Subtiaba language
Extinct Oto-Manguean language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Subtiaba, also known as Maribio, is an extinct Oto-Manguean language which was spoken on the Pacific slope of Nicaragua, especially in the Subtiaba district of León. Edward Sapir established a connection between Subtiaba and Tlapanec. When Lehmann wrote about it in 1909 it was already very endangered or moribund.
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Tlapanecan
- Subtiaba
The name "Subtiaba" may be of Nahuatl origin, from the roots xoctli ("black snail"), atl ("water"), pan ("on").[4]
Phonology
Lehmann thought there may have been some sort of variation between voiceless and voiced stops, which may account for some discrepancies between datasets. Stops were voiced after nasals. <r> and < hr > were used in transcriptions to represent /ʂ/, a phonological correspondence shared with some local registers of Spanish and other Central American indigenous languages.
Lexicon
Subtiaba evidently had some loanwords from Mangue, a neighboring language only distantly related. These include chitú "cat" (Mangue chitu), sidáa "rooster" (M. sitaraca), ñusi "tiste" (from M. ñusi, "cacao"), dagaba "frog/toad" (M. na-tokopó). Both Subtiaba words for corn may have ultimately derived from Mayan languages.
There were also loans from Spanish. For example, jabón "soap" became Subtiaba rabuni /ʂabuni/, having been borrowed at a time when the Spanish word was still pronounced with an initial /ʃ/.
