Uto-Aztecan Homeland

[Lloyd Anderson]

Not sure whether the following has been mentioned in this thread
(I haven't read every single message, I suspect).

Terry Kaufman argues from his studies of loanwords
that Teotihuacan had an elite
from a hypothesized third branch of the Mixe-Zoquean family
(that is, a branch separate from Mixean and from Zoquean),
and that commoners were perhaps Totonacan.
His studies yield a series of contour lines showing the largest numbers of
loan words from this source near Teo, and progressively fewer as one
moves out from there.  That is of course not Nahua.
Terry presented some of this material at a Dumbarton Oaks conference,
which means it will be some time before that is in print.
The data was at that time not yet displayed to make these
contours visually obvious.  Hopefully it will be before long.

My earlier understanding of what justified a traditional view of UA
as having migrated from the North to the South,
dropping off a part of the population at points along the way,
had been that the family tree had the largest number of deep branches
in the north, and progressively shallower branches as one got
closer to Cora-Huichol and to Nahua in the south.
It is of course merely a traditional rule-of-thumb that our default
conclusion should be an origin near where there are the largest number
of such branches represented.
Perhaps that reasoning can be overridden.
Has that evidence been completely rewritten or somehow discounted?
If we have evidence from particular loanwords on corn which seems
to contradict that older framework, perhaps some clever person
can figure out a new synthesis.  (It is some time since I read
Hill's paper on this subject, I'm hoping that someone will point m
to a message or will produce a message which gives a good summary
of the state of the arguments, what is clear now and what is not.)

I much fear that there is a bias in investigations towards results which
involve Nahua, simply because we have preservation of far more
information about Nahua speakers and their language and culture
than we do about others.  Is that taken into account in any evaluations
of probabilities or even plausibilities?

Best wishes,
Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics