Coahuilteco was one of the Indigenous languages that was spoken in southern

Texas Texas ( , ; or ) is the most populous U.S. state, state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. It borders Louisiana to the east, Arkansas to the northeast, Oklahoma to the north, New Mexico to the we ...

(United States) and northeastern

Coahuila Coahuila, formally Coahuila de Zaragoza, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Coahuila de Zaragoza, is one of the 31 states of Mexico. The largest city and State Capital is the city of Saltillo; the second largest is Torreón and the thi ...

(Mexico). It is now

extinct Extinction is the termination of an organism by the death of its Endling, last member. A taxon may become Functional extinction, functionally extinct before the death of its last member if it loses the capacity to Reproduction, reproduce and ...

, and is typically considered to be a language isolate, but has also been proposed to be part of a Pakawan family.

Classification

Coahuilteco was grouped in an eponymous

Coahuiltecan The Coahuiltecan were various small, autonomous bands of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Native Americans who inhabited the Rio Grande valley in what is now northeastern Mexico and southern Texas. The various Coahuiltecan groups were hunter ga ...

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. He ...

in 1891, later expanded by additional proposed members by e.g.

Edward Sapir Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American anthropologist-linguistics, 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 ...

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 A language isolate is a language that has no demonstrable genetic relationship with any other languages. Basque in Europe, Ainu and Burushaski in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, Haida and Zuni in North America, Kanoê in South America, and Tiwi ...

. 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. It is now considered a language isolate.

Phonology

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):

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