Coahuilteco was one of the
Pakawan languages
The Pakawan languages were a small language family spoken in what is today northern Mexico and southern Texas. All Pakawan languages are today extinct.
Classification
Five clear Pakawan languages are attested: Coahuilteco language, Coahuilteco, C ...
that was spoken in southern
Texas
Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...
(United States) and northeastern
Coahuila
Coahuila (), formally Coahuila de Zaragoza (), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Coahuila de Zaragoza ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Coahuila de Zaragoza), is one of the 32 states of Mexico.
Coahuila borders the Mexican states of N ...
(Mexico). It is now
extinct
Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...
.
Classification
Coahuilteco was grouped in an eponymous
Coahuiltecan
The Coahuiltecan were various small, autonomous bands of Native Americans who inhabited the Rio Grande valley in what is now southern Texas and northeastern Mexico. The various Coahuiltecan groups were hunter-gatherers. First encountered by Europ ...
family by
John Wesley Powell
John Wesley Powell (March 24, 1834 – September 23, 1902) was an American geologist, U.S. Army soldier, explorer of the American West, professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and director of major scientific and cultural institutions. H ...
in 1891, later expanded by additional proposed members by e.g.
Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American Jewish anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States.
Sap ...
.
Ives Goddard
Robert Hale Ives Goddard III (born 1941) is a linguist and a curator emeritus in the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. He is widely considered the leading expert on the Algonqui ...
later treated all these connections with suspicion, leaving Coahuilteco as a
language isolate
Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The nu ...
. Manaster Ramer (1996) argues Powell's original more narrow Coahuiltecan grouping is sound, renaming it Pakawan in distinction from the later more expanded proposal. This proposal has been challenged by Campbell, who considers its sound correspondences unsupported and considers that some of the observed similarities between words may be due to borrowing.
Sounds
Consonants
Vowels
Coahuilteco has both short and long vowels.
Syntax
Based primarily on study of one 88-page document, Fray Bartolomé García's 1760 ''Manual para administrar los santos sacramentos de penitencia, eucharistia, extrema-uncion, y matrimonio: dar gracias despues de comulgar, y ayudar a bien morir,'' Troike describes two of Coahuilteco's less common syntactic traits: subject-object concord and center-embedding relative clauses.
Subject-Object Concord
In each of these sentences, the object ''Dios'' 'God' is the same, but the subject is different, and as a result different suffixes (''-n'' for first person, ''-m'' for second person, and ''-t'' for third person) must be present after the demonstrative ''tupo·'' (Troike 1981:663).
Center-embedding Relative Clauses
Troike (2015:135) notes that relative clauses in Coahuilteco can appear between the noun and its demonstrative (NP --> N (Srel) Dem), leading to a center-embedding structure quite distinct from the right-branching or left-branching structures more commonly seen in the world's languages.
One example of such a center-embedded relative clause is the following:
The Coahuilteco text studied by Troike also has examples of two levels of embedding of relative clauses, as in the following example (Troike 2015:138):
See also
*
Coahuiltecan languages
Coahuiltecan was a proposed language family in John Wesley Powell's 1891 classification of Native American languages. Most linguists now reject the view that the Coahuiltecan peoples of southern Texas and adjacent Mexico spoke a single or relate ...
*
Coahuiltecan people
The Coahuiltecan were various small, autonomous bands of Native Americans who inhabited the Rio Grande valley in what is now southern Texas and northeastern Mexico. The various Coahuiltecan groups were hunter-gatherers. First encountered by Eur ...
References
Bibliography
* Goddard, Ives (Ed.). (1996). ''Languages''. Handbook of North American Indians (W. C. Sturtevant, General Ed.) (Vol. 17). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. .
* Mithun, Marianne. (1999). ''The languages of Native North America''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (hbk); .
* Sturtevant, William C. (Ed.). (1978–present). ''Handbook of North American Indians'' (Vol. 1-20). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. (Vols. 1-3, 16, 18-20 not yet published).
* Troike, Rudolph. (1996). Coahuilteco (Pajalate). In I. Goddard (Ed.), ''Languages'' (pp. 644–665). Handbook of North American Indians. Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution.
External links
Coahuiltecan Indians
{{DEFAULTSORT:Coahuilteco Language
Pakawan languages
Extinct languages of North America
Indigenous languages of the Southwestern United States
Indigenous languages of the North American Southwest
Native American history of Texas
Hokan languages
Indigenous languages of Texas
Coahuiltecan languages
Language isolates of North America
hr:Coahuiltec Indijanci