Piro is a poorly attested, extinct

Tanoan language Tanoan , also Kiowa–Tanoan or Tanoan–Kiowa, is a family of languages spoken by indigenous peoples in present-day New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Most of the languages – Tiwa (Taos, Picuris, Southern Tiwa), Tewa, and Towa – a ...

once spoken in the more than twenty

Piro Pueblos Piro Pueblo : The Piros (not to be confused with the Piros of the Ucayali basin in Peru) are a Native American Pueblo people whose ancestors lived in a number of pueblos in the Rio Grande Valley around modern Socorro, New Mexico, USA. The now e ...

near

Socorro, New Mexico Socorro (, '' sə-KOR-oh'') is a city in Socorro County in the U.S. state of New Mexico. It is in the Rio Grande Valley at an elevation of . In 2010 the population was 9,051. It is the county seat of Socorro County. Socorro is located south of A ...

. It has generally been classified as one of the

Tiwa languages Tiwa (Spanish ''Tigua'', also ''E-nagh-magh'') is a group of two, possibly three, related Tanoan languages spoken by the Tiwa Pueblo, and possibly Piro Pueblo, in the U.S. state of New Mexico. Subfamily members and relations Southern Tiwa is ...

, though Leap (1971) contested whether or not Piro is truly a Tanoan language at all.Leap, William L. (1971) "Who Were the Piro?" ''Anthropological Linguistics'' 13: pp. 321-330 The last known speaker, an elderly woman, was interviewed by Mooney in 1897, and by 1909 all Piro members had

Mexican Spanish Mexican Spanish ( es, español mexicano) is the variety of Dialect, dialects and Sociolect, sociolects of the Spanish language spoken in Mexican territory. Mexico has the largest number of Spanish speakers, with more than twice as many as in a ...

as their native language.

Corpus

The corpus of Piro is limited to place names, two vocabularies and an 1860 translation of the Lord's Prayer using Spanish orthography: The Piro-origin place names listed by Bandelier are Abo, Arti-puy, Genobey, Pataotry, Pil-abó, Qual-a-cú, Quelotetrey, Tabirá ( Gran Quivira), Ten-abó, Tey-pam-á, Trenaquel and Zen-ecú (

Senecú The Piro pueblo of Senecú was the southernmost occupied pueblo in New Mexico prior to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. It was located on the west bank of the Rio Grande within sight of the Piro pueblo of San Pasqual. Colonial Spanish documents consi ...

Vocabulary

As Piro was morphologically

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative langu ...

, words were built from prefixes, stems and suffixes. For example, ''quen-lo-a-tu-ya-é'' ("mosquito") is

glossed A gloss is a brief notation, especially a marginal one or an interlinear one, of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text or in the reader's language if that is different. A collection of glosses is a '' ...

as "the insect that bites". Piro was reportedly

mutually intelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an ...

with

Isleta Pueblo of Isleta ( tix, Shiewhibak , kjq, Dîiw'a'ane ; nv, Naatoohó ) is an unincorporated community and Tanoan pueblo in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, United States, originally established in the . The Southern Tiwa name of the pueblo ...

with many shared words and case stems. Of the 180 words in Bartlett's Piro vocabulary, 87% were identical or nearly so to their corresponding stems in Southern Tiwa. The vocabulary created by Harrington also contains several

loanwords A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because the ...

from Spanish, such as ''pipa-hem'' for "pipe" (from Spanish ''pipa'').

References

External Resources

1894-7 Field Notes by James Mooney
Tanoan languages Extinct languages of North America Languages extinct in the 20th century {{indigenousAmerican-lang-stub