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

3: The Linguistic Artifact: Toward a Prehistoric Sociolinguistics

24 CHAPTER 2 meet the uto-aztecan language family The UA language family includes languages indigenous to most of the Great Basin, southern California, Arizona, northern Mexico, and the western coast of Mexico (Sonora, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Narayit, Durango, Zacatecas), plus the various Nahuan varieties, which are sprinkled mainly through central Mexico. (“Nahuan” includes Náhuatl and related languages which are/were spoken by many ethnic groups in Mesoamerica, including the Aztecs.) As the name “Uto-Aztecan” implies, this language family stretches from the Utes of Utah south to the Aztecs. The Prussian scholar Buschmann (1859) noted similarities between some UA languages and Náhuatl, but he believed the vocabulary similarities were due to borrowing, because the Aztecs maintained that they had come from north of Mexico. Daniel Brinton (1891) proposed UA as a language family, but John W. Powell did not include UA as a language family in his rival work (1891), which was more influential in its day. At the end of the 1800s, there was a bias against unwritten languages, which were seen as different from those with a written history (like Indo-European) in that the comparative method sketched in the first chapter could not be applied to them because they changed too quickly, were too primitive, and so on, despite the established study of Algonkian as a language family during the 1800s. Kroeber (1907) used the comparative method to establish the relatedness of the northern languages (see below: Numic, Takic, Tubatalabal, Hopi). Sapir (1913b, 1915) showed the systematic relationship of Southern Paiute (a northern , Numic language) and Náhuatl (a southern language), thus demonstrating that the comparative method worked with data from previously unwritten languages, as well as establishing UA as a bona fide language family. MEET THE UTO-AZTECAN LANGUAGE FAMILY 25 The following subfamilies are the most basic units of UA: Numic Takic Tepiman Tarahumaran Opatan Cahitan Corachol Nahuan The labels “Numic” and “Takic” are based on the word for ‘person’ in those two subfamilies. The name Takic, however, must be taken with some caution, because there has been no final demonstration as to just what it means. At best, it is a geographic grouping (the Takic languages are/were spoken in southern California, roughly in the Los Angeles area and inland). This geographic understanding of Takic implies similarity based on borrowing between languages from the same family, but with varying historical development. The idea is that over time, they borrowed back and forth, producing a great deal of similarity, much of which ultimately came from the same linguistic ancestor. figure 2. U.S. Route 50, the “Loneliest Road in America.” Route 50 goes through the heart of the Great Basin, ending in California. The Proto-Uto-Aztecan dialect chain extended from the southern Central Valley of California into the western Great Basin during the middle Holocene (2000–2500 BP), linked through the Mojave Desert and/or across the Sierras. (Stock photo by Piccaya, www.123rf.com) CHAPTER 2 26 However, there is no single set of sound changes or innovations that define a Takic subfamily as a genetic unit (Kenneth Hill, pers. comm.). Within Takic, however, there are two demonstrated subfamilies: Cupan, which is made up of Luiseño, Cupeño, and Cahuilla (Bright and Hill 1967; Munro 1990, 2000), and Serran, made up of Kitanemuk (Anderton 1988) and Serrano (K. Hill 1967, 2001). A reconstruction of Serran is needed. The Gabrielino language (Munro 2000), spoken to the north of Los Angeles and on Santa Catalina Island, is also grouped as a Takic language. The descendants of the speakers of Gabrielino prefer to call their language Tongva, so that is the term that will be used in this book. Serran and Tongva need to be systematically compared to Cupan to determine if there is a Takic subfamily. In this book, I will use the term Takic as if it designates a subfamily of UA. Numic (Davis 1966; Iannucci 1973) is a clearly defined UA subfamily and is of strategic importance to UA prehistory. Miller (1984) showed, on the basis of a 100-word vocabulary sample, that Numic languages were more closely related to each other than the languages in the Takic grouping were to each other. The Numic languages had a cognate range of 52 percent to 87 percent, while the Takic range was 38 percent to 48 percent. A number of reasons for the Numic sameness will be explored in...