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Proto-Iroquoian language

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Proto-Iroquoian
Reconstruction ofIroquoian languages
Era1500 BCE

Proto-Iroquoian is the reconstructed ancestor of the Iroquoian languages. In 1961, Floyd Lounsbury estimated from glottochronology a time depth of 3,500 to 3,800 years for the split of North and South Iroquoian.

At the time of early European contact, French explorers in the 16th century encountered villages along the St. Lawrence River, now associated with the St. Lawrence Iroquoian. Other better known northern tribes took over their territory and displaced them, and were later encountered by more French, European and English colonists. These tribes included the Wendat and Neutral in modern-day Ontario, first encountered by French explorers and traders; the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee League (Iroquois) in Upstate New York and Pennsylvania, and the Erie Nation and Susquehannock peoples in Pennsylvania.

Southern speakers of Iroquoian languages ranged from the Cherokee in the Great Smoky Mountains, to the Tuscarora and Nottoway in the interior near the modern Virginia/North Carolina border.

Subdivisions

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The Iroquoian languages are usually divided into two main groups: Southern Iroquoian (Cherokee) and Northern Iroquoian (all others) based on the great differences in vocabulary and modern phonology.[citation needed] Northern Iroquoian is further divided by Lounsbury and Mithun into Proto-Tuscarora-Nottoway and Lake Iroquoian.[citation needed] Julian does not believe Lake Iroquoian to be a valid subgrouping.[1]

History of studies

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Isolated studies were done by Wallace Chafe, Karin Michelson, and Blair Rudes.[2][3][4] There have also been several works of internal reconstruction for daughter languages, in particular Seneca and Mohawk. A preliminary full reconstruction of Proto-Iroquoian was not provided until Charles Julian's work in 2010.[5]

Phonology

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Proto-Iroquoian as reconstructed shares the Iroquoian languages' notable typological traits of small consonant inventories, complex consonant clusters, and a lack of labial consonants.

Vowels

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The reconstructed vowel inventory for Proto-Iroquoian is:[6]

Front Central Back
Close i   iː u   uː
Mid e   eː   ẽ   ẽː o   oː   õ   õː
Open a   aː

Like later Iroquoian languages, Proto-Iroquoian is distinguished in having nasal vowels /õ/ and /ẽ/, although it has more than in its daughter languages.

Consonants

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The reconstructed consonant inventory for Proto-Iroquoian is given in the table below. The consonants of all Iroquoian languages pattern so that they may be grouped as (oral) obstruents, sibilants, laryngeals, and resonants.[7]

Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Plosive t k   kʷ ʔ
Affricate ts
Fricative s h
Nasal n
Approximant ɹ j w

Morphology

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Reconstructed functional morphemes from Charles Julian:[8]

Lexicon

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Reconstructed lexical roots and particles from Charles Julian:[8]

Notes

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References

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  • Barbeau, Marius (1960). Huron-Wyandot Traditional Narratives in Translations and Native Texts. Anthropological Series. Vol. 47. Ottawa: National Museum of Canada.
  • Chafe, Wallace (1977a). "Accent and Related Phenomena in the Five Nations Iroquois Languages". In Hyman, Larry (ed.). Studies in Stress and Accent. Southern California Occasional Papers in Linguistics. Vol. 4. pp. 169–181.
  • Julian, Charles (2010). A History of the Iroquoian Languages (PDF) (PhD thesis). University of Manitoba.
  • Lounsbury, Floyd G. (1961). "Iroquois-Cherokee Linguistic Relations". In Fenton, William; Gulick, John (eds.). Symposium on Cherokee and Iroquois Culture. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin. Vol. 180. pp. 11–17.
  • Lounsbury, Floyd G. (1978). "Iroquoian Languages". In Trigger, Bruce G. (ed.). Northeast. Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 15. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. pp. 334–343. LCCN 77-17162. OCLC 12682465.
  • Michelson, Karin (1988). A Comparative Study of Lake-Iroquoian Accent. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ISBN 1-55608-054-9.
  • Mooney, James (1900). Myths of the Cherokee. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
  • Rudes, Blair A. (1995). "Iroquoian Vowels". Anthropological Linguistics. 37 (1): 16–69. JSTOR 30028042.