For the past couple months, I have been studying Koreguaje (aka Coreguaje, Korebaju), working through Ko’rehuajʉ chʉ’ore cutuñu over voice calls with a family friend as tutor. We’ve gotten about half way through the book, but as the vocabulary and grammar get more difficult, I’m finding the need to slow down. The language is a Western Tucanoan language, indigenous to the upper Caquetá river valley in Colombia, on the edge of the Amazon basin. There are a couple closely related languages in the upper Caquetá region and the neighboring corner of Ecuador, and all other languages that are known to be related to it have home territories to the east, mostly in the Vaupés. But to me it feels familiarly like an Otomanguean language. There are suprasegmental nasalization, glottalization and tone that reminds me of Mixtec, though the tone system only has high and low, without contours. And a few common words are similar enough to trip me up sometimes:
| Koreguaje | Mixtec | English |
|---|---|---|
| vʉ’e [wɨʔe] | ve’e [βeʔe] | house |
| chʉ’ʉ [tʃɨʔɨ] | yu’u [ʒuʔu] | me |
| jʉ̃jʉ̃ [hɨ̃hɨ̃] | jãjã [xãxã] | yes |
But if you look at larger lists of comparative vocabulary, for Otomanguean and Tucanoan, there are no such similarities. It seems that these few are coincidentally similar words, in similar sound systems.