Chitimacha
A Mesoamerican Language in the Lower Mississippi Valley
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5120978 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Cecil H Brown (Northern Illinois University), Søren Wichmann (0000-0002-3257-3087, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology), David Beck (0000-0001-8422-7728, University of Alberta) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 80 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 425-474 |
| Publication date | 2014-10-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal of American Linguistics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-7071 • E-ISSN: 1545-7001 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/677911 |
| OpenAlex | W2088725301 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 10 |
| References cited | 30 |
The comparative method of historical linguistics is carefully applied to the hypothesis that Chitimacha, a language of southern Louisiana now without fully fluent speakers, and languages of the Totozoquean family of Mesoamerica are genealogically related. Ninety-one lexical sets comparing Chitimacha words collected by Swadesh (1939; 1946a; 1950) to words reconstructed for Proto-Totozoquean (Brown et al. 2011) show regular sound correspondences. Along with certain structural similarities, this evidence attests to the descent of these languages from a common ancestor, Proto-Chitimacha-Totozoquean. By identifying regular sound correspondences, the phonological inventory and some of the vocabulary of the proto-language are reconstructed. Reconstructed words relating to maize agriculture and the fabrication of paper indicate that prehistoric Chitimacha speakers migrated to the Lower Mississippi Valley from Mesoamerica. Some speculations on how and when Chitimacha speakers migrated are offered
Ancestor · Archaeology · Linguistics · Mesoamerica · Vocabulary · Archaeology and Natural History · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies
Comparative Reconstruction Probabilistically
Evaluating proposals of language genealogical relationship
The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology and Language
Australian archaeolinguistics
Sino-Tibetan archaeolinguistics
The Indigenous Languages of the Americas
Relative Clauses in Upper Necaxa Totonac
Appositive possession in Ainu and around the Pacific
Paleobiolinguistics of New World Crops and the Otomanguean Language Family
Semantic Alignment in Chitimacha
The Linguistics of Sitting, Standing and Lying
The earliest archaeological maize ( Zea mays L.) from highland Mexico
Linguistic Structures of Native America
The Origin and Diversification of Language
Borrowability and the notion of basic vocabulary
The Quechumaran Hypothesis and Lessons for Distant Genetic Comparison
Perceptual constraints and phonological change
Lexical Acculturation in Native American Languages
Caddo Agriculture on the Western Frontier of the Eastern Woodlands
Sound Correspondences in the World's Languages
The Mexican Connection and the Far West of the U.S. Southeast
The Role of Nahuatl in the Formation of Mesoamerica as a Linguistic Area
A Sketch of Pisaflores Tepehua Phonology
Positional Auxiliaries in Biloxi
Tzotzil auxiliaries
Phonologic Formulas for Atakapa-Chitimacha
Language in the Americas
Anthropological linguistics
The Phonetics of Chitimacha
Language in the Americas
Meso-America as a Linguistic Area
Reconstructing the Paleodiet of the Caddo through Stable Isotopes
Lexical Acculturation in Native American Languages
Mesoamerican Historical Linguistics and Distant Genetic Relationship
On Mesoamerican Linguistics
Automated Dating of the World's Language Families Based on Lexical Similarity
Hieroglyphic Literacy in Ancient Mayaland
| Citations per year | 0.91 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2015 - 2025 (11) |
| Highly cited | No |