User:Paigejaru/Cinta Larga

Cinta Larga is a Tupian dialect cluster of Brazil, the largest language of the Monde branch.

According to Moore (2005), Arara do Rio Guariba (Guariba River Arara), spoken in the northern part of Aripuanã Indigenous Park, is closely related to the Cinta Larga dialect cluster, and also shares some features with Suruí. 26 words were collected by Hargreaves in 2001. It remains unclassified due to the lack of data.

The Cinta Larga (or Cinturão Largo) are a people indigenous to the western Amazon Rainforest of Brazil, numbering around 1300. Their name means "broad belt" in Portuguese, referring to large bark sashes the tribe once wore. The tribe is famous for shadowing Theodore Roosevelt's Roosevelt–Rondon Scientific Expedition, making no contact.

Cinta Larga is an endangered language spoken by indigenous tribes of the Mato Grosso and Rondonia regions of Brazil. It is part of the Tupian family of South/Central American Languages. More specifically, it is a Mondean language whose four branches are mutually intelligible and include Gaviao, Cinta Larga, Zoro, and Arua. As of this past decade, it has anywhere from approximately 600-1300 living native speakers. The tribe participates in community rituals and traditions, the most important of which being the Feast of the Wild Pig culminating in the sacrifice of a boar by bow and arrow. They have had several violent encounters with outsiders during attempts to pillage resources off the tribe's land. Epidemic diseases are also suspected to be a leading culprit of their dwindling population.

History and Culture
Since the 1920s, the tribe has often come into violent conflict with prospectors entering the region to harvest rubber, timber, gold or diamonds. In the 1960s, this culminated in the "Massacre at 11th Parallel" in which rubber prospectors killed many of the Cinta Larga by throwing dynamite into their village from a plane, and then finishing off the survivors, including killing women and children with particular cruelty. Only two members of that Cinta Larga community survived the massacre.

It is believed the plane made a first pass over the village, dropping sugar to lure a crowd to the central plaza. Then, it swooped in low to drop the dynamite on the assembled Cinta Larga. The bodies were buried in the riverbank, and that village was abandoned forever.

The Gaviao people refer to themselves as "hawks". The populations of the Gaviao were already sparse as far back as the seventies, but at that time were still slowly and steadily increasing. They were known in the past to build small villages comprised of houses of nuclear families, based around their core values of patriarchal society. Each house headed by a patriarch, it would contain his married and unmarried children (namely daughters) and their spouses.

Ritual
The tribe have a traditional feast wherein they perform rituals culminating in the sacrifice of a wild animal, namely a pig or a boar. The feast is appropriately named the Mbebe Akaee Feast, or “Feast of the Wild Pig" The invitation, "guest of honor" tradition, organization, and celebration involved in the Mbebe Akaee feast are an integral aspect of the tribe's culture as well as an explicit display of their collectivist values.

Language
The Cinta Larga language is a Mondé language, belonging to the Tupi language family. It is written in the Latin script. Study of its syntax and morphology has been limited to few researchers over the course of several decades. A rudimentary breakdown of their matrix sentence structure might include an obligatory subject noun phrases, obligatory auxiliary stem, optional predicate noun phrases, optional verb phrases, and optional embedded clauses. Their language is tonal, with the Cinta Larga tribe's dialect having been found specifically to rise in tone prior to palatals. As recorded by field researchers, members of the tribe remarked that its tonality makes the language difficult to read. Their language has been shown to feature vowel raising, word-initial labial weakening (lenition), and compensatory vowel lengthening.

The broader context of Gaviao languages have been recorded to feature long, low tones. The Zoro, whose speech patterns are distinct but under the Monde umbrella and align with the Gaviao in many ways, are known to feature whistles in their languages, further distinguishing the two families. For what they do not share, it is not uncommon to encounter loan words and cognates. Gaviao languages are thought to have tone contrasts analogous to the stress contrasts of the nearby majority language Portuguese. The Cinta Larga language follows a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order. Morphosyntactic classes of this language, and all Tupian languages, are functionally nominative or absolutive.

Diamond Mine Controversy
In 2004 the tribe was responsible for the murders of 29 miners illegally unearthing diamonds in the area. Loggers had come onto the reservation and were accused of bringing drugs and diseases as well as raping and pillaging. The Cinta Larga tribe itself claims no interest in the mines and to have never mined for diamonds. In exchange for an $810,000 community grant from the Brazilian government, the tribe agreed to shut down the mine and refrain from killing intruders. The grant expired in 2007, and the tribe has implied it may reopen the mine.

Threats and Looking Ahead
In terms of threats to the population, diseases such as pneumonia, malaria, and influenza are among the reasons there are so few remaining members of these communities today. Apart from violent interactions with other cultures, disease has proven detrimental to the small, close-knit tribes. In terms of threats to the language, at the time of one 2007 study, there were 643 speakers and the rate of transmission, or passing the language onto the next generation, was high. More recent information as to the number of speakers is scarce but the tribe and their language are still classified as critically endangered.