25:203-231.
Porro, Antonio. 1983. Os solimões ou jurimaguas: Território, migracões e comércio intertribal. Revista do Museo Paulista 29:23-38.
Santos-Granero, Fernando. 2002. The Arawakan Matrix: Ethos, Language, and History in Native South America. In Jonathan D. Hill and Fernando Santos-Granero, eds., Comparative Arawakan Histories: Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in Amazonia, pp. 25-50. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
'"A mais conhecida e belicosa nação de todo o rio Amazonas, que atemorizava a esquadra portuguesa em sua primeira entrada, e que é a de Yoriman" (Acuña, 1874:118) aparece, em meados do século XVII, com os nomes de Culiman em Rojas, Yoriman em Acuña, Joriman em Laureano de la Cruz e Sorimões em Heriarte (Rojas, 1880-89:443; Acuña 1874:118-119; Cruz, 1900:109-110; Heriarte, 1975:184). A última forma, em sua corruptela Solimões, iria se fixar no português a partir do fim do século, inclusive para designar o curso do Amazonas acima do rio Negro.'
Amended to this passage is the following footnote (ibid.:25).
'Solimões significando para alguns autores rio dos venenos nada mais é que uma curiosa convergência lingüística: solimão, do latim sublimatum, era o nome popular do sublimato corrosivo (bicloreto de mercúrio) ou "qualquer poção venenosa ou letifera" que os eruditos do século XVIII associaram às flechas evenenadas de algumas tribos do rio Amazonas.'
Now, a first approximation is to say that Proto-Omagua-Kokama (POK) *tsuɾema is a Portuguese loanword, but – barring borrowing – why should it reconstruct to the proto-language, which was clearly spoken well before the arrival of Europeans (Michael to appear). (That said, there are clear Portuguese loans in at least Omagua, e.g., ʃapɪwa 'hat' (cf. Port. chapeu), so it seems we should keep the borrowing possibility open.) Relatedly, it is noteworthy that POK *tsuɾema has no known cognates in other Tupí-Guaraní languages, so it is in fact either a loan from Portuguese or from another indigenous South American language.
Second, three of the four mentions of this ethnonym that Porro cites come from men (Acuña, Heriarte, Rojas) describing the same voyage, that of Pedro Teixeira, in 1636, although only Acuña was attached to the voyage itself; Heriarte's account was published significantly later than the others, in 1662. Acuña and Rojas were Spaniards, while Heriarte was a Portuguese (see Fernandes and Gomes Filho (2014) and Newsom (1996) for more details). Laureano de la Cruz, a Spaniard, was in the region extensively between 1647 and 1649 (de la Cruz 1900[1653]). Thus we have the forms Culiman, Yoriman, and Joriman from Spaniards, and Sorimões from a Portuguese. Only the latter closely resembles the Portuguese word for 'poison' (i.e., with an initial alveolar fricative and vowel qualities in the final syllable that suggest a singular form solimão). This smacks to me, then, of a folk etymology on the part of a native Portuguese speaker, as Porro himself hints at. But if it's a folk etymology, then why should such a similar word mean 'poison' in Omagua and Kokama (assuming of course that it is a loan)?
I would like to simply throw out the possibility that POK *tsuɾema is a borrowing from an Arawak language, perhaps Yurimagua itself, that either at or posterior to the time of borrowing came to mean something like 'venom', thence denoting any venomous or poisonous substance. Whether the Kubeo yuremawa are actual descendants of the colonial-era Yurimagua is a separate question that I will not address here.
Lastly, I want to mention that the ethnonym Yurimagua may also be decomposable as yurema 'boa' + *awa, the POK word for 'person, people'. The likelihood of this is perhaps increased by the fact that, according to the Jesuit missionary Samuel Fritz, the Yurimagua revered the boa as a God-like figure, a feature that would presumably have been salient to Omagua speakers. Under this account, 'Yurimagua' would have been the Omagua designation for the Yurimagua. Furthermore, if Yurimagua is the source language for yurema, this lends some credence to the idea that Yurimagua was an Arawak language, which makes good geographic sense. Unfortunately there are no records of Yurimagua whatsoever.
References:
de la Cruz, Laureno. 1900[1653]. Nuevo descubrimiento del río de Marañón llamado de las Amazonas, hecho por la religión de San Francisco, año de 1651 ... escrito por la obediencia de los superiores en Madrid, año de 1653. Madrid: La Irradiación.
Fernandes, Maria Luiza and Gregório Ferreira Gomes Filho. 2014. A expedição de Pedro Teixeira e a "descoberta" do Rio Branco. Revista Territórios y Fronteiras 7(1):147-164.
Michael, Lev. to appear. On the Pre-Columbian Origin of Proto-Omagua-Kokama. Journal of Language Contact.
Newsom, Linda A. 1996. Between Orellana and Acuña: A Lost Century in the History of the North-West Amazon. Bulletin de l'Institut Francais d'Études Andines 25:203-231.
Porro, Antonio. 1983. Os solimões ou jurimaguas: Território, migracões e comércio intertribal. Revista do Museo Paulista 29:23-38.
Santos-Granero, Fernando. 2002. The Arawakan Matrix: Ethos, Language, and History in Native South America. In Jonathan D. Hill and Fernando Santos-Granero, eds., Comparative Arawakan Histories: Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in Amazonia, pp. 25-50. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
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