A Prehistory of Western North America: The Impact of Uto-Aztecan Languages

10: A Rejoinder: Comparative Tepiman Mythology and Beyond

255 CHAPTER 9 can proto-uto-aztecan culture be reconstructed? Is the PUA culture level too old to provide concrete details that apply to all cultures speaking UA languages? Recall the basic principle that material culture is more likely to change than is nonmaterial culture. The answer to the questions posed above is at least a partial “yes,” as will be seen in the sets of linguistic artifacts covered in this chapter. Some sets of linguistic artifacts do offer glimpses into PUA culture, however. In the next chapter, there is an extended example of this, drawn from mythology. The following sets of linguistic artifacts are reconstructable, and they tell us something about the physical, social, and mental worlds of the speakers of PUA. domain data natural environment homeland studies (Fowler 1972, 1983) technology words for physical artifacts agriculture words for corn complex (see Hill references in ch. 8) social organization kinship (Shimkin 1941) perception color terms (Hill and Hill 1970) metaphor the “flower world” (Hill 1992) world view ‘die’ verbs (Shaul, below) The natural environment has been covered in the discussions of the PUA homeland, and so has the possibility that the PUA speech community had corn agriculture. The rest of these domains will be discussed below. Most of the data are sets of artifacts of vocabulary (e.g., technology, kinship, color CHAPTER 9 256 terms, flower metaphor), but one is a grammatical artifact: ‘die’ verbs, which reveal something of the PUA world view. proto-uto-aztecan technology In this section, I assemble and talk about UA words that refer to technology. The three cognate sets for ‘digging stick’ show that there was not a single word, and that the time depth of the terms varies (PUA times, Proto-Numic times). The most widely distributed term means ‘hoe’ and is found all over Southern UA languages plus Hopi, suggesting that Hopi borrowed the word as part of the corn complex from Southern UA cultural tradition. The Numic form *poto can also mean ‘walking stick/cane.’ In addition, Classical Náhuatl has three other words meaning ‘digging stick’ (koa-tl, wekpal-li, wekol-li). The first two words for ‘bow’ are probably the same: the Hopi form has metathesis (switching of neighboring sounds): **wata becomes awta. In the forms reflecting **ata ~ ate, the initial /w/ is dropped. The Cupan forms with *kuta-pi are based on PUA **kuta ‘wood.’ As with the roots for ‘digging stick,’ there is no single PUA root for the divergent history of such terms in UA. The ‘arrow’ terms reflect two PUA roots, one of which, **paka alternating with **pako, is based on the PUA root for ‘reed,’ perhaps reflecting a difference in the materials available for arrow making. Of the words for ‘metate,’ the root **mata is universal; the first part of the English and Spanish word metate comes from PUA! The form **te-pa contains the root **te ‘rock,’ and this introduces another problem for the resolution of culture history terms: the difference between two forms of a referent, in this case ‘portable, household mortar’ and ‘bedrock mortar.’ This is even more evident in the several terms for ‘bag/sack,’ which show a varied culture history of such referents , as well as varying forms of the actual referents (as shown by such glosses as ‘pocket,’ ‘sheath,’ and ‘bundle’ in the contributing data in Stubbs 2011). The words for ceramics must refer to different ceramic forms (and purposes ), each term with a varied history. The forms and distributions in Stubbs (2011) for ‘net,’ ‘cloth,’ and ‘shoes’ all look like the information in the table. This shows that simple, single-term, reductionistic reconstructions of UA culture history simply are not possible. In the same vein, the data show that the technology of making pottery probably did not arrive in northerly UA languages from Mexico at a single time, imported by a single wave of UA-speaking migrants. The solution is to reconstruct languages from the ground up, with reference to the forms and functions of physical artifacts. 257 table 9.1. uto-aztecan referents for various artifacts Gloss PUA Distribution ‘digging stick’ **wika ‘hoe’ NUA: Hopi SUA: Tarahumaran, Corachol, Tepiman, Cahitan, Nahuan ‘digging stick’ *poto NUA: Numic (all three branches) ‘digging stick’ *-citu NUA: Numic (Northern, Central) ‘bow’ **ata ~ **ate NUA: Numic, Tubatalabal SUA: Guarijío, Nahuan ‘bow’ **wata NUA: Hopi awta SUA: Tepiman **ga:to ‘bow’ **pakoti ~ *pikoti NUA: Tubatalabal SUA: Tubar, Cahitan...