| Coahuilteco | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Mexico, United States |
| Region | Coahuila, Texas |
| Ethnicity | Quems, Pajalat, etc. |
| Extinct | 18th century |
| Dialects |
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | xcw |
xcw | |
| Glottolog | coah1252 |
 Coauhuilteco language | |
Coahuilteco was one of the Pakawan languages that was spoken in southern Texas (United States) and northeastern Coahuila (Mexico). It is now extinct.
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. [1] This proposal has been challenged by Campbell, [2] who considers its sound correspondences unsupported and considers that some of the observed similarities between words may be due to borrowing.
| Bilabial | Inter- dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | labial | ||||||||
| Nasal | m | n | |||||||
| Plosive/ Affricate | plain | p | t | ts | tʃ | k | kʷ | ( ʔ ) | |
| ejective | pʼ | tʼ | tsʼ | tʃʼ | kʼ | kʷʼ | |||
| Fricative | ( θ ) | s | ʃ | x | xʷ | h | |||
| Approximant | plain | l | j | w | |||||
| ejective | lʼ | ||||||||
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i / iː | u / uː | |
| Mid | e / eː | o / oː | |
| Open | a / aː |
Coahuilteco has both short and long vowels. [3]
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. [4] [5]
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).
Dios
God
tupo·-n
DEM-1CON
naxo-xt'e·wal
1pS-annoy
wako·
CAUS
'We annoyed God'
Dios
God
tupo·-m
DEM-2CON
xa-ka·wa
2S-love
xo
AUX
e?
Q
'Do you love God?'
Dios
God
tupo·-t
DEM-3CON
a-pa-k'tace·y
3S-SUB-pray(PL)
'that (all) pray to God'
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:
saxpame·
sins
pinapsa·i
you
[xami·n
(OBJ)
ei-Obj
xa-p-xo·]
2-sub-know
tupa·-n
DEM-1C
‘the sins (which) you know’
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):
pi·lam
people
apšap’a·kani
good.PL
[ei-SUBJ
pi·nwakta·j
things
[Dios
God
(∅)
(DEM)
pil’ta·j
pronj
a-pa-ta·nko]
3-sub-command
tuče·-t
DEM-3C
a-p-awa·y]
3-sub-do.PL
tupa·-t
DEM-3C
‘(He will carry to heaven) the good people [who do the things [that God commands]]’.
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