Coahuilteco language

Coahuilteco was one of the Indigenous languages that was spoken in southern Texas (United States) and northeastern Coahuila (Mexico). It is now extinct, 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 family by John Wesley Powell in 1891, later expanded by additional proposed members by e.g. Edward Sapir. Ives Goddard later treated all these connections with suspicion, leaving Coahuilteco as a language isolate. 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

		Bilabial	Inter- dental	Alveolar		Palatal	Velar		Glottal
							plain	labial
Nasal		Template:IPAlink		Template:IPAlink
Plosive/ Affricate	plain	Template:IPAlink		Template:IPAlink	Template:IPAlink	Template:IPAlink	Template:IPAlink	Template:IPAlink	(Template:IPAlink)
	ejective	Template:IPAlink		Template:IPAlink	Template:IPAlink	Template:IPAlink	Template:IPAlink	Template:IPAlink
Fricative			(Template:IPAlink)	Template:IPAlink		Template:IPAlink	Template:IPAlink	Template:IPAlink	Template:IPAlink
Approximant	plain			Template:IPAlink		Template:IPAlink		Template:IPAlink
	ejective			Template:IPAlink

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	Template:IPAlink		Template:IPAlink
Mid	Template:IPAlink		Template:IPAlink
Open		Template:IPAlink

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 people

Bibliography

• Goddard, Ives (Ed.). (1996). Languages. Handbook of North American Indians (W. C. Sturtevant, General Ed.) (Vol. 17). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. Template:ISBN.
• Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Template:ISBN (hbk); Template:ISBN.
• 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
• Reassessing Cultural Extinction: Change and Survival at Mission San Juan Capistrano, Texas – Chapter 8: Linguistics