Talk:Chitimacha language

Updates
I just saw this report (with video) from WVUE Fox 8. The language has been rediscovered and Rosetta Stone has also created software for its Endangered language program. Night Tracks (talk) 14:44, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

Chitimacha is related to Totonacan and Mixe-Zoque
Cecil H. Brown, Søren Wichmann and David Beck more or less prove that the by now reasonably well-established Totozoquean group from Mexico (Totonacan = Totonac-Tepehua + Mixe-Zoque) is in turn related to Chitimacha. This should renew consideration of Greenberg's and Ruhlen's extended Penutian concept: those controversial scholars (1) accept a Gulf group as stated in the article, (2) uniquely (as I have found) consider it to belong to Penutian, (3) posit a parallel Mexican Penutian group comprising Totonacan and Mixe-Zoque, also Mayan and Huave. If their affiliation of Chitimacha to their Penutian Gulf was not purely 'on the nod', but based on shared vocabulary and morphology, then probably (1) 'Mexican Penutian' does exist, comprising Mixe-Zoque, Totonacan and Chitimacha but probably NOT Mayan and certainly not Huave (pretty much established now as Otomanguean), (2) 'Gulf Penutian' does exist and is visibly related, comprising Muskogean, Natchez, Tunica, Atakapa and maybe others, but not Chitimacha - which is nevertheless related, merely in another sub-branch of Penutian. (Note that Greenberg and Ruhlen believe that the Yuki and Wappo languages of California are/were 'displaced' Gulf languages.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by UnknownSage (talk • contribs) 13:23, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

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 " 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. Jaylatarche (talk) 09:52, 10 September 2018 (UTC)