The Pame languages are a group of languages in
Mexico
Mexico ( Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guate ...
that is spoken by around 12,000
Pame people in the state of
San Luis Potosí. It belongs to the
Oto-Pamean branch of the
Oto-Manguean language family.
Distribution and languages
Ethnologue notes two living varieties of Pame both spoken in the state of San Luis Potosí: Central Pame, in the town of
Santa María Acapulco, and Northern Pame, in communities from the north of
Río Verde to the border with
Tamaulipas
Tamaulipas (), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Tamaulipas ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Tamaulipas), is a state in the northeast region of Mexico; one of the 31 states which, along with Mexico City, comprise the 32 Federal Entiti ...
.
The third variety, Southern Pame, was last described in the mid 20th century, is assumed to be extinct, and is very sparsely documented. It was spoken in Jiliapan, Hidalgo, and Pacula, Querétaro.
*Northern Pame (Ñãʔũ) (~6,000)
*Central Pame (Šiʔúi) (~6,000)
*Southern Pame (Šiyúi) (†)
Classification
The Pame languages are part of the
Oto-Pamean branch of the
Oto-Manguean language family. They are most closely related to the
Chichimeca Jonaz language
Chichimeca or Chichimeca Jonaz is an indigenous language of Mexico spoken by around 200 Chichimeca Jonaz people in Misión de Chichimecas near San Luis de la Paz in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. The Chichimeca Jonaz language belongs to th ...
, spoken in Guanajuato, and together, they form the Pamean language groups. During the colonial period, two grammatical descriptions were written.
Phonology
Consonants
Berthiaume (2004) report a complex phonology for Northern Pame with contrasts between plain, voiced, aspirated, and glottalized consonants both for the stops, nasals, affricates and approximants.
Pame languages are
tonal but the exact number of tonal contrasts is a matter of debate. Avelino, Gibson and Manrique have analyzed the language as having three tones: high and low level tones and a falling
contour tone (Suárez 1983, pg. 51). However, Berthiaume (2004) argues that only a high and a rising tone exist, no low, level tone.
Vowels
Grammar
Pame grammar is characterized by complex morphophonemics and suppletion. Many grammatical categories are marked by exchanging consonants in patterns that are not fully predictable. The morphology is head-marking, marking agreement with possessors on nouns and with the participants in actions on verbs. Its personal system distinguishes between singular, dual and plural number in all persons, and there is also an exclusive first-person category ("we but not you").
Pame has an
octal
The octal numeral system, or oct for short, is the radix, base-8 number system, and uses the Numerical digit, digits 0 to 7. This is to say that 10octal represents eight and 100octal represents sixty-four. However, English, like most languages, ...
(base-8) counting system, as the Pame keep counting their knuckles, rather than the fingers.
Examples
The following table shows the numbers and some basic words in different varieties of Pame:
[Soustelle, 1937, p. 364-365]
Media
Pame-language programming is carried by the
CDI's radio station
XEANT-AM
XEANT-AM (''La Voz de las Huastecas'' – "The Voice of the Huastecas") is an indigenous community radio station
that broadcasts in Spanish, Nahuatl, Pame and Huastec (Tének) from Tancanhuitz de Santos in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí ...
, based in
Tancanhuitz de Santos
Tancanhuitz is a town and one of the 58 municipalities of the state of San Luis Potosí in central Mexico. It is located in the southeastern part of the state, approximately from the city of San Luis Potosí. The municipality covers an area of 1 ...
,
San Luis Potosí.
References
Bibliography
*Suaréz, Jorge A. 1983. The Mesoamerican Indian Languages. Cambridge: CUP
*Berthiaume, S. C. (2004). A phonological grammar of Northern Pame (Doctoral dissertation, PhD thesis, University of Texas at Arlington).
*Avelino, H. (2006)
The typology of Pame number systems and the limits of Mesoamerica as a linguistic area Linguistic Typology, 9, 493–513.
*Gibson, L. F. (1956). Pame (Otomi) phonemics and morphophonemics. International Journal of American Linguistics, 22(4), 242–265.
*Gibson, Lorna, and Doris Bartholomew. "Pame noun inflection." International Journal of American Linguistics 45, no. 4 (1979): 309–322.
*Manrique Castañeda, Leonardo. "Análisis preliminar del vocabulario pame de Fray Juan Guadalupe Soriano." In Anales de Antropología, vol. 12, no. 1. 2009.
*Castañeda, L. M. (1960). Dos gramáticas pames del siglo XVIII. Anales del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, sexta época (1945-1967), 11, 283–287.
*Lastra, Y. (2015). Tratado del arte y unión de los idiomas otomí y pame; Vocabularios de los idiomas pame, otomi, mexicano y jonaz de Fray Juan Guadalupe Soriano.
*Manrique Castañeda, Leonardo. 1967. Jiliapan Pame. The Handbook of Middle American Indians, ed. by Robert Wauchope, general editor, Norman McQuown, volume editor, vol. 5, 331–48. Austin: University of Texas Press.
*
Soustelle, Jacques 937(1992): ''La familia Otomí-Pame de México Central'', Fondo de Cultura Económica, México DF, .
External links
* ''A Phonological Grammar of Northern Pame'
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pame Language
Indigenous languages of Mexico
Oto-Manguean languages
Oto-Pamean languages
Endangered Oto-Manguean languages