Tonkawa language
| Tonkawa | |
|---|---|
| Native to | United States |
| Region | Western Oklahoma, South-central Texas and into New Mexico |
| Extinct | ca. 1940 |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | tonk1249 |
Pre-contact distribution of the Tonkawa language
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The Tonkawa language was spoken in Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico by the Tonkawa people. A language isolate, with no known related languages, Tonkawa is now extinct. Members of the Tonkawa tribe now speak English.
Tonkawa has 10 vowels:
Tonkawa has 15 consonants:
There are two environments in which consonant clusters occur in Tonkawa:
Repeated or identical consonants are treated as one unit. However, the condition that causes this repetition has not been fully analyzed.
There are cases where the glottal stop is not used in the cluster or combination
There are certain consonants that can either begin or end in a cluster. However, if the cluster begins the syllable, there can be no intervening vowel.
Initial stem syllables that begin with h-
Final stem syllables
An interesting feature of Tonkawan phonology is that the vowels in even-numbered syllables are reduced. That is, long vowels are shortened, while short vowels disappear. Analyses of this were given by Kisseberth (1970), Phelps (1973, 1975) and Noske (1993).
The Tonkawa language is a syllabic language that bases its word and sentence prosody on even stressed syllables.
There are five types of syllable arrangements: (CL consonant, CC: consonant cluster, V: vowel)
Morphological terms that are important for Tonkawa:
These are distinguished by hyphens. Example: ka-la 'mouth'
The morphemes in Tonkawa can be divided as follows:
I. Themes
In Tonkawa the theme is composed of morphologic units. The basic unit is the stem. The stem is composed of two elements (the consonant and vowel) and modified by affixes. The theme, or stem, is functional, which means it changes as more affixation is added. This leads to the fusion of the stem and affix where it becomes difficult to isolate the word into its smaller units.
II. Affixes
III. Enclitics
Unlike English, where the pronouns, nouns, verbs, etc. are individual words, Tonkawa forms these parts of speech in a different manner. In Tonkawa, the most important grammatical function is affixation. This process shows the subjects, objects, and pronouns of words and/or verbs. Within affixations, the suffix has more importance than the prefix.
The differenation between subject and object is shown in the word ending, aka the suffix. While the word order tends to be subject, object, verb (SOV), compounding words is very common in Tonkawa. Reduplication is very common in Tonkawa and affects only the verb themes. Usually only one syllable is duplicated, and this duplication symbolizes a repeated action, vigorous action, or a plural subject.
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