Coahuilteco was one of the

Pakawan languages The Pakawan languages were a small language family spoken in what is today northern Mexico and southern Texas. All Pakawan languages are today extinct. Classification Five clear Pakawan languages are attested: Coahuilteco language, Coahuilteco, C ...

that was spoken in southern

Texas Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...

(United States) and northeastern

Coahuila Coahuila (), formally Coahuila de Zaragoza (), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Coahuila de Zaragoza ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Coahuila de Zaragoza), is one of the 32 states of Mexico. Coahuila borders the Mexican states of N ...

(Mexico). It is now

extinct Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...

Classification

Coahuilteco was grouped in an eponymous

Coahuiltecan The Coahuiltecan were various small, autonomous bands of Native Americans who inhabited the Rio Grande valley in what is now southern Texas and northeastern Mexico. The various Coahuiltecan groups were hunter-gatherers. First encountered by Europ ...

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. H ...

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

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

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 Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The nu ...

. 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.

Sounds

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