Piro is a poorly attested, extinct Tanoan language once spoken in the more than twenty Piro Pueblos near

Socorro, New Mexico Socorro (, ''Help:Pronunciation respelling key, sə-KOR-oh'') is a city in Socorro County, New Mexico, Socorro County in the U.S. state of New Mexico. It is in the Middle Rio Grande Valley AVA, Rio Grande Valley at an elevation of . At the 2020 ...

. It has generally been classified as one of the Tiwa languages, though Leap (1971) contested whether or not Piro is truly a Tanoan language at all. The last known speaker, an elderly woman, was interviewed by Mooney in 1897, and by 1909 all Piro members had

Mexican Spanish Mexican Spanish () is the variety of dialects and sociolects of the Spanish language spoken in Mexico and its bordering regions. Mexico has the largest number of Spanish speakers, more than double any other country in the world. Spanish is spo ...

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: , quoted in 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 (word parts), each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglu ...

, 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 In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intellig ...

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 A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...

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

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