The Word list of South Cayapo registred by Nehring

Abstract

The existing linguistic records of South Cayapó are lists of words, most with fewer than one hundred words, written by naturalists and curious who had contact with this group in
the nineteenth century. This study focuses on the record held by Nehring, a German pharmacist who settled in Piracicaba (SP), and sent Paul Ehrenreich a list of 39 words in this language.
According to Ehrenreich, this is a list of South Cayapó from Santana do Paranaíba, a village located in the province of Mato Grosso, on the edges of Paranaiba River, near the mouth of
Aporé River. Considering the spelling used to record and the origin of its recorder, I raise hypotheses about the sound value of the spelling of the word list. I transliterated the record to the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in order to show which phonological processes occur in this language. In an attempt to extract from the list all possible linguistic information, I identify even preliminarily, morphological information restricted to belongings names.