Indian Linguistic Families of America, North of Mexico: Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1885-1886, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1891, pages 1-142Powell, John Wesley
History
Indian Linguistic Families of America, North of Mexico: Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1885-1886, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1891, pages 1-142
Powell, John Wesley
Indians of North America -- Languages; Indians of North America -- Languages -- Bibliography
These dialects collectively form a remarkably homogeneous family, all of
them, with the exception of the San Luis Obispo, being closely related
and containing very many words in common. Vocabularies representing six
dialects of the language are in possession of the Bureau of Ethnology.
The inland limits of this family can not be exactly defined, although a
list of more than one hundred villages with their sites, obtained by Mr.
Henshaw in 1884, shows that the tribes were essentially maritime and
were closely confined to the coast.
_Population._--In 1884 Mr. Henshaw visited the several counties formerly
inhabited by the populous tribes of this family and discovered that
about forty men, women, and children survived. The adults still speak
their old language when conversing with each other, though on other
occasions they use Spanish. The largest settlement is at San
Buenaventura, where perhaps 20 individuals live near the outskirts of
the town.
COAHUILTECAN FAMILY.
= Coahuilteco, Orozco y Berra, Geografía de las Lenguas de México,
map, 1864.
= Tejano ó Coahuilteco, Pimentel, Cuadro Descriptivo y Comparativo de
las Lenguas Indígenas de México, II, 409, 1865. (A preliminary notice
with example from the language derived from Garcia’s Manual, 1760.)
Derivation: From the name of the Mexican State Coahuila.
This family appears to have included numerous tribes in southwestern
Texas and in Mexico. They are chiefly known through the record of the
Rev. Father Bartolomé Garcia (Manual para administrar, etc.), published
in 1760. In the preface to the “Manual” he enumerates the tribes and
sets forth some phonetic and grammatic differences between the dialects.
On page 63 of his Geografía de las Lenguas de México, 1864, Orozco y
Berra gives a list of the languages of Mexico and includes Coahuilteco,
indicating it as the language of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas.
He does not, however, indicate its extension into Texas. It would thus
seem that he intended the name as a general designation for the language
of all the cognate tribes.
Upon his colored ethnographic map, also, Orozco y Berra designates the
Mexican portion of the area formerly occupied by the tribes of this
family Coahuilteco.[33] In his statement that the language and tribes
are extinct this author was mistaken, as a few Indians still survive who
speak one of the dialects of this family, and in 1886 Mr. Gatschet
collected vocabularies of two tribes, the Comecrudo and Cotoname, who
live on the Rio Grande, at Las Prietas, State of Tamaulipas. Of the
Comecrudo some twenty-five still remain, of whom seven speak the
language.
[Footnote 33: Geografía de las Lenguas de México, map, 1864.]
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