Talk:Kiowa language

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i've been listening to a kiowa audio language course for several months now.

let's just say i don't speak fluent kiowa yet.

Gringo300 01:11, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Status

How many speakers? How many fluent? On TV about 10 years ago there was an old Kiowa man who was recording all the words of the language he could on index cards, many thousands. His own children apparently did not speak Kiowa and were not interested in learning. He has died and I think the program said he was the last fluent speaker. Information about current status and speakers of the language other than specifics of phonology would be great. Badagnani (talk) 08:45, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Marianne Mithun reported about 300 adults of varying degrees of fluency in 1999 (personal communication to her from Parker McKenzie). – ishwar  (speak) 22:37, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

So is it true that the gentleman featured on the TV news was indeed the last fluent individual? Badagnani (talk) 22:39, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

I cant say. We would need to ask a specialist. The 1990 census reports 1,092, which is definitely too much.
What was the name of the TV program? – ishwar  (speak) 22:47, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

It was probably the NBC Nightly News or something similar. It was about a 4- or 5-minute segment about the guy. I asked N. Scott Momaday about the man a few years ago and he told me he had passed away. Badagnani (talk) 03:51, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Here is the status of our language, current as of my visit to the tribal headquarters in October 2007. The last fluent speaker is still alive and in his 90s, but he has Alzheimer's disease. A lot of the language has been recorded as oral history on tapes, but some of those original tapes were stolen by a individual from a university to transcribe and never returned. (Yes, it was not the best idea to send out originals with no copies.) It seems there is no one alive and in control of his faculties that knows the full language, but there is a small revival going on and classes are available which are taught be Alecia Gonzales, who has also written the only accessible Kiowa textbook for students. There is an Australian linguist who is probably the most fluent person in Kiowa living right now. There is a small amount of controversy about whether anyone is completely fluent in the language right now. There are some people who say they are fluent, but there are others who dispute that . Xj (talk) 11:09, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Why 'Tanoan'?

Note from a Kiowa:

Many times I've read that our language is, 'Tanoan'. I took that as fact, since I read it. But, later in life I met many Pueblo folks who are said to have a 'Tanoan' language, and their words are not anything like our language. I also spoke to a friend south-ways who speaks Aztecan, which is also said to be a 'Tanoan' language. None of her words for any common thing even remotely resembled our language.

Then, there is the fact that the 'Tanoan' language speaking folks seem to be located in the south of the current U.S. and further into Mexico. Yet, our people (Kiowas) originated at our earliest understanding, near the Kootenay region of current British Columbia (Canada). Our custums are certainly northern plains. And, our living oral history within our own tribe is of our lands in the Black Hills in which the Lakota now reside.

How is our Kiowa language "Tanoan"? When we are not southern people in origin and none of our living language resembles in any way the existing 'Tanoan' languages?

Maybe 'cause we have some sounds that other languages have?

Like...in chinese many words end with 'ing' so, following the same premise, many words in english end with 'ing', too. English must therefore be an Asian dialect, eh?

LOL

Just kidding...but, still curious how Kiowa is classified as 'Tanoan'. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.33.24.5 (talk) 19:57, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi.
Actually, Kiowa is not Tanoan. Rather is a single of language on the Kiowa branch of the four-branch Kiowa-Tanoan family tree (the other branches are Tiwa, Tewa, and Towa (Jemez). The term Tanoan refers to the family members that are in the southwest. It was originally thought that the Tanoan was genetic branch but that is not the case today. So, currently, Tanoan is just a geographic subgrouping.
Kiowa is, of course, the language that is the most different from the other languages in the family. Researchers realized that the "Tanoan" languages were related over 100 years ago. The guess that Kiowa was also related to them started with John Peabody Harrington, and he and some others made some lists of words that could be related. But, it wasnt until Ken Hale demonstrated the relationship using the comparative method in 1967 that the linguist world was convinced. I've never looked at the details of his analysis before, so maybe I'll take this as an invitation to do so.
I'd have to read how the linguistic evidence is used to interpret the archeology and pre-history.
The comparative method, which is what linguists use demonstrate genealogical relationships between languages and language families, cannot show that English is related to Chinese (and it doesnt). And it can only go back about 7000 years (give or take a thousand years or so). So, even if English is really related to Chinese, it cant be demonstrated with the comparative method. And, of course, the ancestors of the Kiowas and Tanoan folks probably have been on the continent longer than 7000 years. Basically, the method compares similar words with similar meanings and looks for sound (i.e., consonants, vowels, tones) correspondences. Before you do that, you are supposed to eliminate all words that might be borrowed from each other or another language and "weird" words like bird names, baby words ("mama", "dada"), sound words ("pop!", "bow-wow"), etc. If correspondences are found, then rules are posited that predict the pattern in the correspondences. There are constraints on what type of rules are considered likely based upon what linguistics knows about how sounds change over time. A rule of this sort looks something like:
original consonant A stays A in language #1 but becomes a different consonant B when it occurs before the vowel C in language #2.
a real example:
all the words that start with a t in Navajo and Western Apache start with a k in Jicarilla Apache and Lipan Apache. So, Navajo tó and Western Apache tóó mean "water" with an initial t but Jicarilla and Lipan have kó as "water". And if we look up north at the Athabascan languages there the words for "water" also usually start with a t. And for various phonetic reasons (which I'm not mentioning) and a majority-wins principle, we say that the original sound was a t which changed into a k in Jicarilla & Lipan.
Aztecan-Tanoan is a hypothetical idea that hasnt convinced the general linguistic community yet. A lot of people find the idea intriguing and perhaps promising, but more research needs to be done before anyone can say if Uto-Aztecan languages are really related Kiowa-Tanoan languages. So, until then, it is best treated as an unproven hypothesis.
– ishwar  (speak) 03:16, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
Theres almost nothing in Wikipedia about Tanoan languages. I'm trying to remedy this a bit. In the meantime, here is a nice summary of research by Michael Foster from the Handbook of North American Indians (I'm omitting the reference info here):
"Tanoan was recognized as a family over 100 years ago, and Harrington recognized a tripartite division into Tiwa, Tewa, and "Towa" (Jemez) branches and also proposed the link with Kiowa.... As far remoter connections, the linking of Kiowa-Tanoan with Uto-Aztecan in the Aztec-Tanoan superstock has won at least qualified acceptance, although with Zuni usually omitted.
"Two contrasting models of relationship were proposed for Kiowa-Tanoan, and this tended to undercut the usefulness of linguistic findings for culture-historical inference. The first was a family-tree model, which used lexicostatistics to establish relative distances among the languages. It was claimed that Tiwa and Tewa were more closely related to each other than either was to Jemez, and that Kiowa was even more divergent. Later phonological and grammatical evidence tended to bear these conclusions out, although Jemez and Kiowa were said on these grounds to be equally divergent from Tiwa and Tewa. These studies announced widely divergent time-depth estimates for the family, ranging from 2000 B.C. to A.D. 1 for Proto-Kiowa-Tanoan, with similarly discrepant figures for later splits. The differences in dating present a significant problem, since the earlier figure places Proto-Kiowa-Tanoan well back in the Archaic period, while the later figure places it at the point where the agricultural traditions in the Southwest were beginning to emerge. Another review attributed a time-depth of 3000 years maximum to the family as a whole, and hence dates of about 500 B.C. for the Jemez split, A.D. 200 for the Tewa split, and A.D. 1400 for the separation of Northern and Southern Tiwa. These figures imply that Kiowa split from Tanoan before the emergence of agriculture in Basketmaker II times. The second model of Kiowa-Tanoan relationship, based on unpublished lexical, grammatical, and phonological evidence, rejects Tanoan as a subgroup and postulates four coequal branches for the family, which presumably underwent nearly simultaneous separation from the Proto-Kiowa-Tanoan base. No time-depth figure for the separation was provided. The two models are evidently irreconcilable and have different implications with regard to the movement of prehistoric Tanoans.
" Because of the location of the historic Tanoans, Tanoan is usually associated with the Anasazi tradition, although a similar claim has been made for Uto-Aztecan, Keresan, and Zuni. It has also been argued that Tanoan roots are to be found in the Mogollon tradition lying to the south. The agricultural Anasazi, whose culture spread through a large area surrounding the Four Corners after A.D. 1 and developed into one of the great Pueblo traditions until their centers were abandoned around A.D. 1300, shared a number of traits with the Mogollon people, but they also had many distinctive features. One suggestion is that Tanoan-speaking Anasazi originated in the San Juan valley, expanding into the Colorado River region. Assuming that Kiowa separated from Tanoan before A.D. 1, the Kiowas are less likely to have been an Anasazi group that reverted to an Archaic lifeway after migrating to the Plains than a group that never underwent the Anasazi transformation in the first place. In fact, Kiowa historic traditions tell of origins far to the north, at the headwaters of the Missouri River in western Montana, and of a migration to the southern Plains in the eighteenth century. The original Kiowa-Tanoan split could still have occurred in the south in pre-Anasazi times, with ancestral Kiowas moving first to the north and then returning to the southern Plains in historic times, although there is no archeological support for such a hypothesis, and the linguistic evidence is inconclusive."
Hope you enjoy – ishwar  (speak) 04:41, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks very much for that information ishwar. Dear 'Unsigned Kiowa person' (I wish you had a handle so I could address you properly my friend!), there are extensive cultural and historical connections between us and the Tanonan Puebloans. We traded extensively with Tewa speakers, trading meat for corn and beads for example, and the connection was so strong that you do find strong historical Kiowa influences among northern Tewa, such as their unique adoption of our braided hair styles, leggings and shirts. Our remembered oral history goes back far before the Dakotas, to Bear Butte, and before that to Yellowstone, which is just north of the Puebloan region. Think of our earliest origin stories, what would you say they are? Well they are Grandmother Spider and the Sacred Twins, I am sure you will agree. These are all Puebloan stories, and they go back even earlier than the Tanoan split, they are held by Uto-Aztecans as well. I will also caution you in advance that if you discuss these issues with the white man, they will question your academic credentials, declare that they know far more about indian matters than you ever could, and imply clearly through their arrogance that us simple red men are not qualified to remember our own histories. It is their loss. All my relations! Xj (talk) 11:31, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Why Tanoan? (cont.)

I must not have been signed in when I posted the, "Why Tanoan" entry.

I read and appreciate the comments by iswar. But, I still don't see how our language is "Tanoan".

Do you know of any Kiowa words that are in any way similar to another 'Tanoan' language?

Or, maybe, like when you hear Japanese being spoken today, many English words get thrown in their sentences...especially when talking about pop-culture or technology. Even though Japanese uses many English words today, their language is not related to English. Maybe these 'related' words they found to categorize our language as "Tanoan" were simply ones we picked up in dealings with other tribes.

Just looking for simple examples of common words that show a relation between our language and other "Tanoan" languages.

We do have a long relationship with the Puebloan folks, and I agree that the stories of the Zaiday-Tahlee are probably shared from their culture. But you can find such 'sacred twin' stories in almost all cultures. I just Google'd 'sacred twins' and saw some from India, Africa and Rome.

I'm just not sure that equates to us being the same language family.

Scott Zotigh

hmm.. Come to think of it...since our Zaiday-Tahlee is probably shared from those Pueblo folks...what is their word for 'half boys'? Is it similar in sound to 'Zaiday-Tahlee'?

Just curious. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Zotigh (talk • contribs) 15:23, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi. I've started to add information at Kiowa-Tanoan languages#Historical phonology. It is, of course, unfinished, but there is some info there at least. There are consonant correspondences that have been worked out, and also Kiowa and the Tanoan languages both have certain consonant alternations that are considered too similar to be regarded as just a coincidental similarities. But, I havent added an explanation of the alternations yet (I also havent added info about these in individual languages at Kiowa phonology and Taos phonology). The words being compared are pretty basic words, so borrowing is probably unlikely (and I dont know about the historical contact between Kiowa and the others, so I cant comment further on this). Many of the English words borrowed into Japanese are noticeably not basic vocabulary (like handoru "steering wheel" < handle, doa "western style door" < door). I'm not aware that there are any published dictionaries of these languages, so I cant help you with a cognate for half boys (if there is a cognate), maybe I can find the word for boy in other the languages.... – ishwar  (speak) 21:23, 2 April 2008 (UTC)