Tupi-Guarani loanwords in Southern Arawak: taking contact etymologies seriously

This paper seeks to rigorously evaluate a set of claims that lexical items in Southern Arawak languages are loanwords from Tupi-Guarani languages. I show that, in most cases, these hypotheses can be rejected because the Arawak forms in question either have clear internal etymologies or because the noted similarities are too superfcial and no coherent or plausible picture for the phonological deviation between the putative loans and their presumed source forms can be offered. In advancing internal etymologies for the target Arawak forms I will also try to cast light on aspects of the historical developments of these languages, as well as raise some so far unacknowledged issues for future research. Next, I consider some plausible cases of Guarani loans in one Southern Arawak language, Terena, explicitly arguing for these contact etymologies and placing these loanwords within a chronological stratum in Terena history. Complications related to dissimilar sources in Arawak-TupiGuarani contact and to the status of Wanderw¶rter are also briefly addressed. ---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.31513/linguistica.2017.v13n3a16383