a split-intransitive grammatical alignment. Verbs were preceded by pronouns, which could be subject or object forms. Subject pronouns like a- "I" expressed the person was in control, while object pronouns like xe- "me" signified the person was not. The two types could be used alone or combined in transitive clauses, and they then functioned like subject and object in English: A-bebé = I-fly, "I can fly", "I flew". Xe pysyka = me catch, "Someone has caught me" or "I'm caught". A-î-pysyk = I-him-catch, "I have caught him". Although Tupi verbs were not inflected, a number of pronominal variations existed to form a rather complex set of aspects regarding who did what to whom. That, together with the temporal inflection of the noun and the presence of tense markers like koára "today," made up a fully functional verbal system. Word order played a key role in the formation of meaning: taba abá-im (village + man + tiny) = tiny man from the village taba-im abá = man from the small village Tupi had no means to inflect words for gender, so used adjectives instead. Some of these were: apyŷaba = man, male kuñã = woman, female kunumĩ = boy, young male kuñãtãĩ = girl, young female mena = male animal kuñã = female animal The notion of gender was expressed, once again, together with the notion of age and that of "humanity" or "animality". The notion of plural was also expressed by adjectives or numerals: abá = man; abá-etá = many men Unlike Indo-European languages, nouns were not implicitly masculine except for those provided with natural gender: abá "man" and kuñã[tã] "woman/girl"; for instance. Without proper verbal inflection, all Tupi sentences were in the present or in the past. When needed, tense is indicated by adverbs like ko ara, "this day". Adjectives and nouns, however, had temporal inflection: abáûera "he who was once a man" abárama "he who shall be a man someday" That was often used as a semantic derivation process: akanga "head" akangûera "skull" (of a skeleton) abá "man" abárama "teenager" With respect to syntax, Tupi was mostly SOV, but word order tended to be free, as the presence of pronouns made it easy to tell the subject from the object. Nevertheless, native Tupi sentences tended to be quite short, as the Indians were not used to complex rhetorical or literary uses. Most of the available data about Old