Tinigua are the indigenous people who inhabited the river basin Yari, Caguan and today Caquetá Department of Colombia

Colombia

Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...

. In their language, Tinigua refers to the ancestor

Ancestor

An ancestor is a parent or the parent of an ancestor ....

s: tini probably meant “word of the ancients.”

History

The Tinigua population

Population

A population is all the organisms that both belong to the same group or species and live in the same geographical area. The area that is used to define a sexual population is such that inter-breeding is possible between any pair within the area and more probable than cross-breeding with individuals...

 drastically declined in the 19th century. First, the exploitation of the rubber

Rubber

Natural rubber, also called India rubber or caoutchouc, is an elastomer that was originally derived from latex, a milky colloid produced by some plants. The plants would be ‘tapped’, that is, an incision made into the bark of the tree and the sticky, milk colored latex sap collected and refined...

, then as allies of the Witotos they faced the Muinane and Carijona, and had to abandon much of their territory and settle to the north. Finally they were attacked by settlers after 1949, which caused their extinction

Extinction

In biology and ecology, extinction is the end of an organism or of a group of organisms , normally a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and recover may have been lost before this point...

, so that in 1994 only survived two elderly brothers, in the Sierra de la Macarena, Meta.

The first references to this group were provided by the priest Martivell Fair (1925) and Capuchins missionary Gaspar de Pinell (1929). Language samples were collected by the Capuchins Estanislao Les Corts (1931), Fructuoso Manresa and Igualada and Marcelino Francisco de Castellvi, and the latter published in 1940 the first study of the language Tinigua.

Language

According to Nubia Tobar, who interviewed some of the last speakers of the language, there were six oral vowels organized into three basic levels of openness: high, medium and low, and three positions: anterior, central and posterior, each of which with its corresponding glottalized and elongated. The 22 consonants were p, ph (aspirated), t, th (aspirated), t (palatal), ts (Africa), k, kh (aspirated), kw (velar) b, d, and (voiceless palatal sound), g, m, n, n, f, s, z (voiced alveolar fricative), h (voiceless glottal fricative), che (palatal affricate), and the glide w. The language was thought lost until they are located two elderly speakers in the 1990s. Presumably the language is now extinct.

The Tinigua languages have been grouped in a family-Pamigua Tinigua since Castellvi (1940) demonstrated the affinity of the two languages, using the vocabularies collected by F. Pamigua Published by Ernst and Toro (1895). Of the Pamigua we know from Rivero (1763), who lived between Concepcion de Arama (Meta) and Guaviare, but we ignore the reason of their disappearance.