Comecrudo language

Comecrudo, also Yué, is an extinct Pakawan language of Mexico. The name Comecrudo is Spanish for "eat-raw". It was best recorded in a list of 148 words in 1829 by French botanist Jean Louis Berlandier (Berlandier called it "Mulato") (Berlandier et al. 1828–1829). It was spoken on the lower Rio Grande near Reynosa, Tamaulipas, in Mexico. Comecrudo has often been considered a Coahuiltecan language although most linguists now consider the relationship between them unprovable due to the lack of information.

Comecrudo
Carrizo, Yué
A short tale in Carrizo
Native to	Mexico
Region	Rio Grande
Ethnicity	Comecrudo people
Extinct	late 19th century
Language family	Hokan ? Coahuiltecan ? Pakawan Comecrudan Comecrudo
Language codes
ISO 639-3	xcm
Linguist List	xcm
Glottolog	come1253

Comecrudo tribal names were recorded in 1748 (Saldivar 1943):

• Sepinpacam
• Perpepug
• Atanaguaypacam / Atanaouajapaca (also known as Atanaguipacane)

In 1861, German Adolph Uhde published a travelogue with some vocabulary (Uhde called the language Carrizo, Spanish for "reed") (Uhde 1861: 185–186). In 1886, Albert Gatschet recorded vocabulary, sentences, and a short text from the descendants (who were not fluent) of the last Comecrudo speakers near Camargo, Tamaulipas, at Las Prietas (Swanton 1940: 55–118). The best of these consultants were Emiterio, Joaquin, and Andrade.

An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)^[1] found lexical similarities with Uto-Aztecan, likely due to borrowings.

See also

• Comecrudo people
• Coahuiltecan
• Coahuiltecan people

References

1. Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013).

Further reading

• Berlandier, Jean L. (1969). The Indians of Texas in 1830. Ewers, John C. (Ed.). Washington: Smithsonian Institution.
• Berlandier, Jean L.; & Chowell, Rafael (1828–1829). [Vocabularies of languages of south Texas and the lower Rio Grande]. (Additional manuscripts, no. 38720, in the British Library, London.)
• Berlandier, Jean L.; & Chowell, Rafael (1850). Luis Berlandier and Rafael Chovell. Diario de viaje de la Comisión de Límites. Mexico.
• Gatschet, Albert S. (1886). [Field notes on Comecrudo and Cotoname, collected at Las Prietas, Tamaulipas]. Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives Ms. no. 297.
• Swanton, John. (1940). Linguistics material from the tribes of southern Texas and northern Mexico. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin, 127 (pp. 1–145).
• Uhde, Adolph. (1861). Die Länder am untern Rio Bravo del Norte. Heidelberg: J. C. B. Mohr.