Appendix:Old Tupi adjectives

Most Old Tupi adjectives are formed with the noun's theme, which is obtained by removing its final atonic vowel, usually -a. Oxytone nouns stay unchanged when used as adjectives.

Old Tupi adjectives can be either attributive or predicative.

When attributive, the adjective always comes postpositioned and agglutinated to the noun, passing through the usual phonetic transformations. The resulting composition is threated as a noun and the suffix -a is added if the final word ends in a consonant — by rule, all nouns in Old Tupi must end in a vowel, stressed or not (see Appendix:Old Tupi nouns).

noun adjective

oka + pirang > opiranga

red house

(literally, “housered”)

When predicative, the adjective also comes after the noun, but not agglutinated. If the subject is a pronoun, the adjective is simply put together with it:

noun adjective

xe pirang

I am red

(literally, “I red”)

If the subject is a noun, between the two must come the third-person pronoun i, which functions as a dummy pronoun — this is called a copula. In English, this is usually done by the verb to be:

noun copula adjective

oka i pirang

the house is red^{[n 1]}

(literally, “house it red”)

Adjectives can also be used to denote possession. Possessable nouns can be turned into adjectives by removing their final atonic vowel, giving the sense of having that thing.

xe aoba

my clothes

xe aob

I'm clothed

As previously said, oxytones stay the same.

xe sy

my mother or
I have a mother

Adjectives can be pluriform if so is the noun they derivate from. Like pluriform nouns, they can only be found in its base form when agglutinated to other words.

Apart from the absolute (since adjectives will always be in relation to another word) and the R3 forms (as the pronoun o is not used with adjectives) they both have the same inflections (see Appendix:Old Tupi nouns#Pluriform nouns).

• Antônio Lemos Barbosa (1956) Curso de tupi antigo: gramática, exercícios, textos [Course of Old Tupi: Grammar, Exercises, Texts]‎ (in Portuguese), Rio de Janeiro: Livraria São José
• Eduardo de Almeida Navarro (2005) Método Moderno de Tupi Antigo: a língua do Brasil dos primeiros séculos [Modern method of Old Tupi: the language of Brazil's early centuries]‎ (in Portuguese), 3 edition, São Paulo: Global Editora, →ISBN