Upcoming Work on Taushiro

Later this month I have the good fortune to be able to meet Amadeo García García, the last speaker of Taushiro, in Iquitos.  My goal is to carry out four full days of work on the documentation of his language, with the goal of establishing a longer-term project in the coming years.  Taushiro is a language isolate formerly spoken in the Corrientes-Tigre interfluvium in what is now the northeasterly region of Loreto, Peru (see other posts by Nila Vigil and Lev Michael).  By 1971, only two extended family groups, referred to as the atontu'tua and the einontu'tua, resided on the Aucayacu River (Alicea Ortíz 1976:6), a left-bank tributary of the Aguaruna River, itself a left-bank tributary of the Tigre River upriver of the district capital of Intuto.  In 1976 they totaled 12 adults and 6 children (ibid.).

It is likely that the Taushiro are related to a group referred to in the Jesuit era as the asarunatoa (note the similarity of this name with the hydronym Aguaruna, as well as the sequence <toa>), a group visited in 1684 by an expedition led by Tomás Santos and which apparently lived on a tributary of the Tigre four days (in canoe) upriver of the mouth of the Corrientes (see past post here on this expedition).  Two other groups, the havitoa and the pinche, were visited during this journey, and one gets the impression from Santos' writings that they were all related.  Indeed, numerous scholars have simply assumed that Pinche is a Jesuit-era ethnonym for the Taushiro.  Pinches were apparently hostile to the Roamainas accompanying Santos, and even in the 20th century Atontu'tuas were apparently hostile to Einontu'tuas (ibid.:20).

Previous linguistic work on Taushiro was carried out in the 1970s by Neftalí Alicea Ortíz, a Puerto Rican member of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), a missionary linguistics outfit.  This resulted in a dictionary, a phonological sketch, a grammatical sketch, an ethnographic sketch, and a small number of accompanying texts.  In 2008, Peruvian student Juanita Pérez Ríos completed an undergraduate honors thesis on motion verbs in the language.  Despite this corpus, much remains unclear about the language (e.g., its phonological system), and I hope to begin to answer some of these questions.

Amadeo García has received a relatively high amount of attention in Peru in recent years due to his sensationalized status as the last speaker of Taushiro.  A Lima news outlet made a 15-minute special on him in 2008, and he met regional president Iván Vásquez in 2012.  You can read a more cogent report from 2012 on Amadeo and his language by José Álvarez Alonso here.

I will report back shortly!

Alicea Ortíz, Neftalí. 1976. Apuntes sobre la cultura taushiro. Lima: Summer Institute of Linguistics.