Chitimacha language

Chitimacha, though conventionally regarded as a language isolate, has recently been proposed to be related to, or a member of, the proposed Totozoquean language family. These proposals have not been accepted by the wider linguistic community. An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013) found lexical similarities between Chitimacha, Huave, and Totozoquean. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance. An earlier, more speculative, proposal suggested an affinity with the also hypothetical group of Gulf languages. == Phonology ==

Brown, Wichmann, and Beck (2014) give the following phoneme inventory based on Morris Swadesh's 1939 analysis. ==Orthography==

Transcription has been done by researchers in a number of orthographies, including French, Spanish, and Americanist. Members of the Chitimacha tribe have developed a practical orthography using the Latin alphabet which does not use diacritics It retains elements of the orthography earlier used by Morris Swadesh. ==Grammar==

Chitimacha has a grammatical structure which is not dissimilar from modern Indo-European languages but it is still quite distinctive. Chitimacha distinguishes several word classes: verbs, nouns, adjectives (verbal and nominal), quantifiers, demonstratives. Swadesh (1946) states that the remaining word classes are hard to distinguish but may be divided "into proclitics, postclitics, and independent particles". Chitimacha has auxiliaries which are inflected for tense, aspect and mood, such as to be. Polar interrogatives may be marked with a final falling intonation and a clause final post-position. Chitimacha does not appear to have adopted any grammatical features from their interactions with the French, Spanish or Americans. Pronouns Verbs are inflected for person and number of the subject. Ambiguity may be avoided by the use of the personal pronouns (shown in the table below), but sentences without personal pronouns are common. There is no gender in the personal pronouns and verbal indexes. Subject and object personal pronouns are identical. } Pronouns are more restricted than nouns when appearing in a possessive construction. Pronouns cannot be preceded by a possessive unlike nouns. Nouns There are definite articles in Chitimacha. Nouns are mostly uninflected; there are only approximately 30 nouns (mostly kinship or referring to persons) which distinguish a singular or plural form through a plural suffix or other formations. Nouns are free, or may be possessed by juxtaposing the possessor and the possessed noun. : = my father ("I father") : = that man's father ("that man father") == Sample text ==

The following sentences and translations are from the book "Modern Chitimacha (Sitimaxa)" (2008), endorsed by the Chitimata Tribal government's Cultural Department. {{interlinear|indent=2|lang=ctm == References ==