Deep relationships among California languages
The Hokan and Penutian language classifications, introduced by Dixon & Kroeber (1913), remain controversial nearly a century after they were first proposed. Recently developed computational methods for identifying historical relationships between languages are promising tools for assessing distant linguistic relationship proposals such as these. This paper uses a variation of the linguistic relatedness metric and multilateral clustering procedure developed by Kessler (1999, 2001) to study California language phylogenetics. The purpose is twofold: to evaluate the utility of this methodology for identifying deep relationships, and to re-examine the evidence for Hokan and Penutian groupings. While this paper illustrates several advantages of the methodology employed, it ultimately fails to provide any additional support for Hokan or Penutian. I conclude that while this result may be influenced by the sensitivity of the methodology to the composition of the input sample, it ultimately casts further doubt on the genealogical nature of the Hokan and Penutian classificatory groups.
References
de Angulo, Jaime & L.S. Freeland
1930 The Achumawi language.
International Journal of American Linguistics 61. 77-120.
de Angulo, Jaime & L.S. Freeland
n.d.
Jaime de Angulo and L.S. Freeland papers. Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley.
Beckman, Jill N
1998 Positional faithfulness. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Amherst dissertation.
Bergsland, Knut & Hans Vogt
1962 On the validity of glottochronology.
Current Anthropology 31. 115-153.
Berman, Howard
1983 Some California Penutian morphological elements.
International Journal of American Linguistics 491. 400-412.
Bethel, Rosalie, Paul V. Kroskrity, Christopher Loether & Gregory A. Reinhardt
1993 A dictionary of Western Mono, 2nd edn. Unpublished manuscript.
Bolnick, Deborah A. (Weiss), Beth A. (Schultz) Shook, Lyle Campbell & Ives Goddard
2004 Problematic use of Greenberg’s linguistic classification of the Americas in studies of Native American genetic variation.
American Journal of Human Genetics 751. 519-523.
Bright, William
1957 The Karok language. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bright, William
1968 A Luiseño dictionary. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bright, William & Susan Gehr
2008 Karuk dictionary (online).
[URL].
Broadbent, Sylvia M. & Harvey Pitkin
1964 A comparison of Miwok and Wintun. In
William Bright (ed.),
Studies in California linguistics (
University of California Publications in Linguistics 34), 19-45. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Callaghan, Catherine A
1965 Lake Miwok dictionary. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Callaghan, Catherine A
1987 Northern Sierra Miwok dictionary. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Callaghan, Catherine A
1997 Evidence for Yok-Utian.
International Journal of American Linguistics 631. 18-64.
Callaghan, Catherine A
2001 More evidence for Yok-Utian: A reanalysis of the Dixon and Kroeber sets.
International Journal of American Linguistics 671. 313-346.
Campbell, Lyle
1997 American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chitoran, Ioana, Louis Goldstein & Dani Byrd
2002 Gestural overlap and recoverability: Articulatory evidence from Georgian. In
Carlos Gussenhoven &
Natasha Warner (eds.),
Laboratory phonetics, vol. 71, 419-447. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Couro, Ted & Christina Hutcheson
1973 Dictionary of Mesa Grande Diegueño. Banning CA: Malki Museum Press.
Crawford, James M
1989 Cocopa dictionary. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Daley, Jon P
1989 Tümpisa (Panamint) Shoshone dictionary (
University of California Publications in Linguistics 116). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dixon, Roland B
1905 The Shasta-Achomawi: A new linguistic stock, with four new dialects.
American Anthropologist 7(2). 213-217.
Dixon, Roland B. & A.L. Kroeber
1913 New linguistic families in California.
American Anthropologist 151. 647-655.
Dixon, Roland B. & A.L. Kroeber
1919 Linguistic families of California (
University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 16). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dunn, Michael
2009 Contact and phylogeny in Island Melanesia.
Lingua 1191. 1664-1678.
Dunn, Michael, Angela Terrill, Ger Reesink, Robert A. Foley & Stephen C. Levinson
2005 Structural phylogenetics and the reconstruction of ancient language history.
Science 3091. 2072-2075.
Dyen, Isidore, Joseph B. Kruskal & Paul Black
1992 An Indoeuropean classification: A lexicostatistical experiment.
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 82(5). iii-132.
Felsenstein, J
2001 PHYLIP: Phylogeny inference package: Version 3.6. Department of Genetics, University of Washington.
Frachtenberg, Leo J
1918 Comparative studies in Takelman, Kalapuyan and Chinookan lexicography, a preliminary paper.
International Journal of American Linguistics 1(2). 175-182.
Golla, Victor
2011 California Indian languages. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gow, David W., Janis Melvold & Sharon Manuel
1996 How word onsets drive lexical access and segmentation: Evidence from acoustics, phonology and processing. In
H. Timothy Bunnell &
William Idsardi (eds.),
Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 66-69New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Greenberg, Joseph
1987 Language in the Americas. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Gursky, Karl-Heinz
1974 Der Hoka-Sprachstamm. Eine Bestandsaufnahme des lexikalischen Beweismaterials.
Orbis 231. 170-215.
Haas, Mary R
1963 Shasta and Proto-Hokan.
Language 39(1). 40-59.
Halpern, Abraham M
1964 A report on a survey of Pomo languages. In
William Bright (ed.),
Studies in Californian linguistics (
University of California Publications in Linguistics 34), 88-93. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Haynie, Hannah J. & Loretta Kelsey
2007 Southeastern Pomo field notes. Unpublished raw data.
Hill, Kenneth C
(ed.) 1998 Hopi dictionary/Hopìikwa lavàytutuveni: A Hopi-English dictionary of the Third Mesa dialect, with an English-Hopi finder list and a sketch of Hopi grammar. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Jacobsen, William H
1958 Washo and Karok: An approach to comparative Hokan.
International Journal of American Linguistics 24(3). 195-212.
Johnson, Keith
2008 Quantitative methods in lingiustics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kaufman, Terrence
1988 A research program for reconstructing Proto-Hokan: First gropings. In
Scott DeLancy (ed.),
Papers from the 1988 Hokan-Penutian languages workshop, 50-168. Eugene, Oregon: Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon.
Kessler, Brett
1999 Estimating the probability of historical connections between languages. Stanford, CA: Stanford University dissertation.
Kessler, Brett
2001 The significance of word lists. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Kessler, Brett & Annukka Lehtonen
2006 Multilateral comparison and significance testing of the Indo-Uralic question. In
Peter Forster &
Colin Renfrew (eds.),
Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, 33-42. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Kroeber, Alfred L
1925 Handbook of the Indians of California (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
Lamb, Sydney
1958 Monachi dictionary. Unpublished manuscript.
Lees, Robert B
1953 The basis of glottochronology.
Language 291. 113-127.
McLendon, Sally
1964 Northern Hokan (B) and (C): A comparison of Eastern Pomo and Yana. In
William Bright (ed.),
Studies in Californian linguistics (
University of California Publications in Linguistics 34), 126-144. Berkeley: University of California Press.
McMahon, April & Robert McMahon
2005 Language classification by numbers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mithun, Marianne
1999 The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mithun, Marianne
2007 Grammar, contact, and time.
Journal of Language Contact – THEMA 11. 133-155.
Moshinsky, Julius
1965 Julius Moshinsky papers. Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley.
Nichols, Johanna
1999 Linguistic diversity in space and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Olmsted, D.L
1956 Palaihnihan and Shasta I: Labial stops.
Language 321. 73-77.
Olmsted, D.L
1957 Palaihnihan and Shasta II: Apical stops.
Language 331. 136-138.
Olmsted, D.L
1959 Palaihnihan and Shasta III: Dorsal stops.
Language 351. 637-644.
Olmsted, D.L
1961 Atsugewi morphology I: Verb inflection.
International Journal of American Linguistics 271. 91-113.
Olmsted, D.L
1966 Achumawi dictionary. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Olmsted, D.L
1984 A lexicon of Atsugewi. Berkeley: Survey of California and Other Indian Languages.
Olmsted, D.L. & William Bright
1959 A Shasta vocabulary.
The Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 20(1). 1-55.
Oswalt, Robert L
1964 The internal relationships of the Pomo family of languages. In
D.F. México (ed.),
Actas y memorias del XXXV Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, vol. II1, 413-427. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
Oswalt, Robert L
1970 The detection of remote linguistic relationships.
Computer Studies 31. 119-129.
Oswalt, Robert L
1975 Kashaya vocabulary (
Kashaya Pomo Language in Culture Project Working Papers 32). Department of Anthropology, California State College, Sonoma.
Oswalt, Robert L
n.d.
Robert Louis Oswalt papers on Pomoan languages. Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley.
Pitkin, Harvey
1985 Wintu dictionary. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pitkin, Harvey & William Shipley
1958 A comparative survey of California Penutian.
International Journal of American Linguistics 24(3). 174-188.
Powell, John Wesley
1891 Indian linguistic families of America, north of Mexico (
Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1885-1886). Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
Ringe, Donald, Tandy Warnow & Ann Taylor
2002 Indo-European and computational cladistics.
Transactions of the Philological Society 1001. 139-151.
Sankoff, David
1972 Reconstructing the history and geography of an evolutionary tree.
American Mathematics Monthly 791. 596-603.
Sapir, Edward
1917 The position of Yana in the Hokan stock (
University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 13). Berkeley: The University of California Press.
Sapir, Edward
1921a A bird’s-eye view of American languages north of Mexico.
Science 541. 408.
Sapir, Edward
1921b A characteristic Penutian form of stem.
International Journal of American Linguistics 21. 261-273.
Sapir, Edward & Morris Swadesh
1960 Yana dictionary (
University of California Publications in Linguistics 22). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sawyer, Jesse
n.d.
Jesse Sawyer papers. Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley.
Shipley, William F
1963 Maidu texts and dictionary. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Shipley, William F
1980 Penutian among the ruins: A personal assessment. In
Bruce R. Caron,
Meredith A.B. Hoffman &
Marilyn Silva (eds.),
Proceedings of the sixth annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 437-441. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Silver, Shirley
1961 Shirley Silver papers. Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley.
Silver, Shirley
1964 Shasta and Karok: A binary comparison. In
William Bright (ed.),
Studies in Californian linguistics (
University of California Publications in Linguistics 34), 170-181. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sjoberg, Andrée & Gideon Sjoberg
1956 Problems in glottochronology.
American Anthropologist 581. 296-308.
Starostin, George
2003 A lexicostatistical approach towards reconstructing Proto-Khoisan.
Mother Tongue 81. 81-126.
Swadesh, Morris
1952 Lexico-statistical dating of prehistoric ethnic contacts.
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 961. 453-463.
Swadesh, Morris
1955 Towards greater accuracy in lexicostatistical dating.
International Journal of American Linguistics 211. 121-137.
The Southern Ute Tribe
1979 Ute dictionary, preliminary ed.. Ignacio, CO: Ute Press.
Uldall, Hans J. & William Shipley
1966 Nisenan texts and dictionary. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Vihman, Eero
1970 Eero Vihman papers. Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley.
Voegelin, C.F. & E.W. Voegelin
1966 Map of North American Indian Languages. New York: American Ethnological Society.
Voegelin, C.F. & F.M. Voegelin
1973 Recent classifications of genetic relationships.
Annual Review of Anthropology 21. 139-151.
Whistler, Kenneth & Victor Golla
1986 Proto-Yokuts reconsidered.
International Journal of American Linguistics 521. 913-934.
Zigmond, Maurice L., Curtis G. Booth & Pamela Munro
1990 Kawaiisu: A grammar and dictionary, with texts. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Emlen, Nicholas Q. & Johannes Dellert
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 february 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.