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2: Meet the Uto-Aztecan Language Family
- University of New Mexico Press
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1 CHAPTER 1 who’s chasing the uto-aztecans? The working title for this book was “Who’s Chasing the Uto-Aztecans?” The answer to this question is, simply, everyone who is interested in the prehistory of western North America and northern Mexico. Uto-Aztecan refers to a family of languages found in western North America and Mexico, from the “Utes” (Utah) to the Aztecs (central Mexico). The study of the development of the Uto-Aztecan languages from a single, presumed ancestral language (Proto-Uto-Aztecan) is the subject of this book. In terms of area covered and number of languages, Uto-Aztecan (UA) is one of the more important Native American language families. It is the geographic area of the spread of this language family that is important as a construct for the study of western North American prehistory. By comparing its position relative to the geographic spreads of other language families and hypothesized stocks (a stock is a language family of language families) it is possible to discern prehistoric cultural interaction. The following families and stocks are the key players in the game of chess that prehistorians play in reconstructing the prehistory of western North America: • Uto-Aztecan • Athapaskan (part of the Nadene stock) • Hokan, a proposed stock of languages and language families on the periphery of California’s central valleys • Penutian, a proposed stock historically occupying California’s central valleys • Algic, a stock made up of the Algonkian language family and two languages in northern California • Tanoan CHAPTER 1 2 The known language isolates (a language family of one language) of western North America are few, but their locations may still be posited in prehistoric reconstruction. The major reconstructions using language family/stock positions will be reviewed below. The assumption in using the geographic spread of a language family as evidence for prehistory is that ultimately the language family represents a single proto-speech community, with a single language and culture located in a specific area/region in the past. Gauging when that past was clearly is problematic , and is addressed below. But a more nagging (and less obvious) question is: Is the equation of language and culture and even genetic heritage of a community (a tribe, for the sake of argument) always a correct assumption? Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology, warned against this assumption. figure 1. Interstate 5, Central Valley, California. The Central Valley has seen much human traffic since the Proto-Uto-Aztecan speech community occupied the southern valley in the middle Holocene (2000–2500 BP). By using linguistic, archaeological, and genetic markers, it is possible to make inroads and recover some specifics of the prehistory of western North America. (Stock photo by Harris Shiffman, www.123rf.com) [18.119.17.207] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:06 GMT) WHO'S CHASING THE UTO-AZTECANS? 3 Consider the Garifuna people of Belize and the Miskito Coast of Central America. The Garifuna people are of mixed genetic heritage (West African, Native American), with the African ancestry predominating in their physical appearance. Their language is an Arawakan language (despite the older term “Black Carib”), with an estimated 25 percent of the words from Carib and 25 percent from European languages (English, French) plus a handful of words from African languages. Much of their material culture is like that of their neighbors in Belize, but their nonmaterial culture is heavily derived from African belief systems. map 1. Historical distribution of Uto-Aztecan languages. The area in central Texas is the recent (ca. 1700) intrusion of Comanche (Numic subfamily). The southern distribution in Mexico is all Nahuan subfamily. The diversity of Uto-Aztecan is in the north, suggesting a homeland north of Mesoamerica. CHAPTER 1 4 Other than the problem of lumping culture into a single whole (material culture tends to change faster than nonmaterial culture), the problem with the language = culture = biological heritage equation is obvious. For example, the vocabulary of English is basically half French, creating an illusion of common descent. There is no reason to believe that cultural and linguistic mixing did not occur in the past. For instance, half of the word stock of Blackfoot (part of the Algonkian language family) is not Algonkian and comes from some unknown language. Germanic (the subfamily of Indo-European to which English belongs) has the same feature (about half of its native vocabulary is from some unknown non-Indo-European language), but it also has unusual sound changes (the Germanic sound shifts) and changes in...