Spanish and English Loanwords in Taos

Abstract

1. In a paper entitled The Days of the Week in the Language of Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, Lg. 15.51-5 (1939), I expressedthe hope of making detailed studies of all the Spanish and English loanwords I find in the language (p. 52). The present article is a fulfillment of that hope for the materials in my collections. I have not gathered any new material since 1937, and as some of my texts are not completely analyzed, it may be that there are additional loanwords that I have not yet identified. But barring this possibility, the lists here are complete. 1.1. In everyday speech the Taos use many more loans, especially of English origin, but these I was never able to record because there was-once it was known that I knew something of the language-little free conversation in my presence, and what there was I could not write down but only try to remember. My informants reacted to many loanwords with a kind of purism that made it difficult to get them to repeat the words. The items treated here were either recorded in text, with no comment from me until later, or were caught on the wing, as it were. 1.2. The article mentioned above contains a general discussion of bilingualism among the Taos, and of the use of Spanish and English loans (p. 51-2), and has many details of Taos pronunciation; it also mentions previous publications on the language. My paper The Historical Phonology of the Tiwa Languages, Studies in Linguistics 1, no. 5 (1942) [10 p.], gives a reference to additional bibliography, and has some statements about Taos phonemes and morphology; the article there cited, The Relationship of UtoAztecan and Tanoan, by the late B. L. Whorf and myself, AA 39.609-24 (1937), contains some description of the phonology and morphology of Taos (612-13). My article The Kinship and Status Terms of the Tiwa Languages, AA 45.557-71 (1943), briefly describes Taos sounds and treats three of the words presented here (p. 562). For further description reference will have to be made to my Outline of Taos Grammar, which is to appear in the volume Linguistic Structures of Native America, expected to be published by the Viking Fund Publications in 1945. 1.3. In The Days of the Week... I used tilde () for nasal vowels and j for the palatal semivowel, and omitted initial glottal stop. In The Relationship of Uto-Aztecan and Tanoan the letter y was substituted for j. In E. C. Parsons's Taos Tales (Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, 34 [1940]), the footnotes which I supplied containing Taos material have the hook under vowels (,) for nasality (I have not used the tilde since), and use y, but in the two texts in the Appendix (p. 173-81) I retained j, as I thought I would use it in my Outline. For the same reason j was used in the Comparativ Phonology and the kinship paper. This last and the Appendix both show initial glottal stop. Recently, in making a final revision of the text of the Outline, I decided to bring my transcription into line with most Americanist practice, and use y for the semivowel. Inferior w (instead of superior) I introduced in the Comparative Phonology and continue to use it here for reasons I need not go into. The material now presented accordingly uses the following symbols (not all of them actually occurring): a, 4, b, c, c', e, Q, a, f, g, h, i, i, k, kw, k', k'w, l, 1, m, n, o, Q, P, p', p', r, s, t, t', t', u, W, w, x, xw, y, ?, and the accentmarks 'a, la, a, a. Alphabetical order is as shown, but ? is ignored except that a vowel