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5: The American Southwest and Uto-Aztecan
- University of New Mexico Press
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62 CHAPTER 4 “numic spread sure goes good with whitey bread” The title of this chapter reflects native Numic reactions to the “Numic Spread Hypothesis,” of which this chapter is a critique (Roberts and Ahlstrom 2006). The Numic Spread Hypothesis argues for a recent (archaeologically speaking) spread of the Numic languages into the Great Basin along with a seed-beating technology. This hypothesis effectively denies Numic people from participating in discussions about most of the prehistory of the Basin. The usual number of the Numic languages (Numic subfamily, UtoAztecan language family) is six, grouped in three geographical dialect chains: Northern Numic, Central Numic, and Southern Numic. Central Numic is now considered to include three languages, and Southern Numic is the most diverse subgroup, made up of at least five distinctive regional varieties. Synonyms for each language are given in parentheses. northern numic southern numic Northern Paiute (Paviotso, Bannock) Kawaiisu Mono (Monache) Chemehuevi central numic Southern Paiute Timbisha Shoshone (Panamint, Koso) Northern Ute (Uintah-Ouray) Shoshone (Shoshoni) Southern Ute Comanche A literature review of the Numic languages is in Mithun (1999:541–543); Campbell (1997) has nothing substantial to add about Numic linguistics literature . These languages are located mainly in the Great Basin with some 63 map 4. The Numic subfamily. The speech communities that interacted with Numic and other Uto-Aztecan in the past are shown, but the historic extension of Comanche into Texas is omitted. The southern languages (historical Southern Numic with nearby Hopi) were probably spoken in the northern part of the Numic range before the same area was occupied by Northern Numic, based on the distribution of lexical artifacts shared with Maiduan and Washo. [18.117.153.38] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 20:23 GMT) CHAPTER 4 64 southern groups spilling over into the Colorado Plateau. The single exception is the Washo language spoken in the immediate area of Lake Tahoe (tahoe means ‘lake’ in Washo). Washo is not a Uto-Aztecan language (it has the classical symptoms of Hokan). Iannucci (1973) and Freeze and Iannucci (1979) identify several lexical artifacts and several shared phonological and word structure artifacts that define an Eastern Numic made of Central Numic and Southern Numic, as opposed to Western Numic. This has a consequence for the model proposed here for Numic prehistory. the numic spread hypothesis A shift to seed-beating in the eastern Great Basin (Utah) has been seen by archaeologists as a possible time for speakers of the Numic languages to have populated that region, fanning out from Death Valley. The Numic Spread Hypothesis (Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982) seemingly correlates with Lamb’s figure 3. Rocky Mountain landscape with river and meadow. A natural barrier, the Rockies (unlike the Sierras) contained Uto-Aztecan speech and culture, channeling it southward into the American Southwest and northern Mexico. (Stock photo by Olivier Le Queinee, www.123rf.com) "NUMIC SPREAD SURE GOES GOOD WITH WHITEY BREAD" 65 (1958a) model of Great Basin linguistic prehistory. I suggest that this correlation is flawed and will suggest alternative reconstructions below. There are several reasons to discount a single Numic spread. One is that Southern Numic is the most diverse of the Numic dialect continuums, indicating that it spread earlier and diversified more than the other two Numic dialect chains. Other data that rule out a single Numic spread show that Southern Numic was in contact with several other languages families (especially Maiduan) in the western Great Basin in the area that Northern Numic historically occupied. Lamb (1958a), using the age-area method, inferred that the Numic languages spread over the Great Basin from the area around Death Valley. The age-area method holds that the most diverse languages of a language family or subfamily are at the edges of the area over which the languages are spoken. Lamb suggested that Kawaiisu, Timbisha, and Mono are the conservative (less changed, less innovative) members of the Numic subfamily of Uto-Aztecan. They are next to each other in the Death Valley area. Lamb then used glottochronology to infer that the Numic languages had separated about 900 years ago. Other linguists have computed dates for the separation of the Numic languages , usually using extreme (western and eastern) varieties of each of the three dialect chains as samples. Goss (1968) suggested 900 years (Kawaiisu, Southern Ute). Miller and colleagues (1971) suggested 700 years (Timbisha, Shoshone). Hale (1958, 1959) suggested 1,000 years (Northern Paiute, Shoshone , Southern Ute). Hale’s time depth is greater because he sampled all three...