Extinct Language Research Articles

Using older Khoisan sources: quantifier expressions in Lower Nosop varieties of Tuu

This paper tries to demonstrate that older sources on extinct Khoisan languages can provide valuable information for modern linguistic research in spite of their problems concerning transcription, translation, and morphosyntactic analysis of the data. This is done with the example of quantitier expressions in two little known varieties of the Tuu family (alias Southern Khoisan), spoken in the wider area of the Lower Nosop, namely|' Auni and| Haasi. In particular, this new analysis corroborates the closer alignment of the two vis-a-vis other Tuu languages as proposed by Dorothea Bleek, but also shows that they display as a group a considerable affinity to the !Xō-o cluster. which goes against the currently dominating proposal on Tuu classification.

Grammar Notes on Siraya, an Extinct Formosan Language

This is an attempt to unravel the grammar of a gospel text in Siraya, an extinct West Formosan language. It includes a discussion of the historical setting, the spelling, phonological features, function words, relation markers, morphosyntax of the verb, and the use of deictic verbs as prepositions. Regarding verbal morphosyntax, special attention is given to case marking suffixes, verbal classifiers, compound verbs, and anticipating sequences. Verbal classifiers are lexical elements prefixed to a root (a verb, adverb, or noun) with which they constitute the overall meaning of the resulting verb (mattdy- 'talking, saying' + vli 'reciprocating, doing in return'-< mattdy-vili 'to answer'; mattdy- + rx 'mind' -X mattdy-rtx 'talk to oneself'). Compound verb constructions are constructions in which auxiliaries assume the functions of adverbs in English. These auxiliaries form an open class and are in fact the head of the verb phrase, as they carry most of the marking. An anticipating sequence is an element of a verb that is prefixed to the preceding auxiliary. 1. INTRODUCTION. This article is a report on work in progress on the linguistic analysis of Siraya. Together with Favorlang, another extinct Formosan language, Siraya was used for missionary purposes during the occupation of West Formosa by the Dutch East India Company between 1624 and I66I. Section 2 presents a historical background against which Siraya was used by Calvinist missionaries; section 3, an account of the language materials that the latter collected and that have survived time, as well as an account of previous linguistic work on Siraya; section 4, an outline of the procedure that I am following for their analysis; section 5, a treatment of some of the orthographic and phonemic difficulties involved in their analysis; and section 6, a short outline of Siraya grammar. 2. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND.2 In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company tried to establish trade relations with China. It wanted to monopolize trade between China and Europe. It also hoped to be able to monopolize trade between China and Japan, as the Chinese emperor prohibited direct trade contacts between the Japanese and the Chinese. But the Chinese, who were not particularly interested in opening up their economy to western countries

Purism vs. compromise in language revitalization and language revival

ABSTRACTConservative attitudes toward loanwords and toward change in grammar often hamper efforts to revitalize endangered languages (Tiwi, Australia); and incompatible conservatisms can separate educated revitalizers, interested in historicity, from remaining speakers interested in locally authentic idiomaticity (Irish). Native-speaker conservatism is likely to constitute a barrier to coinage (Gaelic, Scotland), and unrealistically severe older-speaker purism can discourage younger speakers where education in a minority language is unavailable (Nahuatl, Mexico). Even in the case of a once entirely extinct language, rival authenticities can prove a severe problem (the Cornish revival movement in Britain). Evidence from obsolescent Arvanitika (Greece), from Pennsylvania German (US), and from Irish in Northern Ireland (the successful Shaw's Road community in Belfast) suggests that structural compromise may enhance survival chances; and the case of English in the post-Norman period indicates that restructuring by intense language contact can leave a language both viable and versatile, with full potential for future expansion. (Revival, purism, attitudes, norms, endangered languages, minority languages, contact)

Archaeology, Genetics and Linguistic Diversity

The current convergence is outlined between the three approaches to human diversity now offered by the disciplines of archaeology, histoncal linguistics and molecular genetics. The potentialities and pitfalls in the genetic evidence are reviewed. The outlines of the new account of linguistic diversity which may now be discerned receive a measure of support from the genetic evidence which is, however, especially in its application to the origins of the world's languages, subject to problems of interpretation. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all the extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects had to be included, such an arrangement would, I think, be the only possible one ... this would be strictly natural, as it would connect together all languages, extinct and modern, by the closest affinities, and would give the filiation and origin of each tongue (Darwin 1859: 405). It seems to me obvious that, though, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, unity of languages may afford a certain presumption in favour of the unity of stock of the peoples speaking those languages, it cannot be held to prove that unity of stock, unless phillologers are prepared to demonstrate that no nation can lose its language and acquire that of a distlinct nation, without a change of blood corresponding with the change of language (Huxley 1865: 260).

The Alsea Noun Phrase

This paper examines the structure of the noun phrase in Alsea, an extinct language of the Oregon Coast., with particular attention to the behavior of a clitic occurring in the second position within the noun phrase.

Names and Peoples in Incaic Quito: Retrieving Undocumented Historic Processes Through Anthroponymy and Statistics

When analyzed statistically, the distribution of verbal elements in some written sources, like that of objects in archeological sites, yields culture‐historical data independent of artifacts' intended meaning. A 1559 case study from highland Ecuador uses personal names and their parts to detect cultural differences in aboriginal society and their changing relation to superordinate Inca culture. This can be done even with undeciphered names from an extinct language, suggesting a fortiori that the method is generalizable.

A Note on Extinct Languages of Northwest Mexico of Supposed Uto-Aztecan Affiliation

Previous articleNext article No AccessNotes and ReviewsA Note on Extinct Languages of Northwest Mexico of Supposed Uto-Aztecan AffiliationWick R. MillerWick R. Miller Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by International Journal of American Linguistics Volume 49, Number 3Jul., 1983Papers Presented at a Symposium on Uto-Aztecan Historical Linguistics Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/465793 Views: 13Total views on this site Citations: 5Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1983 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Matthias Urban The geography and development of language isolates, Royal Society Open Science 8, no.44 (Apr 2021).https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.202232Matthias Urban, Hugo Reyes-Centeno, Kate Bellamy, Matthias Pache The areal typology of western Middle and South America: Towards a comprehensive view, Linguistics 57, no.66 (Nov 2019): 1403–1463.https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2019-0032Claudia Elia Villalobos Fernández Desarrollo historico de la cultura y pesca prehispanica sinaloense, Sapientiae 5, no.11 (Jul 2019): 58–86.https://doi.org/10.37293/sapientiae51.04Gabriela Caballero Behind the Mexican Mountains: Recent Developments and New Directions in Research on Uto-Aztecan Languages, Language and Linguistics Compass 5, no.77 (Jul 2011): 485–504.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2011.00287.xC. Jill Grady, Peter T. Furst Ethnoscience, Genetics, and Huichol Origins: New Evidence Provides Congruence, Ethnohistory 58, no.22 (Apr 2011): 263–291.https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-1163037

Subject-Object Concord in Coahuilteco

clausal arguments, show person agreement with the subject NP of their clause. Coahuilteco is typologically SOV, with modifiers and determiners/relators following the noun in that order. Subject concord is marked by personal suffixes on the determiner/relator, or alternatively by person-marked particles or auxiliaries. The system serves to bracket constructions and permit tracking of subject scope (or verb dependency relations), fulfilling some of the same functions as switch-reference. An unusual and possibly unique syntactic feature found in Coahuilteco, an extinct Indian language of southern Texas,' is the marking of OBJECT NOUN PHRASES (and other oblique NP's) for agreement with SUBJECT NOUN PHRASES of sentences. In a recent survey of agreement phenomena in the languages of the world, Moravcsik (1978:363) listed fourteen pairs of constituents between which agreement might obtain, none of which was subject and object. The scope of agreement which a noun imposes on other constituents of the sentence ordinarily does not extend beyond the phrase of which it is the head, the verb with which it is associated, or certain nominal or adjectival predicatives (the only exceptions to this limitation of scope being anaphoric pronominalization, reflexivization, and deletion of identical NP arguments within the same clause or conjoined or subordinated clauses). So far as is known, then, the formal marking of subject agreement on object NP's has not been previously reported. Coahuilteco first gained prominence in American Indian linguistics when Sapir 1920, building on Swanton 1915 and on Dixon & Kroeber 1919, linked it (and other languages of southern Texas) with the Hokan languages of California in a Hokan-Coahuiltecan grouping, which Sapir subsequently (1929) made part of his Hokan-Siouan phylum. The latter is no longer generally accepted as a valid grouping by linguists, and the Hokan-Coahuiltecan grouping must be considered questionable (see Bright 1956 for an early critique). The unity of the respective components themselves has even been questioned; and Coahuilteco is now considered an isolate (Goddard 1979), making it one of the few low-level groupings of American Indian languages which has been revised since Powell 1891.

Proto Hianacoto: Guaque-Carijona-Hianacoto Umaua

Previous articleNext article No AccessProto Hianacoto: Guaque-Carijona-Hianacoto UmauaMarshall Durbin and Haydée SeijasMarshall Durbin Search for more articles by this author and Haydée Seijas Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by International Journal of American Linguistics Volume 39, Number 1Jan., 1973 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/465236 Views: 4Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Spike Gildea, Doris Payne, , Is Greenberg's "Macro-Carib" viable?, Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas 2, no.22 (Aug 2007): 19–72.https://doi.org/10.1590/S1981-81222007000200003Willem F. H. Adelaar, Pieter C. Muysken The Languages of the Andes, 42 (Sep 2009).https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486852

In search of language contact between Jarawa and Aka-Bea: The languages of South Andaman

The paper brings forth a preliminary report on the comparative data available on the extinct language Aka-Bea (Man 1923) and the endangered language Jarawa spoken in the south and the central parts of the Andaman Islands. Speakers of Aka-Bea, a South Andaman language of the Great Andamanese family and the speakers of Jarawa, the language of a distinct language family (Abbi 2006, 2009, Blevins 2008) lived adjacent to each other, i.e. in the southern region of the Great Andaman Islands in the past. Both had been hunter-gatherers and never had any contact with each other (Portman 1899, 1990). The Jarawas have been known for living in isolation for thousands of years, coming in contact with the outside world only recently in 1998. It is, then surprising to discover traces of some language-contact in the past between the two communities. Not a large database, but a few examples of lexical similarities between Aka-Bea and Jarawa are investigated here. Words for comparison are selected from the Automated Similarity Judgment Programme-list ASJP (Holman et al. 2008, Brown et al. 2007, 2008, Wichmann 2010) as well as from the Loan Word Typology research (Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009). Although we have data only for 100 items, we further compared the lexical items against the Swadesh list (1955) (see appendix 5). The result achieved exposes for the first time, the possibility of language contact between Aka-Bea and Jarawa in the past. We pose a very relevant question here: can enmities and rivalries induce changes in languages which can be ascribed to contact of a very special kind? We conclude by claiming that prototypical least borrowable lexical items can also be borrowed in a very specific context despite the absence of interactive communication between the two communities.

The Karankawa Invasion of Texas

0. Karankawa is an extinct language once spoken on the coastal islands of Texas and in settlements along and near rivers and bays of the south Texas coast. Only a few vocabularies of Karankawa have been published and their reliability has been questioned. We have something like 29 words of 'Clamcoche' from north and northeast of Matagorda Bay (baie St. Bernard or baie St. Louis) recorded by the brothers Pierre Talon and JeanBaptiste Talon; they lived with the Clamcoche in 1687-1689. We have 106 words or so from an area to the southwest, perhaps near Aransas Bay (baie Saint-Joseph), recorded by Jean B6ranger in 1720. The rest of our published vocabularies were recorded by Gatschet after all the native speakers had disappeared. Gatschet collected 6 words from Sallie Washington and 17 words from Old Simon, both aged Tonkawa Indians, in 1884. He collected about 136 entries (each consisting of an entry word with or without one or more illustrative sentences) in 1888 from Mrs. Alice Williams Oliver. Mrs.

Book Review: I. Biblical Studies: Extinct Languages

Book Review: I. Biblical Studies: Extinct Languages

California Penutian: History and Bibliography

extant languages and records of some of the extinct languages, as is the case for IndoEuropean and Semitic. When, however, he must rely on scanty and often poorly recorded materials, his task is infinitely more complicated. Despite these and many other obstacles, both professional and amateur linguists have speculated about genetic relationships among American languages from the appearance of the first word lists and in some cases even earlier. As a result, many families and stocks have been posited with varying degrees of acceptance by authorities. California Penutian (Miwok, Costanoan, Wintun, Maidu, and Yokuts) is an interesting case in point. This paper presents a brief history of the events leading up to the establishment of this stock covering a period of almost four centuries. 2.1. Contact between the white man and

Book Reviews

Book Reviews Get access Extinct Languages. By JOHANNES FRIEDRICH. New York: Philosophical Library, 1957. x + 182 pages with 74 figures. $5.00. CYRUS H. GORDON CYRUS H. GORDON Brandeis University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume XXV, Issue 4, October 1957, Pages 375–376, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/XXV.4.375 Published: 01 October 1957

Consonant Clusters in Tai

1.1. Very few of the languages of the Tai family still preserve consonant clusters of the type pl-, kl-, pr-, kr-, etc. The two languages generally known to preserve such clusters, at least in part, are Siamese and Ahom, the latter an extinct language of Assam.' The dialects of Wu-ming and Lung-an, both in central Kwangsi province,2 are the other dialects I know which preserve them to a certain extent. The widely scattered distribution of these languages shows that the preservation of the clusters indicates no specially close linguistic relationship among them. Three other languages-Lao,3 a language closely related to Siamese; Shan,' closely related to Ahom; and Dioi of Kweichow province,5 with which Wu-ming shares many common characteristics-have all simplified such clusters. It is safe to assume that the simplification is in most cases an individual dialect development, and that the clusters persisted in each of the various dialect groups before their simplification took place. 1.2. Since we are limited in this study to clusters of consonant plus liquid, the problem is to determine the various existing combinations. This task is complicated by two factors. (1) The first consonant is often modified by the following liquid, so that the modem forms often show altogether different articulations; cf. Siam. plaa 'fish' but T'ien-chow 6aa,6 Siam. took 'strips of bamboo' but Lungchow phjook.7 (2) There are two liquids, I and r, in Proto-Tai (abbr. PT), which are often redistributed in the dialects according to special conditions. Thus, Ahom has 1 after unaspirated initial consonants and r after aspirated initial consonants; Wu-ming has 1 in clusters, but r alone. Siamese is the only language where various contrasts are possible (pl-, pr-, phl-, phr-, etc.); but even there, as the comparative evidence shows, many clusters have been simplified, and some combinations (pr-, tr-, etc.) are hardly found to have correspondences in any other language except Lao. These forms may be either proven or suspected

The Position of Apalachee in the Muskogean Family

1. Apalachee is an extinct language of Florida. It has long been known to belong to the Muskogean family of languages, but, so far as I am aware, it has never been assigned to its proper position within the family on the basis of strict phonological considerations. Handbook of American Indians,1 under the heading Apalachee, it is stated that these Indians are linguistically more nearly related to the Choctaw than to the Creeks. the same source, under the heading Muskogian, Apalachee is put in the same subgroup with Hitchiti, probably on the strength of Gatschet's opinion, viz., The Hitchiti, Mikasuki, and Apalachi languages form a dialectric group distinct from Creek and the western dialects [by which he means Choctaw and Chickasaw], and the people speaking them must once have had a common origin.2 Swanton, on the other hand, holds a different opinion, which he states in speaking of the Apalachicola, a town of the Creek Confederacy not to be confused with Apalachee: In recent times Apalachicola has always been classed by the Creeks as a Hitchiti-speaking town, while the fragment of Apalachee that has come down to us