Coahuiltecan

Coahuiltecan is a general name for a group of people who previously lived in the southern Texas region near the Rio Grande river. The earliest Spanish explorers to make contact with the natives in this region describe a prosperous and friendly people. However, they are most often described in their post-contact condition which left them in a state very similar to a society that has survived a terrible disaster. Accounts of these people state that they lived in very dirty and smelly camps and were seen eating rotten meat, dirt, maggots, and bugs. If food was found it was generally deer, rabbit, mesquite beans, nuts,berries, worms, lizards, insects, roots, cacti and occasionally buffalo. Many scholars now believe that as many as 90% of these people have lost their lives due to European disease which in turn may account for how they existed after contact was made. The Coahuiltecan language and culture are now extinct although their descendants are absorbed into the Hispanic populations living in the south Texas region today. A group called the Quems were also recorded as having settled along both banks of the Rio Grande.

Language family

Coahuiltecan (also Paikawa) was a proposed language family that consisted of Coahuilteco and Cotoname. A later proposal expanded the family to also include Comecrudo (Comecrudan), Karankawa, and Tonkawa.

It is now generally believed that all of these languages are unrelated language isolates, with Comecrudo now part of the Comecrudan family.

The Coahuiltecan proposal appeared in John Wesley Powell's 1891 classification of Native American languages.

ee also

* Coahuilteco

Bibliography

* Mithun, Marianne. (1999). "The languages of Native North America". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.

External links

*
* [http://data2.itc.nps.gov/parks/saan/ppdocuments/san%20juan%20cultural%20study2.htm Reassessing Cultural Extinction: Change and Survival at Mission San Juan Capistrano, Texas — Chapter 8: Linguistics]
*