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Proceedings of the Annual Meetings of the
Berkeley Linguistics Society
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Title:
Fruits for Animals: Hunting Avoidance Speech Style in Murui (Witoto, Northwest Amazonia)
Journal Issue:
Proceedings of the Annual Meetings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 41
Author:
Wojtylak, Katarzyna Izabela
Publication Date:
2015
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Berkeley Linguistics Society
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PROCEEDINGS OF THE FORTY-FIRST ANNUAL MEETING OF THE
BERKELEY LINGUISTICS SOCIETY
February 7-8, 2015
General Session
Special Session
Fieldwork Methodology
Editors
Anna E. Jurgensen
Hannah Sande
Spencer Lamoureux
Kenny Baclawski
Alison Zerbe
Berkeley Linguistics Society
Berkeley, CA, USA
Berkeley Linguistics Society
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Linguistics
1203 Dwinelle Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720-2650
USA
All papers copyright c
2015 by the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISSN: 0363-2946
LCCN: 76-640143
i
Contents
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .v
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
e No Blur Principle Eects as an Emergent Property of Language Systems
Farrell Ackerman, Robert Malouf. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Intensication and sociolinguistic variation: a corpus study
Andrea Beltrama . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Tagalog Sluicing Revisited
Lena Borise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Phonological Opacity in Pendau: a Local Constraint Conjunction Analysis
Yan Chen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Proximal Demonstratives in Predicate NPs
Ryan B. Doran, Gregory Ward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Syntax of generic null objects revisited
Vera Dvořák . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Non-canonical Noun Incorporation in Bzhedug Adyghe
Ksenia Ershova . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Perceptual distribution of merging phonemes
Valerie Freeman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .121
Second Position and “Floating” Clitics in Wakhi
Zuzanna Fuchs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Some causative alternations in K’iche’, and a unied syntactic derivation
John Gluckman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
e ‘Whole’ Story of Partitive Quantication
Kristen A. Greer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
A Field Method to Describe Spontaneous Motion Events in Japanese
Miyuki Ishibashi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
ii
On the Derivation of Relative Clauses in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec
Nick Kalivoda, Erik Zyman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Gradability and Mimetic Verbs in Japanese: A Frame-Semantic Account
Naoki Kiyama, Kimi Akita. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
Exhaustivity, Predication and the Semantics of Movement
Peter Klecha, Martina Martinović. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Reevaluating the Diphthong Mergers in Japono-Ryukyuan
Tyler Lau . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .287
Pluractionality and the stative vs. eventive contrast in Ranmo
Jenny Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
Labial Harmonic Shi in Kazakh: Mapping the Pathways and Motivations for Decay
Adam G. McCollum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
Reference to situation content in Uyghur auxiliary ‘bolmaq’
Andrew McKenzie, Gülnar Eziz, Travis Major . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .353
Case-Marking in Estonian Pseudopartitives
Mark Norris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371
Discourse Coherence and Relativization in Korean
Sang-Hee Park . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397
Negotiating Lexical Uncertainty and Speaker Expertise with Disjunction
Christopher Potts, Roger Levy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417
Patterns of Misperception of Arabic Consonants
Chelsea Sanker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447
e Imperative Split and the Origin of Switch-Reference Markers in Nungon
Hannah Sarvasy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .473
Asymmetries in Long-Distance QR
Misako Tanaka. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 493
e cross-linguistic distribution of sign language parameters
Rachael Tatman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .503
iii
Homophony and contrast neutralization in Southern Min tone sandhi circle
Tsz-Him Tsui . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515
Cultural Transmission of Self-Concept from Parent to Child in Chinese American Families
Aya Williams, Stephen Chen, Qing Zhou . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 533
Fruits for Animals: Hunting Avoidance Speech Style in Murui
Katarzyna Izabela Wojtylak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 545
A Quest for Linguistic Authenticity: Cantonese and Putonghua in Postcolonial Hong Kong
Andrew D. Wong. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 563
iv
v
Acknowledgments
As the Executive Committee of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Soci-
ety, we would like to express our gratitude to the conference participants, volunteers, session
chairs, faculty, and staff members for their participation. It was your contributions that made
the conference a success. We are especially grateful for the patience, hard work, and support
of Paula Floro and Bel´en Flores, without whom BLS 41 would not have been possible. We
would also like to thank the following departments and organizations of the University of
California, Berkeley for their generous financial support:
Department of Linguistics
Student Opportunity Fund
Graduate Assembly
Department of Philosophy
Department of Psychology
Department of Ethnic Studies
French Department
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Berkeley Language Center
Office of Academic Affairs Vice President
vi
vii
Foreword
This monograph contains a number of the talks given at the 41st Annual Meeting of the
Berkeley Linguistics Society, held in Berkeley, California, February 7-8, 2015. The conference
included a General Session and the Special Session Fieldwork Methodology. The 41st Annual
Meeting was planned and run by the second-year graduate students of the Department of
Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley: Kenny Baclawski, Anna Jurgensen,
Spencer Lamoureux, Hannah Sande, and Alison Zerbe.
The original submissions of the papers in this volume were reviewed for style by Anna Jur-
gensen and Hannah Sande. Resubmitted papers were edited as necessary by Anna Jurgensen
and Kenny Baclawski, and then compiled into the final monograph by Anna Jurgensen. The
final monograph was reviewed by Spencer Lamoureux. The endeavor was supported by Ali-
son Zerbe’s management of the Berkeley Linguistic Society’s funds for publications.
The BLS 41 Executive Committee
July 2015
viii
545
Fruits for Animals: Hunting Avoidance Speech Style in Murui (Witoto,
Northwest Amazonia)
Katarzyna Izabela Wojtylak
Language and Culture Research Centre, James Cook University, Australia∗
1 Introduction
This paper focuses on the hunting avoidance speech style in Murui, a Witoto-speaking group
from Colombia and Peru. Murui men employ a special vocabulary when hunting bigger game.
It is a system of lexical substitution meant to ‘deceive’ the animal spirits by avoiding the
utterance of the animals’ ‘true’ names. Uttering the names would result in an unsuccessful
hunt: animal spirits would know they are to be hunted and would escape. Animals are,
therefore, ‘renamed’ to ‘trick’ their spirits. This culturally significant speech register is sub-
ject to a high degree of metalinguistic awareness, and is referred to by native speakers as
‘skilled speech’. Many of the avoidance terms and their referents appear to be iconic. They
are based on physical similarity between the animal whose name is avoided and some (typi-
cally non-faunal) natural objects (commonly fruits), or the animal’s characteristic behavior.
Other are based on mythical associations and appear to have ontological origins.
This paper is divided into six parts. The first section briefly introduces the sociolinguistic
profile of the Murui language. The following part addresses the typology of avoidance speech
styles. Subsequently, section three and four deal with the Murui avoidance speech style and
the substitution terms that it employs. The remaining parts of the paper discuss the use of
this special register in the Murui hunting discourse, touching upon interpretations of dreams.
The final section offers a brief summary and identifies areas that need further research.
1.1 The Witoto People
Northwest Amazonia is home to a great number of ethnic groups, many of which include
representatives of larger language families (such as Arawak, Carib, and Tucanoan), smaller
families (such as Kakua-Nukak, Peba-Yagua, Bora as well as the Witotoan language family),
and a number of language isolates (among them Andoqu´e and Ticuna) (see e.g. Aikhenvald
2012, Aikhenvald and Dixon 1999). Murui, the language of this study, is a member of the
Witotoan language family.1
∗I wish to thank the Murui people for their efforts to teach me about the hunting speech style. I would
like to thank Alexandra Aikhenvald, Bob Dixon, Juan Alvaro Echeverri, and Luke Fleming for their helpful
comments on the material. Thanks to the audience at Berkeley Linguistic Society 41 and the Language and
Culture Research Centre in Cairns, Australia, for helpful feedback.
1The following abbreviations are used in this paper: 1first person; 2second person; asub ject of transi-
tive verb; clf classifier; conj conjunction; des desiderative; eevent nominalizer; emph emphatic; epist
epistemic; excl exclamation; foc focus; ggeneric; incp inceptive; inher inherent; interj interjection;
intens intensifier; kin kinship; lk linker; loc locative; n.s/a topical nonsubject; neg negative/negation;
nmlz nominalization; pl plural; purp purposive; qquestion marker n1;red reduplication; ssubject of
intransitive verb; sg singular; sp specific; sp Spanish.
546
Murui together with three other related language variants constitute in all likelihood a
dialect continuum. In the literature, all these groups are referred to as ‘the Witoto people’
who are speakers of a single language, called also ‘Witoto’. In fact, the word witoto is an
exonym of Carijona (Carib) origin, meaning ‘enemy’, that was employed by early missionaries
and rubber traders (Petersen de Pi˜neros and Pati˜no 2000:219). Traditionally, the Witoto
inhabited the region of the Amazon Basin between the Putumayo and Caquet´a Rivers in
south-eastern Colombia.2Nowadays, they also live in northern parts of Peru.3
All the Witoto people share a number of cultural traits with other unrelated groups in
Northwest Amazonia. Together, they are considered to form a cultural area (or a ‘network’),
called the ‘People of the Center’. It encompasses seven ethnolinguistic groups spoken in
south-eastern Colombia and northern Peru (Echeverri 1997:27). Nowadays, this cultural
network numbers approximately 10,000 people (DNP 2010). The groups are representatives
of the following languages and language families:
•Witotoan language family with Ocaina, Nonuya, and Witoto,
•Bora language family with Muinane, Bora (and Mira˜na, a dialect of Bora),
•Arawak language family with Res´ıgaro, and
•Andoqu´e, a linguistic isolate.
The cultural traits that the People of the Center share, separate them from other indigenous
groups that inhabit the same area: the Carijona (Carib) to the north, the Siona, Secoya, and
Coreguaje (West Tucanoan) to the west, Orej´on (or M´a´ıh1ki) to the south, and the speakers
of Arawak and East Tucanoan languages to the north-east (see Figure 1).4Even though the
People of the Center are scattered across a vast ground area, they all share a similar social
organization where patrilineal filiation determines one’s lineage.5Traditionally, the People
of the Center resided in multi-family malocas (i.e. communal dwellings of a circular shape),
with larger villages consisting of multiple communal units. All these groups used pairs of
slit wooden drums called manguar´e (jua1in Murui) for long-distance communication of up
to 20 kilometers throughout the forest (see e.g. Thiesen 1969). The People of the Center
have numerous cultural customs in common. Perhaps the most characteristic is the ritual of
mambe (jibib1r1in Murui) that involves ingesting the green (pulverized) powder of processed
coca (jibie) leaves mixed with yarumo leaves, and licking of ambil paste (processed tobacco
mixed with ash-salt from the forest). The consumption of tobacco by licking among these
groups is a unique phenomenon in this part of Northwest Amazonia (see Wilbert 1987:40 in
Echeverri 1997:50). The People of the Center share similar ritual discourses as well as they
partake in the exchange of ritual dance masters and singers of different linguistic backgrounds
(Echeverri 1997, Gasch´e 1977, 2009, Seifart 2005, 2013, Seifart and von Hildebrand 2009).
2In Brazil, the Caquet´a and Putumayo Rivers are called Japur´a and I ˙c´a.
3This paper is a work in progress, reporting on research that is currently underway on Murui (an extensive
reference grammar of the Murui that the author has in an advanced stage of preparation).
4The maps presented in this paper are author’s own estimations, based on the careful examination of the
current literature and my field notes.
5Among the Witoto, kinship is ‘bilaterally transmitted through both the paternal and maternal sides’ (Echev-
erri 1997:80).
547
Figure 1: Location of Murui and other surrounding languages in Northwest Amazonia
In the past, the People of the Center must have had some contact with other groups. For
instance, the Witoto people have a traditional ‘Carijona’ dance called r1a1rua. Although
the West-Tucanoan Secoya consider the Witoto people their traditional enemies, they seem
to have borrowed from the Witoto manioc squeezers (Sp. tipit´ı) as well as bitter manioc
(Gasch´e p.c.). The Bora people, close neighbors of the Witoto, have also borrowed dances
from other neighboring groups. Res´ıgaro (Arawak) has restructured its verbal morphology
under the influence of the unrelated Bora (Aikhenvald 2001:182-188, Seifart 2011:5).
The People of the Center share a tragic history of atrocious exploitations of indige-
nous population, their enslavement, forced displacements, and subsequent spread of diseases
(Casement and Mitchell 1912 [1997]). The period between 1879 and 1910 in Amazonia is
referred to as the Rubber Boom during which the ‘Peruvian Amazon Company’ (called Casa
Arana), led by rubber baron J´ulio Cezar Arana, was responsible for tens of thousands of
indigenous deaths (Hardenburg 1912, Pineda Camacho 2000). With the gradual collapse of
the Rubber Boom, the barbaric exploitation of indigenous population ended by about 1920’s.
1.2 The Murui Language
The ‘Witoto language’, commonly used as a collective umbrella term, encompasses four mu-
tually intelligible dialects: Murui, M1n1ka, N1pode, and M1ka.6Differences between these
6The unclassified B1n1ka is possibly a variation of M1n1ka, spoken by one family in La Chorrera (Petersen
de Pi˜neros p.c. and my field notes).
548
language variants lay mainly in their phonology and morphology. Figure 2 shows approx-
imate locations of the Murui, M1n1ka, N1pode, and M1ka speakers in Colombia and Peru
(communities where more than one Witoto variant is spoken, are marked as ‘Witoto’).
Figure 2: Approximate locations of the Witoto-speaking groups in Northwest Amazonia
The Witoto recognize their common mythological origin but consider themselves to be
divided into separate social groups that speak ‘different languages’. That is why, I refer to
Murui as a ‘language’ in the political sense, although linguistically, it is merely one of the
Witoto variants. The internal classification of the entire Witotoan language family (with
Ocaina and Nonuya) is illustrated below:
Nonuya (moribund with a few speakers, Ethnologue code noj)
Ocaina (moribund with about 50 speakers, Ethnologue code oca)
Witoto (all together approximately 6,000 speakers )
M1n1ka (Ethnologue code hto)
N1pode (Ethnologue code hux)
M1ka (lacking code)
Murui (Ethnologue code huu)
549
In terms of the language structure, Murui is nominative-accusative with both head and
dependent marking.7The language is agglutinating with some fusion and predominantly
suffixing. Typical clause structure is predicate final (SV/AOV) but ordering can be deter-
mined by pragmatic factors. Syntactic functions are expressed through case markers where
marking of core arguments is related to focus and topicality. The most salient characteristic
of Murui is a large multiple classifier system. Its principal function is the enrichment of the
lexicon by formation of new words (Wojtylak in prep.).8
2 Special Speech, Avoidance, and Linguistic Taboo
Cross-linguistically, a prevalent speech register type is one in which everyday words are
pragmatically marked in contexts of risk-prone activities, such as uttering a name of a
respected person or deceased person. To avoid the potential danger, such words are replaced
by substitute lexemes or avoidance terms.
Best documented are undoubtedly the ‘mother-in-law languages’ of Aboriginal Australia
(such as Dyirbal) with elaborate substitute vocabularies employed in affinal co-presence
(Dixon 2015). Such registers are used whenever anyone in an avoidance relationship, such
as mother-in-law or a son-in-law, is close-by (Dixon 2002). Almost all Australian languages
traditionally had such an avoidance speech style. Dyirbal, a language spoken in north-
west Queensland, has been described as having two styles: Guwal, the everyday language
style, and Jalnguy, a special style used in the presence of ‘avoidance kin’. Jalnguy has an
elaborate lexicon of generic avoidance terms where every lexeme appears to be different
between everyday and avoidance styles (Dixon 2015).
Beyond Australia, such context-dependent avoidance speech registers are most commonly
found in contexts of subsistence activities such as hunting, fishing, mining, and harvesting.
For instance, fishing registers have been reported to be used by Sangir speakers and Tetun of
Timor (Indonesia) (Grimes and Maryott 1994, Therik 1995). A hunting register is used on
Buru (Indonesia) (Grimes and Maryott 1994) and among the Semelai on the Malay Peninsula
(Kruspe 2004:7-10). As Kruspe put it:
“When the Semelai enter the jungle to hunt, collect forest products, or prepare a
swidden, it is imperative to employ this speech style. The jungle is seen as fraught
with peril, so in order to avoid the danger of attack from (...) ’malevolent spirits’,
this taboo is used. Failure to do so can result in a range of afflictions including
soul-loss. Other consequences are falling victim to a tiger, crocodile, snake, or
centipede.”
(Kruspe 2004:7)
7Information on Murui was obtained during my original fieldwork in the Murui communities of the Cara-
Paran´a river (Colombia), conducted between July 2013 and January 2014 to collect data for the reference
grammar of the Murui language (Wo jtylak in prep.).
8For phonetic symbols, the following conventions are used throughout this paper: <f>represents the voiceless
bilabial fricative, <v>is the voiced bilablial fricative, <z>is the voiceless dental fricative, <r>is the flap,
<ch>and <y>are the voiceless and voiced lamino-palatal affricates, and <j>is the voiceless glottal
fricative.
550
The Kewa and Kalam in the eastern Papua New Guinea Highlands have a special harvesting
avoidance register used when collecting pandanus nuts (Franklin and Stefaniw 1992). It is
prohibited to use the ‘pandanus language’ outside the area where the trees grow. Among
the Ma Manda people, a Finisterre-Huon-speaking group from Papua New Guinea, there are
certain concepts which cannot be talked about when being away from the safety of people’s
own villages. When the Ma Manda are out in the jungle, they fear that certain words or
phrases will attract the attention of evil spirits. There is a lexicalized linguistic taboo for
‘water’ that is replaced with ‘come-go’ in all the contexts (Ryan Pennington p.c.).9
Amazonia has numerous speech styles as well as linguistic taboos. For instance, the
Matis, a Panoan-speaking group, employ a special vocabulary when preparing poison for
arrows called curare. Certain words cannot be uttered during this activity, otherwise they
would render the poison used for the arrows weak (Fleck and Voss 2006). Another example
are the Tariana (North Arawak from Brazil). The Tariana have a specific word taboo:
words which resemble the root piri ‘Yurupar´ı flute’ cannot be pronounced in front of women
(Aikhenvald 2013:64). In the Tariana mythology, women once owned the secret flutes but
lost them to men.
Other tabooed terms in Amazonia are secret names given at birth. Such name taboos
are found among e.g. the Trio in Suriname (Carlin 2004) and many Panoan groups (Fleck
2013). From the point of view of the Witoto people, a man’s name, as much as his limbs, is
identified with his soul. Should one possess it, they are able to perform evil magic against
the person. Therefore, real names are kept secret and their substitutes, such as kin terms or
indirect forms, are employed in ordinary life (Whiffen 1915:153).
In Amazonia one also finds various speech styles that relate to specific types of avoidance.
For instance, the Kalapalo (Carib-speaking group from Central Brazil) and Kamaiur´a (Tup´ı-
Guaran´ı from Northern Brazil) have distinct affinal civility registers similar in characteristics
to Australian ‘mother-in-law’ speech styles (Basso 2007, Seki 2000). Yanomami groups
of Venezuela and Brazil have a special language called Wayamo.Wayamo was used by
Yanomami men under specific circumstances such as during intertribal feasts in communal
houses, fight challenges, burning of the dead body of a relative, puberty rite parties, and
shamanic chants (Aikhenvald 2012:369). Another example are various synonym sets found
in the lexicons of the Panoan-speaking groups. In Matses, animals can be referred to by
various synonymic terms, e.g. ‘lowland paca’ [Cuniculus paca] has at least three ‘archaic’
synonyms and three other additional terms (Fleck and Voss 2006). Such a variety of terms
could perhaps be explained by traditional raids that brought women as wives from other
related and unrelated tribes (Aikhenvald 2012:361).
Amazonian peoples do not lack specific avoidance speech styles that were used in the
context of subsistence activities such as hunting. Traditionally, the Palikur (Arawak-speaking
group from Northern Brazil) used to employ a special vocabulary to ‘trick’ evil spirits when
fishing (Diana Green in Aikhenvald 2012:365). Nowadays, such avoidance speech styles are
becoming obsolete. In the case of the Palikur people, their fishing register is now gone, as
9This practice stems from a story which describes how a young girl tells her father that she was really thirsty,
and then a spirit came in the night and cut her neck to fill her with water (Ryan Pennington p.c.). For
other studies relating to the topic of special speech, avoidance, and linguistic taboos see also Aikhenvald
2009, Allan and Burridge 2006, Diffloth 1980, Emeneau 1948, Foley 1986, Fox 2005, Hale 1971, Herbert
1990, Treis 2005, Sapir 1915, Simons 1982, and Stasch 2008.
551
the Palikur were ultimately Christianized and they do not fear evil spirits anymore. I turn
now to yet another such avoidance register from Amazonia - the hunting avoidance speech
style as used by the Murui people.
3 Hunting Avoidance Speech Style of the Murui
Among the Murui, hunting is a male enterprise and it is still widely practiced. Although
nowadays, many Murui people live on river banks and rely on fish as their primary animal pro-
tein source, culturally, hunting was regarded as more important than fishing. When hunting,
the most important game is that of mammals; birds and reptiles are of secondary concern.
Traditionally, Murui men used to hunt with blow-pipes, spears, and wooden traps (Whiffen
1915:108, Minor 1973:29).10 Today, hunting with a shotgun has been widely adopted by all
the Witoto groups, the Murui among them.
When hunting, Murui men use a special vocabulary; this vocabulary is meant to ‘disguise’
true names of animals that are going to be hunted. This avoidance speech style is a system of
lexical substitution where animal spirits are ‘deceived’ as they do not ‘understand’ avoidance
names uttered by Murui men. Pronouncing the ‘real’ name of an animal would result in an
unsuccessful hunt: animal spirits would ‘overhear’ they are to be hunted and would escape
the hunter. Animals are thus ‘renamed’: their ‘true’ names are substituted with words
that designate plant-(related) species (mainly fruits). For instance, when willing to hunt a
peccary, a Murui man would say that he is going to collect an ‘umar´ı fruit’.
3.1 Characteristics of the Hunting Speech Style
The hunting speech style has a very prestigious status among the Murui men. It is subject to
a higher degree of metalinguistic awareness: the native speakers easily reflect on this unusual
use of vocabulary. They refer to it as a type of ‘skilled speech’ (Sp. palabra catedr´atica)
that is unintelligible to women as well as to those men who have a limited knowledge of
the Murui culture.11 Traditionally, boys acquired substitution terms as part of their general
upbringing and the initiation rituals; nowadays, some do so at night by listening to elder
men in communal roundhouses, the ananeko (Sp. maloca).
The use of the Murui avoidance speech style is determined by sociolinguistic parameters.
Avoidance terms are used only between men who gather at night in the ananeko before
they set off for a hunt, consume coca and tobacco, and conduct the verbal ‘power-discourse’
called rafue (ra ‘thing, power’, -fue mouth clf:story). Rafue belongs to the jibib1r1uai
(coca-clf:gathering word) genre, called ‘language of the yard and coca’ (Echeverri and
Rom´an-Jitdutjaa˜no 2013:3). It is an abstract genre that is common to the Witoto. It
has been interpreted as a ‘Word that becomes a Thing’ that ‘evokes’ things in the world
10In 1973, Dorothy Minor, an SIL missionary who worked on the M1n1ka language, together with her husband,
Eugene Minor, gave the following account: “(...) the blowpipes (obillaka1), war clubs made of hard wood
(b1g1), spears (duk1rada), archers (z1kuira), and arrows (z1kuirada) appear in Witoto legends, and only
elders remember what they were like.”] (Minor 1973:29, my translation).
11Some older women understand a few substitution terms. Murui women know a lot more about ‘men’s
business’ than what they generally say they do.
552
(Echeverri 1997:185). According to Echeverri (1997:30), rafue has a ‘performative’ function
and represents more than the normal ‘ethnic discourse’ - rafue goes beyond the Witoto
mythology, the Witoto ethnocentric view of the world, and the linkage to their ancestral
territory. Rafue is unlike other Witoto genres, such as bakak1(mythological narrations) or
ruak1(songs). Non-rafue genres are generally ‘about things’ and do not evoke anything in
the world.
Some of the transformations between animals and plants discussed in this paper appear
to have been derived from the ‘original’ rafue (which evokes the ‘history of Creation’). Those
transformation manifest themselves as certain association sets used also in the hunting speech
style (and extend into the dream world). This makes the hunting speech style an integral
part of the rafue discourse (see Echeverri 1997).12 Rafue has also other subtypes, such as
the so-called ‘rafue of ash-salts’ described for M1n1ka (Echeverri and Rom´an-Jitdutjaa˜no
2011, 2013). In ‘rafue of ash-salts’, plant species of ash-salt substitute names for other
plants, animals, insects and parts, organs, affects, capacities of the body and objects, and
institutions and activities of the human world (Echeverri and Rom´an-Jitdutjaa˜no 2013:5).
Such substitution terms are based on semantic associations similar to the ‘animal-plant’
synonym sets used in the hunting avoidance speech style. ‘Rafue of ash-salts’ is used for
sexual education and, as it is conducted, it re-enacts the history of creation.
Substitution terms found in the Murui hunting avoidance speech style are also typical
of other rafue registers (cf. Echeverri and Candre, 2008, Echeverri and Rom´an-Jitdutjaa˜no,
2013). Nevertheless, the correspondences between animals and plants in the hunting resister
are one-to-one, where one animal is generally associated with one plant. In the ‘rafue of
ash-salts’, there are one-to-many correspondences, where one plant, from which ash-salts are
extracted, can have various associations, not just one. For instance, the species of the jimena
tree [Bactris gasipaes (Arecacea)] is associated with underwater beings, anteater, and throat
(Echeverri and Rom´an-Jitdutjaa˜no 2013:7).
As an integral part of the wide Witoto rafue discourse, the form and the use of terms
employed in the hunting avoidance speech style appear to have been ‘inherited’ from perhaps
what was a Proto-Witotoan mythology. Not only Murui but also M1ka, M1n1ka, and N1pode
share this type of hunting avoidance register. In terms of variations between different asso-
ciation sets across the Witoto variants, lexical replacements are fairly similar - that is, the
same plants are used for the same animals in Murui as well as e.g. in M1n1ka. Occasional dif-
ferences in forms of classifiers seem to be related to morphophonological variations between
the Witoto languages, rather than the hunting style itself.
The homogeneity of the avoidance terms used for hunting big game, the one-to-one formal
and semantic correspondences between the animal’s everyday names and the substitution
terms, as well as their unique sociolinguistic manifestations reinforced by the metalinguisitic
awareness of the Murui speakers (men, as opposed to women), allow us to treat the Murui
hunting register as a special speech style in its own right.
We now turn to the relationships between everyday terms and their avoidance substi-
12The issue of ontological implications of such practice is an intriguing one. As it is not yet usefully explored
by the author, it will not be discussed in this paper. Interested readers should refer to the anthropological
works of Echeverri (1997), Echeverri and Rom´an-Jitdutjaa˜no (2013), and, the most important works by
Preuss (1921-1923), who provides the exceptional descriptions of the religion and mythology of the Witoto
people.
553
tutions, based on a selection of Murui avoidance names. A number of ritual discourses
on hunting were produced by elders in the traditional Murui community of Tercera India,
Colombia, and were recorded at night in the ananeko while men were gathering to consume
coca and lick the tobacco paste, and prepare for hunting. They were addressed to Mo ‘the
Father, the Creator’ while women and children listened on the side. The texts were tran-
scribed and translated with men. A textual excerpt of one such hunting discourse in which
a request is made to the Creator asking to be granted a successful hunt, is presented in
§5. The Murui elders who I worked with were eager to share the material recorded on the
hunting speech style as a matter of scientific record.
4 Substitutions
The Murui hunting speech style employs the same grammar as the regular everyday speech
style. The phonology, morphology, and syntax are the same as in the normal everyday
speech. What differs is the lexicon. This ‘avoidance lexicon’ has a fairly limited vocabulary.
During my fieldwork, I collected some 20 identifiable lexical items.13 These substitution terms
appear to be stable as there is almost no formal or functional variation among them between
Murui speakers. Everyday terms and replacement terms have one-to-one correspondences,
where one animal has typically only one substitution term. Since perceivable associations
(e.g. similarity of form) between ‘real’ names of animals and replacements used in their stead
can justify their connections, I identify the following four types of animal-plant associations:
behavioral, impressionistic, formal, and mythical. I will discuss these in turn, starting with
behavioral associations.14
4.1 Behavioral Associations
The animal-fruit associations are relations between everyday terms for animals and substi-
tution terms for plants that are a result of the existing connection between those animals
and plants in terms of animal’s behavior, such as its feeding habits, and possibly, its usual
habitation. For instance, the connection between a woolly monkey jem1(Sp. churuco) and
the ik1k1fruit (Sp. juansoco) arrives from the fact that the ik1k1fruit is greatly favored by
the woolly monkey jem1. Another example is the everyday term 1me ‘agouti rodent’ and
its avoidance term m1zey1, the ‘maraca fruit’. The explanation for this specific association
is that the ‘maraca fruit’ is a favorite food source for agouti rodents. Although I have not
yet found any instances of behavioral associations in terms of animal’s usual dwelling place,
Echeverri and Rom´an-Jitdutjaa˜no (2013:8) give the following example from the M1n1ka ‘rafue
of ash-salts’:
13Fo r ‘rafue of ash-salts’ in M1n1ka, Echeverri and Rom´an-Jitdutjaa˜no (2013) collected 208 items over the
period of four years.
14Such connections defined otherwise as ‘indices’ in Echeverri and Rom´an-Jitdutjaa˜no (2013), after Peirce
(1998 [1909]), have been categorized as existential, symptomatic, and designative. I loosely follow this
approach. In his approach, Peirce (1998 [1909]) places his ‘indices’ as markers of ‘real connections’. In
Echeverri’s approach (p.c.), the use of indices from a Murui ritual perspective poses a different interpreta-
tion of such connections (in terms of ‘the history of Creation’, ‘before the World was turned up’).
554
“(...) the connection between the ja1taikurungo beetle (indet.) and the Oenocar-
pus bacaba palm [is] because the beetle lives in the palm.”
(Echeverri and Rom´an-Jitdutjaa˜no 2013:8)
The similar (and perhaps also other) principles are likely to occur in the Murui hunting
avoidance speech style as well. Murui behavioral associations between animals and plants
are summarized in Table 1.15
Table 1. Behavioral associations between regular and avoidance terms
Regular term Avoidance term Relation terms
1me ‘agouti, rodent species’
[Agouti paca] (Sp. boruga)
m1zey1‘the maraca fruit’
[Theobroma bicolor]
the maraca fruit is favored
by agouti rodents
jem1‘species of primates,
a woolly monkey’ [Lagotrix
lagotricha] (Sp. churuco)
ik1k1‘the juansoco fruit’
[Couma macrocarpa]
the juansoco fruit is greatly
favored by woolly monkeys
4.2 Impressionistic Associations
Another mechanism of associations reflects sensory properties animals and plants share. In
this spirit, names of animals are replaced according to a resemblance between an animal and
a plant. Such resemblance can be based on some visual or olfactory property. For instance,
a jaguar (janayari in Murui) is replaced with uibiy1, a type of fruit. The reason for such
‘transformation’ appears to be based on the physical resemblance between the uibiy1fruit
and the shape of the jaguar’s paw. Similarly, mero, a peccary, is replaced with obedo,a
‘black umar´ı fruit’. This association has been explained in terms of olfaction: the obedo
fruit appears to have a specific scent which, just like peccaries, attracts mosquitoes. Murui
impressionistic associations are exemplified in Table 2.
Table 2. Impressionistic associations between regular and avoidance terms
Regular term Avoidance term Relation terms
janayari ‘jaguar’ (Panthera
onca) (Sp. tigre mariposo)
uibiy1‘type of fruit’ (Ba-
tocarpus amazonicus) (Sp.
´arbol del pan)
the uibiy1fruit has a shape
that is similar to the shape
of the jaguar’s paw
j1gad1ma ‘tapir’ (Tapirus
Terrestris) (Sp. danta)
za˜nara1‘decomposed wood’ the smoked meat of tapir
looks like decomposed wood
o ˜n o ‘frog type’ (Sp. type of
zapo)
1beg1rai ‘decomposed leaves’ the frog looks like decom-
posed leaves
mero ‘type of peccary’
(Tayassu Tajacu ) (Sp.
cerillo)
obedo ‘black umar´ı fruit’
(Poraquiba Sericea) (Sp.
umar´ı negro)
the fruit has a specific scent
which, like peccaries, at-
tracts mosquitoes
15Latin names for Murui plants and animals have been adopted from Echeverri and Candre (2008) and
Seifart and von Hildebrand (2009). An extensive study of Witoto plants has been done by Maria Cecilia
L´opez (1989).
555
4.3 Formal Associations
Murui animal-plants substitutions can correspond to sharing phonologically similar linguistic
forms (such as verbal or nominal roots). This appears to be the most frequent association
type found in the hunting avoidance speech style. An example of this is the connection
between a type of lizard called turak1which is associated with turao, a type of vine. Both
lexemes are related in form, in that they contain the same nominalized verbal root tu-
‘disperse, scatter’ but differ in terms of their classifiers. The lizard turak1contains the
classifier -k1(clf:inher) with overtones of some kind of possession or inherent feature; the
turao vine is derived with the classifier -o (clf:flex) which denotes long and flexible forms.
Murui men who have limited knowledge of the Murui culture, as well as women (who are
not supposed to ‘know’ hunting substitution terms), intuitively draw connections between
lexical sets which share similar phonological forms. Interestingly, they do not have such
intuition for other associations types (i.e. behavioral, impressionistic, and mythical). If they
do not know the ‘real reason’ for the association, they explain such synonym sets in terms
of behavioral or impressionistic associations. Other times, they interpret them to have some
kind of a ‘possession’ relation. And often, both explanations are given at the same time.
For instance, I was told by a young Murui man that, in case of the turak1lizard and the
turao vine, the vine is somewhat ‘similar’ in shape to the lizard. As an afterthought, he
concluded that the lizard and the vine do not share any physical resemblance, therefore,
the turao vine must somehow ‘belong’ to the turak1lizard. According to Murui elders and
other knowledgeable speakers of Murui, the connection is much more profound. The turak1
lizard and the turao vine are similar in that both are both very hard to catch (that is, ‘they
disperse’). A number of regular and avoidance terms that share phonological forms in Murui
are illustrated in Table 3.
Table 3. Impressionistic associations between regular and avoidance terms
Regular term Avoidance term Relation terms
fekoda ‘type of edible worm’
(Sp. suri)
fekorai ‘type of plant’ the fekorai leaf is similar
to the shape of the fekoda
worm; a plant belonging to
worms
jedo ‘opossum’ jedo 1ai˜na ‘type of plant’ the plant ‘belongs’ to opos-
sums
turak1‘type of lizard’ turao ‘type of liana’ both are hard to catch
4.4 Mythical Associations
The last type of animal-plant associations reflects their connections from within the Witoto
mythology. Perhaps, these are the ‘original’ connections on which all previously discussed
associations types were based (in terms of the ontological origins of all Murui synonym sets).
The hunting avoidance speech style seem to have a limited set of mythical associations.
So far, I have encountered only one example of what could be considered to be a ‘mythical
association’. The Murui everyday term for ‘giant anteater’ [Myrmecophaga tridactyla] (Sp.
oso hormigero) is ere˜no. Its avoidance term is buinaire˜no ‘the anteater ancestor’. Both terms
556
appear to have a totemic relation: buinaire˜no is the totem or the ‘power’ of the Anteater clan
(the Ereia1clan). Further research needs to examine more closely if the hunting avoidance
speech style ‘assists’ to develop a mechanism to hunt totemic animals, that are normally
tabooed and depend on clan’s totem, such as an anteater among the members of the Anteater
clan. It may be that changing a name of clan’s totemic animal could remove the prohibition
on hunting this animal. Such avoidance terms may vary among different Murui clans.
5 Discourse
The usage of the avoidance terms in the ritual discourse illustrates a number of unique
characteristics of the hunting speech style. Consider the following textual example from
Momo J1kakaza, an ‘Appeal to the Father’, in which the Creator is asked to grant a successful
hunt:
(1) oka rana ui˜not1o
o
2sg
-ka
-foc
ra
thing
-na
-n.s/a.foc
ui˜no
know
-t1
-lk
-o
-2sg
‘You... You know things!’
(2) k1odo, ma1j1iakad1kue iad1r1ye i˜nena
k1o
see
-do,
-lk+2sg
ma1j1
work
-iaka
-emph+des
-d1
-lk
-kue
-1sg
iad1
conj
r1
eat.meat
-ye
-purp
i
be
- ˜n e
-neg
-na
-e.nmlz
‘You see, I want to work and there is no food!’
(3) jae ua uzut1a1jaijaikaiya mei 1fo n1nomo obedo uaide
ja
past
-e
-clf:g
ua
intens
uzu
grand.parent
-t1a1
-pl.kin
jai
go
-jai
-red
-kai
-incp
-ya
-e.nmlz
mei
interj
1fo
head
n1
q2
-no
-clf:sp.place
-mo
-loc
obe
umar´ı.black
-do
-clf:pointed
uai
fall
-d
-lk
-e
-3
‘In the past, our ancestors used to go where black umar´ı fruit falls.’
(4) obedona ore mo kue itoza
obe
umar´ı.black
-do
-clf:pointed
-na
-n.s/a.foc
ore
excl
mo
father
kue
1sg
i
give
-to
-lk+2sg
-za
-epist
‘I ask you Father, give me black umar´ı fruits!’
(5) kue uruk1kue ekayeza
kue
1sg
uru
child
-k1
clf:inher
kue
1sg
eka
feed
-ye
-purp
-za
-epist
‘[So] I can feed my children.’
557
Consider the obedo ‘black umar´ı fruit’, marked in bold in the lines (3) and (4). As it was
shown in section on impressionistic associations in §4.2, obedo is the avoidance term for mero
‘peccary’ (the association is explained in terms of an unpleasant smell black umar´ı fruits
and peccaries share). In this ‘appeal to the Father’, the hunter is not asking for black umar´ı
fruits. He is in the ananeko, consuming coca and liquid tobacco, preparing for hunting. He
is using avoidance terms because he wants to assure that he will feed his family with the
peccary meat.
This textual excerpt also exemplifies another salient characteristic of the usage of avoid-
ance terms in the hunting discourse, that is, names of the avoided animals are used in a
figurative way. In line (3), the verb that describes actions of the obedo is uaide ‘to fall’. This
clearly illustrates conventional metaphors referring to fruits and their actions: the black
umar´ı fruit (which is de facto a peccary) does not ‘move around’ or ‘run’ like an animal but
literally falls off the obe-rai (umar´ı.black-clf:tree.type) tree.
6 Meanings in Dreams
The Murui hunting goes beyond the acquisition of food. Curiously, people also employ
certain everyday terms and avoidance terms when interpreting dreams. In those contexts,
plants indicate which animals will become hunter’s prey. This is illustrated by a hunter
dreaming about nekaz1‘green umar´ı fruit’ [Poraqueiba sericea] (Sp. umar´ı verde). The
significance of such dreams is straightforward: the hunter’s prey is going to be a zuruma,a
large herbivorous mammal called ‘tapir’ (Sp. danta). Likewise, when a hunter dreams about
the coco del monte fruit, he is going to kill a wild pig (Sp. puerco). As Echeverri and Candre
(2008:65) put it:
“All is the result of tobacco and coca hunting. (...) this means, hunting of people.
And this way, what is to be hunted comes to us in dreams in the form of fruit.”
(Echeverri and Candre 2008:65, my translation).16
The actual big-game hunting takes place in dreams. There, the animals have to be defeated
first before they are defeated in the physical world of the everyday life:
“What happens ‘right here’ (beno) - bad feelings, accidents, problems - is reflected
‘out there’ (jino) as animals. Just to set traps out there is not enough. Those
feelings (animals) first have to be defeated right here. The actual hunting takes
place in dreams, then an animal will go to fall into the trap outside. This way
of turning feelings and dreams into animal bodies is called mon´aitate ‘to make
dawn’. The ability to make that happen is called d1ona m´a1rie ‘tobacco power’.
This power is acquired through tobacco discipline, or yet´arafue.”
(Echeverri 1997:154)
16“(...) Todos son cacer´ıa de tabaco y coca, es decir cacer´ıa de gente. Y asimismo en los sue˜nos esa cacer´ıa
aparece representada en la forma de esos frutales.”
(Echeverri and Candre 2008:65)
558
“(...) ‘Tobacco hunting’ consists of making dawn [mon´aitate] in the body of
animals that which first manifests itself as illness, rage, negligence, quarrelling,
and so forth. Food is only a by-product of this sort of hunting. As such, the
preparation of tobacco and coca are as closely related to hunting as are the setting
up of traps. Tobacco and coca are actual hunting weapons.”
(Echeverri 1997:129)
In other Witoto genres, such as ritual songs ruak1, names of the animals are commonly
uttered. For instance, in songs sung during celebrations in the Murui ananeko, the ‘real’
animal names are freely used for the Muinane people, e.g. eiza1ka1biya from a Muinane
song can be roughly translated as “peccary came”, where the referents of ‘peccary’ are the
Muinane people.
7 Summary
The Murui people, a Witoto-speaking group from Northwest Amazonia, have a special pres-
tigious speech style used by men that relates to hunting game. It is a system of lexical
substitution that shifts from faunal terms to floral terms, and it is employed to ‘deceive’
animal’s spirits ‘assuring’ a successful hunt. Associations between everyday terms (that is,
animals) and avoidance terms (plants) have behavioral, impressionistic, formal, and mythical
connections. They reveal certain ways in the Murui people organize their natural surround-
ings and are important for indigenous taxonomies of fauna and flora. The hunting avoidance
speech style employs figurative expressions for avoided animal’s names. It is also used in
interpretations of dreams, where hunting takes place in the spiritual sphere. It forms part
of a much larger Witoto register, called rafue. Nowadays, with the decreased importance of
spirits among the Murui, the hunting avoidance speech style is on the wane.
Further research that goes beyond the mere description of the avoidance speech style
would be of great help. One could venture into the realms of pragmatics, ideology and, more
importantly, the ontological bases of such practice. One may also ask how the change from
animal to plant names reflects a local division of labor (e.g. hunting versus gathering) and
how it relates to territorial and seasonal based prohibitions.
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