Tonkawa horses

[Anthony Grant]

Dear Wally:

If I recall correctlym the di:tamah word is recorded pretty early on in
our records for Caddo.  I know there's a reflex of caballo in some
Dhegiha languages, as John K told me this per litteras some years back.
  It's possible that there was a reflex in Tonkawa that Hoijer,
gatschet, Chowell, Pike et cetera never got.  But Tonkawa wasn't much of
a language for borrowing words - one or two from other local languages,
a couple from English, about 10 from Spanish - just over 1% of the
recorded stem collection for Tonkawa (Hoijer got about 930 items and
there are some more simplexes in the older literature). Caddo didn't
excatly go hog-wild borrowing words from other languages (certainly not
if yo compare its loan tranche with that of, say, a California
Uto-Aztecan language: there are hundreds of hispanisms in Luiseno and
similar languages), but it does boast the most heterogeneous collection
of loans that I know of in any language of the Americas.

Anthony

>>> chafe at linguistics.ucsb.edu 21/04/2004 17:33:58 >>>
Caddo has two words for 'horse', which people often cite to show that
"we
don't all talk alike": kawa:yuh and di:tamah (with falling pitch on the

di:). The di:- part in the latter means 'dog', but I've never been able
to
figure out the -tamah. I mention this because the Caddos were neighbors
of
the Tonkawas, with some linguistic contact, and it's quite possible the

Tonkawas also had an alternative word derived from caballo, which
Hoijer
just didn't happen to record.
--Wally

> A propos of horses, dogs etc.:  Tonkawa had a word for horse that
meant
> 'dog for carrying things'; it had also had one which meant something
to
> do with burdens, which had been used in Gatschet's day -Hoijer
collected
> this word but not n a text (maybe it had been subject to taboo at
some
> time).  Given that Spanish was the major source of loans into
Tonkawa,
> it's a little odd that it never took over a form of caballo/cahuayo.