[3] The Kamayurá people live in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, specifically in the Upper Xingu area.
[4] The Kamayurá people do not have their own specific schools and rely on teaching each other the language, however, there have been a couple of youths, since the year 2000, that have participated in the Teacher Training Course.
In an interview done by “Nova Raiz” in September 2011 it appears that Lucy Seki has retired, but continues to speak positively of her work with the Kamayurá.
[11] This is common in general in the languages of the Tupian stock, and both causatives have been posited to exist in Proto-Tupian.
[15] In the endocentric derivation of nouns, the following suffixes are used, all of them tonics:[16] The Kamayurá language is composed of combined aspects of the nominative-accusative, active-stative and the establishment of a final verb with initial interrogative words.
[20] Words for numerals and quantifiers like “everyone” and “few” are understood as being associated with a countable item, and can be nominal in function of the subject, or of the object, or even an event, however, they do not occur as nominal determinants, but they present adverbial properties:[21] mokõjtwokunu'umboys-a-No-3-ykarrivemokõj kunu'um -a o- yktwo boys -N 3- arrive“two boys arrived”mo'apytthreemoytsowybeads-a-Nr-REL-irupacks-a-Na-1SG-mepybuymo'apyt moytsowy -a r- iru -a a- mepythree beads -N REL- packs -N 1SG- buy"I bought three packs of beads"mojepeteonerakATa-1SG-jotcomesão pauloN.PR.katyALLmojepete rak a- jot {são paulo} katyone AT 1SG- come N.PR.
This group of particles includes: tete “only”, meme “each”, atsã “little, small”, utsu “a lot”, a’ia’ip “much”.
It can reduplicate radical nominals, adverbials and verbals, generally marked the iterative, distributive and intensive:[25] The following sample is taken from Seki (2000), p. 438.
It is a small excerpt of a folk take about hero Arawitará, who is summoned by his deceased friend to help the souls of the dead in their eternal war against the birds.