54. Possible Relatives in the Americas
The Fuegian-Patagonian Languages
by George Weber
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Table of Contents
1. South American languages 2. The South American Cone - a refuge 3. The Languages under consideration here |
In their article "What does digital technology have to do with Yaghan" Leonore Grenoble and Lindsay Whaley (Linguistic Discovery, Vol. 1, Issue 1, year 2002) expressed the following trenchant thoughts:
Research that involves the collection of language data is notoriously labor intensive, often requiring fieldwork in remote places, where travel alone is extremely time-consuming, not to mention expensive. Funding and institutional support for such research is limited, and often impossible to obtain without the attendant claim on the part of the researcher that paradigm-shifting theoretical ussues lurk behind the data. Prestige within the acadmy does not come through careful analyses of the grammatical categories of Oneida, the nasal phonemes of Tequistatec, or vowel mergers in Pittsburgh, but through pronouncements of innate linguistic structures, the evolutionary development of language or breakdowns in communication between the sexes.Such realities provide powerful incentives to avoid constructing research projects that entail to great an emphasis on the gathering of primary linguistic data. It is a wonder that many linguists still do so. And yet most of these data - dutyfully recorded in notebooks, computer files, as well as on cassette and video tapes - are hidden away in offices and library collections around the world. Most of this information will never find its way out of these caches. Collectively, linguists know far more about the languages of the worl than one might gather from the published material, but that knowledhe remains disconnected and impossible to access.
1. Language families in South America and "the Cone"
Map adapted from William Bright, 1992, Internatinal Encyclopaediaof Linguistics, Oxford University Press
2. The South American Cone - a refuge
The William Bright's International Encyclopaedia of Linguistics (1992) has the following to say on the noticeable empty are of the South American cone:
The third division or area of South America includes none of the major language families of the Highland or Lowland areas. Its distinguishing feature is the relatively large number of language groupings; some are little known, and many can be classified as language isolates. In addition, languages are characterized by small populations of speakers. Research on the indigenous languages of this region (e.g. Araucanian, Guaycuruan, or Chon) is not as detailed or as well known as studies of Lowland or Highland languagesCommon areal features for the Southern Cone are especially interesting. Semantic notions of position appear morphologically from Fuegian languages all the way north to the borders of the highland region, and to Quechua and Aymara. These languages have many devices to situate the visual location of the noun subject or object relative to the speaker.
Tense, aspect, and number are expressed as part of the morphology of location, direction, and motion. Phonologically, palatalization is a common feature in languages of the Southern Cone. More back consonants than front consonants occur, and most languages have a five-vowel system. The basic word order is SVO, but other orders are frequent as well. Gender is unmarked in most nominal roots; however, inherent gender is marked in affixes, especially in attributive forms. Bound nominal roots reflect the notion of inalienability.
It is our contention that the South America Cone has a larger tnumber of small scale and isolate language groups because its geographical shape has made for a last refuge of people and languages forced to move south by the accelerating peopling of the Americas from the north after 10,000 years ago. All of the Americas, including the Cone, were only thinly populated during the pleistocene. With the advent of the warmer holocene, mass migrations from Siberia across the Bering Strait became possible and brought the ancestorss of today's Amerinds to the Americas. With a wave of new migrants pushing south, the pre-existing older and less numerous populations would have been swept before them (or, like the Pericu, trapped in a dead-end peninsula) . Many of the older groups ended up in the Cone. The pattern of small, unusual languages concentrated in the Cone would fit that picture. So does the evidence of Genetics.
The only native languages in or near the Cone spoken in sizable areas and with large numbers of speakers are Mapudungu of the Mapuche tribe centred in Chile and the Guarani language that has become an official language in Paraguay and has spread into areas of Brazil and Argentina. It is notable, however, that both these linguistic success stories are (a) located at the outer fringes of the Cone and (b) their success did not begin until after the European conquest. Within the cone, no native language has ever developed beyond a local and tribal stage.
3. The Languages under consideration here
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1. Mapuche (Araucanian) were Amerind people that expanded from the north from the 18th century on and are not directly related to the older southern populations. Patagonian groups: Pampas people: Tehuelche people: Of the Fuegians, the Ona and the Haush were most
closely related to the Tehuelche. They led a very similar
way of life as cold-climate land hunter-gatherers:
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4. A Fuegian and and and Patagonian comparative word list
The following list of a few sample words in the four accessible Fuegian and Patagonian languages indicate how different they are from each other. Even the two most similar people, Kaesqar and Yamana, do not show any similarity this this sample of their vocabulary.
Such differences in vocabulary are not a sign that they are not really related as vocabularies can change rather rapidly. The structure of a language (eg, grammar) is very much slower to change and that does indicate a degree of relationship. Nevertheless, the vocabulary indicates that speakers of one of these languages could not communicate easily with speakers of another of these languages. It also indicates that the languages have been isolated from each other for a considerable time, certainly going back far in prehistory.
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Kawesqar |
Yamana |
Ona |
Aoniekenk |
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Sun |
Areló or aswál-sélas |
Leum or lëm |
Kré or kran |
Sheuen or Shehuen'à |
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Moon |
Iacepáaiselop or ak'éwek-sélas |
Anoka or hánuxa |
Kréen or krä |
Keingueinken or Keingueincon |
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Night |
Ac-kiói |
Lakar |
Kauk'n |
Ter-nsh |
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Day |
Kala |
Maola |
Kerren |
Chocheg Shehuem |
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Man |
Yp'pa or Hoiken |
Ua |
C'ón or Chohn |
Alen, Aln or Alnk |
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Woman |
Ypacolis or Scherkrs |
Kipa or Keepa |
Naa |
Ishé or Enack |
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One |
Takau-Taku |
Kavuéli |
Sós |
Chochieg |
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Two |
Tilkanon |
Amaka |
Sôki |
H'áuke |
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Three |
Uokels-a-tol |
Maten |
Sauki |
Ká'ash |
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Four |
Uokels-a-tol-uokels |
Kargá |
Koni-sôki |
Kague |
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Five |
Teáku-taku |
Kup'asprá |
Kismarey |
K'tsàen |
While there is considerable data (though too much of it remains unpublished in archives) on theFuegian languages, there is little on Tehuelche.
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Linguistic misunderstandings: The problems and misunderstandings that can crop up unnoticed when questions are asked between people who do not share a common language are spendidly illustrated by the following two examples from Tierra del Fuego (source: E.L. Bridges, The Uttermost Part of the Earth, 1951, Hodder & Stoughton, London). The person who spotted many of these misunderstandings was Thomas Bridges, son of the missionary and author of a Yamana dictionary giving 32,000 Yamana words (Rev. Thomas Bridges, 1893, "A few notes on the structure of Yaghan", Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, XXIII/1:53&endash;81; and Rev. Thomas Bridges, 1933, Yamana&endash;English Dictionary., Anthropos-Institut, Mödling, Germany). -- On early maps of Tierra del Fuego there is a place "Yaapoo" and talk of a tribe of the same name inhabiting it. In fact, there was no such tribe and no place of that name. "Yaapoo" is the word for "otter". When someone asked how the land he pointed at was called, the Fuegian with his undoubtedly superior eyesight spotted an otter there and gave the foreigner the Yamana name for that animal. -- a sound on Hoste island (west of Navarino island) is called"Tekenika" and there was supposed to have been a tribe of that name living there. In fact, "Tekenika" (= teke uneka) merely means "I don't understand what you are talking about". |
5. Classifying the Fuegian and Patagonian languages
The classification of the Fuegian and Patagonian languages depends on what linguist one talks to and whose books one reads.
The sometimes grotesque proliferation of tribal names and spelling variations for one tribe in literature does not help. We have tried to stick to the same names and spellings throughout this site for all people and languages, but we may not have been totally successful everywhere. In which case: apologies. The southern Tehuelche, for example, are sometimes known as Aonikenk, Aonekenk, Teushen or just "Tehuelche" while the Kwaseqar are particularly well endowed with names and spelling variations that include Qawashqar, Kaueskar, Qawesqar, Kaweskar, Alakaluf, Halakwulup, Halakwalip, Hekaine, Aksaná and Hekaine. While this list may be exhausting, it is not necessarily exhaustive. Happy searching!
Classification of major languages with a long history and vast amounts of data available is rarely controversial (e.g. the Indo-European language family). How very different the situation of our Fuegian and Patagonian languages, and there are thousands of "minor" tribal languages all over the world in a similar situation. These languages are disappearing faster than the insufficient number of qualified linguists can take their data in the field. That many of these languages are also spoken in difficult climates by often difficult people also does not help. Hence the huge gaps that exist in our linguistic knowledge of the world's languages.
The Fuegian and Patagonian languages illustrate the problem only too well. There is nothing disreputable or "unscientific" about the uncertain classification that is apparent in the tables below. The tables simply illustrate the fact that nothing is known about the history of many of these languages and that the available data is inadequate. Not even all of the material that has been collected in the field for the last 150 years has been published. Multiply this with a thousand other languages world-wide that are in a similar situation and you get an idea of the size of the problem.
Classifying languages at the best of time is more an art than an exact science. In the absence of reliable data, the character and preferences of the classifying linguist become all-important in deciding in which "pot" the languag will land. There are the "lumpers" (inguists who like to classify or "lump" languages together even if there is little or no evidence) while at the other end are the "splitters"(linguists who hate to lump unless there is rock-hard evidence and near-absolute certainty which there seldom is and so the splitters tend to end up with many language isolates). In the middle there are, you may have guessed it already, the "middlers" (sometimes unkindly called "muddlers" by the two extremist wings of the profession). The middlers try to steer a - yes! - middling course.
With well-known and well-studied languages that have a long historical record of written sources and on which hundredss of linguists have worked for centuries (e.g. the Indo-European language family) there is no controversy. With languages that have no written sources and no history and which may be close to extinction, controversy is certain, whatever the classification presented. Splitters will never agree with lumpers. The Fuegian-Patagonian languages are a good example of such a case. classifications.
Extreme splitter
All languages involved are regarded as language isolates. Nobody has actually proposed this for the Fuegian and Patagonianlanguages - the evidence argues too strongly for some grouping of some of the languages involved (and if it is only Ona and Haush which are definitely related but Haush is not often mentioned in published classifications).
Levels Languages LANGUAGE ISOLATES all languages under consideration here
Firm splitter
Adapted from the splendid web-site http://www.ethnologue.com/info.asp.
Only the languages that are of interest here have been considered.
Levels Languages LANGUAGE FAMILY CHON 1. Tehuelche (north and south) 2. Ona (Selk'nam) LANGUAGE ISOLATES Puelche Yamana (Yaghan) Kawesqar (Alakaluf)
Moderate splitter
Adapted from William Bright, 1992, International Encyclopedia of Linguistics
Levels Languages LANGUAGE FAMILY CHON Chon subfamily 1. Ona (Selk'nam) 2. Tehuelche, northern (Künün-a-Güna) 3. Tehuelche, southern (Aoinekenk, Teushen) Alakalufan sub-family 1. Chono (Kaukaue) 2. Kawesqar (Alakaluf)
Moderate lumper
What scheme does your author prefer? While trying to stay neutral in the great "lumpers versus splitters and all versus middlers" linguistic brouhaha (our Association is based based in Switzerland, after all), I feel it right to join in and to shamelessly lump at least the Fuegian and the Patagonian languages into a single group. I feel that any classification on a level above the Chon language family is too speculative in view of the available minimal evidence. So I am admitting to being a muddling middler. Genetically (see Fuegian and Patagonian Genetics ) the Fuegians and Patagonians are quite different from the Amerinds of South America (let alone thos of North America) and so I do not think that there is a general Amerind family. But I am not infallible. Just as you are not.
Levels Languages listed arbitrarily, from
east to wests and north LANGUAGE FAMILY CHON Foot-Indian Fuegian subfamily 1. Ona (Selk'nam) 2. Haush (Manek'enk) Boat-Indian Fuegian subfamily 3. Yamana (Yaghan) 4. Kawesqar (Alakaluf) Patagonian subfamily 1. Puelche 2.Tehuelche, northern (Künün-a-Güna) 3. Tehuelche, southern (Aoinekenk, Teushen) Chon subfamily 1. Chono (extinct)
Firm lumper
(adapted from: Merrit Ruhlen, 1987. A Guide to the World's Languages)
Levels Only the languages of interest to us here are listed by
name here, he complete list would be far too long LANGUAGE FAMILY AMERIND I. Primary branch IV. Andean A. Group F. Southern 1. Subgroup 1. Puelche 2. Mapundungu (Araucarian) 3. Kawasqar-Yamana 4. Patagonian a. Branch 1a. Puelche 2a. Mapundungu, 3a. Kawasqar, 4a. Tehuelche,
2b Huilliche
3b. Yamana
4b. Teushen,
4c. Ona (Selk'nam),
4d. Haush (Manek'enk)
Extreme lumper
All languages involved are regarded as dialectal variants of one
language. Nobody has actually proposed this
- the evidence is too strongly against it.
Levels Languages LANGUAGE Fuegian-Patagonian language
For more information about the Fuegian and Patagonian languages (plus many more) see:
- http://www.ethnologue.com/info.asp
- http://www.language-museum.com/
- http://www.lib.umt.edu/guide/lang/langfing.htm#top
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Last change 1 March 2007
