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 – ...
once spoken in the more than twenty
Piro Pueblos near
Socorro, New Mexico.
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 Ti ...
, 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 dialects and 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 any other country in ...
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).
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 lang ...
, words were built from prefixes, stems and suffixes. For example, ''quen-lo-a-tu-ya-é'' ("mosquito") is
glossed as "the insect that bites".
Piro was reportedly
mutually intelligible with
Isleta 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 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
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