Misplaced Pages

#439560

22-687: The Kitanemuk, as a Kawaiisu village. traditionally spoke the a Uto-Aztecan language .Most experts contend that the Kitanemuk were not a separate tribal entity at all but were a group of Kawaiisu who were converted by missionaries to Christianity. As they converted, they gave up the Kawaiisu belief system and lost any ability to speak the local native language Estimates for the pre-contact populations of most native groups in California have varied substantially. Alfred L. Kroeber (1925:883) proposed

44-449: A genetic relation between Corachol and Nahuan (e.g. Merrill (2013) ). Kaufman recognizes similarities between Corachol and Aztecan, but explains them by diffusion instead of genetic evolution. Most scholars view the breakup of Proto-Uto-Aztecan as a case of the gradual disintegration of a dialect continuum. Below is a representation of the internal classification of the language family based on Shaul (2014) . The classification reflects

66-567: A population of 1,770 for the Kitanemuk village.. Thomas C. Blackburn and Lowell John Bean (1978:564) estimated the Kitanemuk alone as 500-1,000. As a village subset of the greater Kawaiisu Nation, their numbers were often understated. It is estimated by current tribal records that the total number of eligible Kawaiisu members is close to 100,000. The Kawaiisu were first contacted by the Franciscan missionary-explorer Francisco Garcés in 1769. Some Kawaiisu were recruited and relocated for

88-507: A selected bibliography of grammars, dictionaries on many of the individual languages.( = extinct ) In addition to the above languages for which linguistic evidence exists, it is suspected that among dozens of now extinct, undocumented or poorly known languages of northern Mexico, many were Uto-Aztecan. A large number of languages known only from brief mentions are thought to have been Uto-Aztecan languages that became extinct before being documented. An "Aztec–Tanoan" macrofamily that unites

110-591: A wave of migration from Mexico, and formerly had many speakers there. Now it has gone extinct in Guatemala , Honduras , and Nicaragua , and it is nearly extinct in western El Salvador , all areas dominated by use of Spanish. Uto-Aztecan has been accepted by linguists as a language family since the early 1900s, and six subgroups are generally accepted as valid: Numic , Takic , Pimic, Taracahitic , Corachol , and Aztecan . That leaves two ungrouped languages: Tübatulabal and Hopi (sometimes termed " isolates within

132-624: Is best understood as a genetic classification or as a geographical one. Below this level of classification the main branches are well accepted: Numic (including languages such as Comanche and Shoshoni ) and the Californian languages (formerly known as the Takic group, including Cahuilla and Luiseño ) account for most of the Northern languages. Hopi and Tübatulabal are languages outside those groups. The Southern languages are divided into

154-586: Is still debate about whether to accept the proposed basic split between "Northern Uto-Aztecan" and "Southern Uto-Aztecan" languages. Northern Uto-Aztecan corresponds to Powell's "Shoshonean", and the latter is all the rest: Powell's "Sonoran" plus Aztecan. Northern Uto-Aztecan was proposed as a genetic grouping by Jeffrey Heath in Heath (1978) based on morphological evidence, and Alexis Manaster Ramer in Manaster Ramer (1992) adduced phonological evidence in

176-595: The Nahuan languages (also known as Aztecan) of Mexico. The Uto-Aztecan language family is one of the largest linguistic families in the Americas in terms of number of speakers, number of languages, and geographic extension. The northernmost Uto-Aztecan language is Shoshoni , which is spoken as far north as Salmon, Idaho , while the southernmost is the Nawat language of El Salvador and Nicaragua . Ethnologue gives

198-687: The Spanish missions of Mission San Fernando Rey de España in the San Fernando Valley , Mission San Gabriel Arcángel in the San Gabriel Valley , and perhaps Mission San Buenaventura at the coast in Ventura County . In 1840, a smallpox epidemic hit the Kawaiisu. Beginning in the 1850s, they were associated with the reservations at Fort Tejon and Tule River. By 1917, some lived on Tejon Ranch and other lived on

220-822: The Tepiman languages (including O'odham and Tepehuán ), the Tarahumaran languages (including Raramuri and Guarijio ), the Cahitan languages (including Yaqui and Mayo ), the Coracholan languages (including Cora and Huichol ), and the Nahuan languages . The homeland of the Uto-Aztecan languages is generally considered to have been in the Southwestern United States or possibly Northwestern Mexico. An alternative theory has proposed

242-674: The Tule River Reservation , located in Tulare County, California . Uto-Aztecan languages The Uto-Aztecan languages are a family of indigenous languages of the Americas , consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico . The name of the language family reflects the common ancestry of the Ute language of Utah and

SECTION 10

#1732775849440

264-714: The Uto-Aztecan languages were noted as early as 1859 by J. C. E. Buschmann , but he failed to recognize the genetic affiliation between the Aztecan branch and the rest. He ascribed the similarities between the two groups to diffusion. Daniel Garrison Brinton added the Aztecan languages to the family in 1891 and coined the term Uto-Aztecan. John Wesley Powell , however, rejected the claim in his own classification of North American indigenous languages (also published in 1891). Powell recognized two language families: "Shoshonean" (encompassing Takic, Numic, Hopi, and Tübatulabal) and "Sonoran" (encompassing Pimic, Taracahitan, and Corachol). In

286-503: The Uto-Aztecan languages with the Tanoan languages of the southwestern United States was first proposed by Edward Sapir in the early 20th century, and later supported with potential lexical evidence by other scholars. This proposal has received much criticism about the validity of the proposed cognate sets and has been largely abandoned since the end of the last century as unproven. Tarahumaran languages The Tarahumaran languages

308-415: The decision to split up the previous Taracahitic and Takic groups, that are no longer considered to be valid genetic units. Whether the division between Northern and Southern languages is best understood as geographical or phylogenetic is under discussion. The table contains demographic information about number of speakers and their locations based on data from The Ethnologue . The table also contains links to

330-500: The early 1900s Alfred L. Kroeber filled in the picture of the Shoshonean group, while Edward Sapir proved the unity among Aztecan, "Sonoran", and "Shoshonean". Sapir's applications of the comparative method to unwritten Native American languages are regarded as groundbreaking. Voegelin, Voegelin & Hale (1962) argued for a three-way division of Shoshonean, Sonoran and Aztecan, following Powell. As of about 2011, there

352-418: The family"). Some recent studies have begun to question the unity of Taracahitic and Takic and computer-assisted statistical studies have begun to question some of the long-held assumptions and consensuses. As to higher-level groupings, disagreement has persisted since the 19th century. Presently scholars also disagree as to where to draw language boundaries within the dialect continua . The similarities among

374-465: The form of a sound law. Terrence Kaufman in Kaufman (1981) accepted the basic division into Northern and Southern branches as valid. Other scholars have rejected the genealogical unity of either both nodes or the Northern node alone. Wick R. Miller 's argument was statistical, arguing that Northern Uto-Aztecan languages displayed too few cognates to be considered a unit. On the other hands he found

396-425: The number of cognates among Southern Uto-Aztecan languages to suggest a genetic relation. This position was supported by subsequent lexicostatistic analyses by Cortina-Borja & Valiñas-Coalla (1989) and Cortina-Borja, Stuart-Smith & Valiñas-Coalla (2002) . Reviewing the debate, Haugen (2008) considers the evidence in favor of the genetic unity of Northern Uto-Aztecan to be convincing, but remains agnostic on

418-541: The possibility that the language family originated in southern Mexico, within the Mesoamerican language area , but this has not been generally considered convincing. Uto-Aztecan languages are spoken in the North American mountain ranges and adjacent lowlands of the western United States in the states of Oregon , Idaho , Montana , Utah , California , Nevada , and Arizona . In Mexico , they are spoken in

440-528: The states of Sonora , Sinaloa , Chihuahua , Nayarit , Durango , Zacatecas , Jalisco , Michoacán , Guerrero , San Luis Potosí , Hidalgo , Puebla , Veracruz , Morelos , Estado de México , and in Mexico City . Classical Nahuatl , the language of the Aztecs , and its modern relatives are part of the Uto-Aztecan family. The Pipil language , an offshoot of Nahuatl , spread to Central America by

462-456: The total number of languages in the family as 61, and the total number of speakers as 1,900,412. Speakers of Nahuatl languages account for over 85% of these. The internal classification of the family often divides it into two branches: a northern branch including all the languages of the US and a southern branch including all the languages of Mexico, although it is still being discussed whether this

SECTION 20

#1732775849440

484-572: The validity of Southern Uto-Aztecan as a genetic grouping. Hill (2011) also considered the North/South split to be valid based on phonological evidence, confirming both groupings. Merrill (2013) adduced further evidence for the unity of Southern Uto-Aztecan as a valid grouping. Hill (2011) also rejected the validity of the Takic grouping decomposing it into a Californian areal grouping together with Tubatulabal. Some classifications have posited

#439560