Comecrudan languages

Comecrudan
EthnicityComecrudo people
Geographic
distribution
Rio Grande Valley
Linguistic classificationHokan ?
Glottologcome1251
Pre-contact distribution of Comecrudan languages. (Distribution continues to the south.)

Comecrudan refers to a group of possibly related languages spoken in the southernmost part of Texas and in northern Mexico along the Rio Grande of which Comecrudo is the best known. These were spoken by the Comecrudo people. Very little is known about these languages or the people who spoke them. Knowledge of them primarily consists of word lists collected by European missionaries and explorers. All Comecrudan languages are extinct.

Family division

The three languages were:

Genetic relationships

In John Wesley Powell's 1891 classification of North American languages, Comecrudo was grouped together with the Cotoname and Coahuilteco languages into a family called Coahuiltecan.

John R. Swanton (1915) grouped together the Comecrudo, Cotoname, Coahuilteco, Karankawa, Tonkawa, Atakapa, and Maratino languages into a Coahuiltecan grouping.

Edward Sapir (1920) accepted Swanton's proposal and grouped this hypothetical Coahuiltecan into his Hokan stock.

After these proposals, documentation of the Garza and Mamulique languages was brought to light, and Goddard (1979) believes that there is sufficient similarity between them and Comecrudan for them to be considered genetically related. He rejects all other relationships.

Powell's original Coahuiltecan, renamed Pakawan and extended with Garza and Mamulique, has been defended by Manaster Ramer (1996), who also sees a relationship with Karankawa probable and Atakapa as a more distant possibility. This proposal has been challenged by Campbell, who considers its sound correspondences unsupported and considers that some of the observed similarities between words may be due to borrowing.

Evidence

The following table of common core vocabulary constitutes the complete evidence given by Goddard (1979: 380) in support of a Comecrudan family. Berlandier's manuscripts contain the only existing records of Mamulique and Garza.

Comecrudo Garza Mamulique meaning
al ai atl 'sun'
eskan an kan 'moon'
apel apiero 'sky'
na knarxe kessem 'man'
kem kem kem 'woman'
apanekla axe aha (?) 'water'
aaul aie 'road'

This page was last updated at 2024-03-20 15:40 UTC. Update now. View original page.

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