Biblioteca Digital Curt Nimuendajú

"Whether one employs one or another type of terminology is dependent very largely upon the prospective readers of any grammar. lf one is writing for a scientific journal read by professional linguists, then the terminology may be as technical as the subject matter warrants. On the other hand, if one's description of the language is intended for people who have had only the traditional orientation to grammar, then it is essential that the technical vocabulary be reduced to a minimum. Furthermore, for such readers it is impossible to rely entirely upon the concise descriptions of morpheme distribution by classes. One must cite numerous paradigms. Despite the fact that traditional grammars have many uneconomical ways of describing features, there are certain pedagogical features which must not be overlooked… The type of scientific description which we have been studying in this book is not designed to be applied to constructing a textbook to be used by people learning a language. It is the type of organization of data which should underlie the construction of a good pedagogical grammar, but it is no substitute for one". EUGENE A. NIDA, Morphology, the descriptive analysis of words. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press (Michigan, 1953), p. 240.

Justifica-se, pois, a norma tradicional, que preferimos, de descrever a língua tupi não em si mesma e para lingüistas, mas comparando-a com os idiomas familiares à maioria dos leitores. Pela mesma razão, evitaram-se as grandes sínteses, que difeririam por demais dos esquemas de nossas línguas ocidentais.