How Do You Say Yvyvy?

Sometimes following the news from Paraguay pays off. Yesterday I checked my newsreader and found the following headline, from ABC Digital:

Ante posible búsqueda de plata yvyguy en el Botánico, ediles suspenden obras

En el Jardín Botánico se estaría realizando excavaciones en busca de tesoros escondidos según la sospecha de algunos concejales. Responsabilizan de las perforaciones a la Constructora Fortaleza, que en mayo suscribió un convenio con la Municipalidad de Asunción para la construcción de dos baños.
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Authorities suspend excavation before possible search for yvyguy silver in Botanical Gardens.

Excavations have begun in the Botanical Gardens in search of hidden treasures, according to the suspicions of some councillers. The Constructora Fortaleza is responsible for these works, which were approved in May by the Munincipality of Asunción for the construction of two bathrooms. [my poor translation, of course]

From what I can gather from the rest of the article, apparently digging for buried treasure is forbidden in the Botanical Gardens (but is tempting), and the approval process for this bathroom-construction (which might be a front for other searches?) is a bit sketchy.

Of course what really jumped out at me was the phrase plata yvyguy. It seems to be an accepted Spanish/Guaraní hybrid phrase. And, as best I can tell refers to treasure which was suppposedly hidden around the time the Jesuits were expelled from their missions in Paraguay in 1768. (The book of Guaraní legends I have devotes a page or two about a supposed lost tribe and treasure dating from the expulsion.) In any case, this particular sort of hybrid is pleasingly symbolic of what makes Paraguay so interesting: a relatively even mix of Spanish and Guaraní, pre- and post-colombian culture, and a deep sense of a richness that lies beneath, undiscovered (in the sense that Paraguay itself has been isolated by geography, by history, and by choice over the years).

But back to the word itself, the typo-looking yvyguy—what a lovely odd-looking string of letters! A few searches later, I turned up an anternate version, plata yvyvy, which was an even more pleasing row of letter-forms. I was reminded of certain pleasing Tanzanian placenames like Ujiji (you know, where Stanley met Livingstone), with all those cute little dots in a row.

But how to pronounce the forbidden plata yvyvy? Luckily my good friend Christine happens to be in Asunción right now, studying Guaraní and blogging about it from time to time. I emailed her with my guess at pronunciation: "ee-vee-vee", but was sadly corrected:

The y here is super hard to pronounce... it's a guttural vowel unlike any that we have in either English or Spanish. My guess is that to replicate it, one should imagine the sound one might make when punched in the gut.

I tried that—lightly hitting my stomach while trying to get out a couple of v's—to much amusement but no avail. This Guaraní phonology offers more analogues (German ü, Russian y, French u) and detailed anatomical instructions ... but I still can't get it to mesh right with the v's.

I do now know that yvy means "earth", and -guy seems to be a suffix meaning "under", with the alternate -vy suffix meaning "half". That's a big maybe considering how little I know about the language, but "under-earth silver" seems a good guess for buried treasure.

Meanwhile, Christine ends her blog post on the subject with another amusing observation:

There's another guttural vowel, too. Well, nasal-guttural vowel. It's written as y with a tilde over it (looks like ñ but instead of having an n it's got a y). To the best of my listening ability, this sounds like the sound you hear, in Super Mario Bros II, when little Mario or Luigi (depending on whether you're the first player or second player) jump up into the air just at the moment when you hit the button. Is it the B button or the A? I can't remember... it's been a while since I last played.

The tilde-y is actually available in (very rough) Unicode: Ỹ and ỹ. For some reason, though, they didn't wind up encoding a tilde-g, which is also used in the language, so I think people either type it as g~ or as ĝ with a neat little French hat.

Speaking of little hats in France: another good friend, recently back from Paris, emailed me about the odd Space-Invaders-style mosaic graffiti that he saw around town. Clicking through the photo gallery, I found, among the aliens, a little Super Mario by a brasserie. Vandalism seems much less offensive when it's done using more traditional artisanal methods.