Sociological Linguistics

[Larry Trask]

On Thu, 27 May 1999, Max Dashu wrote:

[LT]

>>  A very few other languages
>> -- such as Proto-Oto-Manguean -- have been reconstructed back to around
>> the same time depth.

> What is this, or rather, where was it?

The Oto-Manguean family is spoken today from central Mexico to Costa
Rica; it is one of the largest American families in terms of
geographical extent, speaker numbers, and language numbers.  The total
number of languages is variously counted at anything from 30 to 80,
depending chiefly on how the large and messy Zapotecan dialect continuum
is treated.  In any case, eight major branches are recognized.

The family has been subjected to intensive historical work, mainly by
linguists from the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and these workers
have succeeded in obtaining a substantial reconstruction of the
proto-language.  This, I understand, is widely regarded as one of the
most successful reconstructions in all of American linguistics.  The
proto-language is commonly estimated to have been spoken around 6000
years ago, or perhaps slightly earlier.

For references to the principal published work on the reconstruction of
POM, see p. 157 of Lyle Campbell's book American Indian Languages
(Oxford, 1997).

It should be noted that the O-M languages are perhaps the most
typologically divergent languages in the Americas: they generally permit
only CV syllables, they have elaborate tone systems, and they generally
lack labial consonants.  Some of them are strikingly similar to Chinese.
Even Greenberg reportedly hesitated for a long time before finally
tossing O-M into his "Amerind" grab-bag.


Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk