[3] Orthographic representations, when they differ from IPA, are shown in angle brackets (all from Nonato 2008, based on Americanist transcription).
Bororo has a rich inventory of twelve diphthongs: All pure vowels can also occur long, i.e. as /iː eː ɯː ɤː uː oː aː/.
The velar stop /k/ becomes aspirated [kʰ] before nonback vowels /a e i/; the labiovelar approximant /w/ becomes labiodental [ʋ] in the same environment.
The canonical syllable structure in Bororo is (C)V: that is, a mandatory vowel nucleus (or diphthong), optionally preceded by a single onset consonant.
Aside from unmodified loanwords from Portuguese (which are quite common, and becoming more so), Bororo syllables never have onset consonant clusters or codas.
Stress in Bororo occurs generally (again with the exception of unmodified Portuguese loanwords) on the penultimate mora.
This process is part of a wider harmony restriction in Bororo, rare among the world's languages: no word (excluding clitics and compounds) may contain more than one voiceless obstruent.
Finally, since vowel-initial stems never take a third-person singular prefix, no thematic vowel is inserted.
anxiety" Bororo, like most languages of South America, is synthetic and agglutinative (albeit with some degree of fusion).
There is no category of obligatory nominal affixes in Bororo; a noun phrase may therefore be composed of a single unmarked root.
In addition, there is a "zero morpheme" *bo- which can occur only with the plural suffix -e, meaning "things" or "people", hence the Bororos' own term for themselves Boe.
Notably, these postpositions may be inflected with the same set of bound pronouns as verbs and inalienable possession; for example, ae "to, toward" can become et-ai "to them".
[8] In some cases, this functions very similarly to focusing prepositions in English: e-mago-re tori ji, "they talked about the mountains".
However, the range of ambitransitive verbs in Bororo is much narrower (if indeed ambitransitives exist at all) than in English, and so several verbs which are transitive in English require focusing with -ji in Bororo: imedü jorüdü-re karo ji "the men ate the fish" (compare a-jorüdü-re "you ate").
Like many indigenous languages of South America, Bororo distinguishes inclusive and exclusive first-person plurals as well as alienable and inalienable possession.
This suffix conveys a basic and unmarked tense, aspect, and mood for a declarative or interrogative sentence: kowaru kuri-re "the horse is big", kaiba kodu-re "where did he go?"
Sentences using the other aspect markers may also be understood as present or recent, but only the absence of a suffix conveys this explicitly: imedü maru-∅ "the man is hunting".
However, direct suffixes may also occur in this context; the indirect only adds an explicit layer of uncertainty or secondhand knowledge.
Instead, the three ordinary aspect suffixes change to apparently-related but historically obscure alternate forms when rendered as indirect.
The causative suffix -dö indicates that the subject of the verb causes the main object to perform an action, adding a level of valency: i-re a-tu-dö "I made you go".
The imminent suffix -yagu indicates that an action is or was about to happen, or alternatively that it is only "nearly" accomplished: a-re a-tu-yagu "you were about to go", e-re tü-yagu pu-reo-re "they are almost alike".
This is technically a transitive sentence in Bororo, unlike in English; however, it is restricted entirely to coreferential arguments (i.e. the subject and object are identical).
[9] Since ambitransitive verbs are at least exceedingly rare in Bororo, however, and intransitives with postpositional focus are very common, the frequency of strictly "transitive" constructions is far fewer than that of English or Portuguese.
"[10] Bororo has six question words, all ending in the interrogative morpheme -ba: kabo-ba "what", yogüdü-ba "who", kakodiwü-ba ’which', ino-ba ’how', kai-ba ’where' and kodi-ba 'why'.
Unlike in English, many well-formed Bororo clauses lack a verb entirely, in which case the first noun (the subject) takes the "intransitive-ergative" suffixes described above.
If these noun phrases are modified outside of inflection (e.g. are possessed by a full noun rather than a prefixed pronoun), they require the "complex equative" particle rema (singular) or remage (plural) to end the clause: Kadagare onaregedü-re Creusa rema "Creusa is Kadagare's child".
These are formed identically to existential clauses, followed by the addition of one of a set of suffixes -o, -no, and -ce, which correspond directly to the deictic prefixes a-, no- and ce-: karo-re-o "here / this is a fish".