Appendix:Old Tupi adjectives

Main category: Old Tupi adjectives

Most Old Tupi adjectives are formed with the noun's theme, which is obtained by removing its final atonic vowel, usually -a. Oxytone nouns stay unchanged when used as adjectives.

Types of use edit

Old Tupi adjectives can be either attributive or predicative.

Attributive edit

When attributive, the adjective always comes postpositioned and agglutinated to the noun, passing through the usual phonetic transformations. The resulting composition is threated as a noun and the suffix -a is added if the final word ends in a consonant — by rule, all nouns in Old Tupi must end in a vowel, stressed or not (see Appendix:Old Tupi nouns).

noun adjective

oka + pirang > opiranga

red house

(literally, “housered”)

Predicative edit

When predicative, the adjective also comes after the noun, but not agglutinated. If the subject is a pronoun, the adjective is simply put together with it:

noun adjective

xe pirang

I am red

(literally, “I red”)

If the subject is a noun, between the two must come the third-person pronoun i, which functions as a dummy pronoun — this is called a copula. In English, this is usually done by the verb to be:

noun copula adjective

oka i pirang

the house is red^{[n 1]}

(literally, “house it red”)

Possession edit

Adjectives can also be used to denote possession. Possessable nouns can be turned into adjectives by removing their final atonic vowel, giving the sense of having that thing.

xe aoba

my clothes

xe aob

I'm clothed

As previously said, oxytones stay the same.

xe sy

my mother or
I have a mother

Pluriform adjectives edit

Adjectives can be pluriform if so is the noun they derivate from. Like pluriform nouns, they can only be found in its base form when agglutinated to other words.

Apart from the absolute (since adjectives will always be in relation to another word) and the R3 forms (as the pronoun o is not used with adjectives) they both have the same inflections (see Appendix:Old Tupi nouns#Pluriform nouns).

Pluriform adjectives table
Classes	I	IIa	IIb	IIc	IId	IIe
R1 form	∅-	r-	r-	r-	ra/re-	r-
R2 form	i ∅-	s-	t-	s-	sa/se-	s-

Examples
Classes	I	IIa	IIb	IIc	IId	IIe
Noun form	poranga	oby	a'ypaba	u'uma	mimby	apó
Noun form	beauty	blue	sexhaustion	mud	whistle	root
R1 form	xe porang	xe roby	xe ra'ypab	xe ru'um	xe remimby	xe rapó
R1 form	"I'm beautiful"	"I'm blue"	"I'm sexhausted"	"I'm mudded"	"I'm whistleful"	"I'm rooted"
R2 form	i porang	soby	ta'ypab	su'um	semimby	sapó
R2 form	"he's beautiful"	"he's blue"	"he's sexhausted"	"he's mudded"	"he's whistleful"	"he's rooted"

Notes edit

^ Old Tupi has no articles, thus not differentiating definiteness; the sense must be inferred by context when translating.