Golf languages
The Gulf languages form a hypothetical North American language family made up of the Muskogee languages on the one hand and four extinct individual languages that were previously regarded as isolated , namely Natchez , Tunica , Atakapa and Chitimacha .
The Gulf languages were proposed by Mary Haas (Haas 1951, 1952) as a language family, but this family could not be clearly identified by comparative linguistics . Historical linguists such as Lyle Campbell (Campbell and Mithun 1979, Campbell 1997) mention the relationship as unproven, although some Muskogee linguists believe that the Muskogee languages are at least related to Natchez (Campbell 1997: 305).
In any event, some specialists in Muskogee linguistics, including Mary Haas and Pamela Munro (Munro 1995), saw the hypothesis of a golf language family as promising; Haas said the closest related language of the Muskogee languages would be Natchez, followed by Tunica, Atakapa and - more dubious - Chitimacha. One difficulty in verifying the hypothesis is the lack of accessible primary sources. Most of the notes on Chitimacha and Natchez are as yet unpublished and are in archives.
literature
- Lyle Campbell : American Indian Languages. The Historical Linguistics of Native America (= Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics. 4). Oxford University Press, New York NY et al. 1997, ISBN 0-19-509427-1 .
- Lyle Campbell, Marianne Mithun (Ed.): The Languages of Native America. Historical and Comparative Assessment. University of Texas Press, Austin TX et al. 1979, ISBN 0-292-74624-5 .
- Mary R. Haas : The Proto-Gulf word for water (with notes on Siouan-Yuchi). In: International Journal of American Linguistics. Vol. 17, No. 2, 1951, ISSN 0020-7071 , pp. 71-79, JSTOR 1263263 .
- Mary R. Haas: The Proto-Gulf word for land (with notes on Proto-Siouan). In: International Journal of American Linguistics. Vol. 18, No. 4, 1952, pp. 238-240, JSTOR 1263321 .
- Pamela Munro: Gulf and Yuki-Gulf. In: Anthropological Linguistics. Vol. 36, No. 2, 1994, ISSN 0003-5483 , pp. 125-222, JSTOR 30028292 .