Fusangese
From FrathWiki
| Fusangese | |
| Spoken in: | Mexico |
| Timeline/Universe: | League of Lost Languages |
| Total speakers: | <1000 |
| Genealogical classification: | Sino-Tibetan Chinese |
| Basic word order: | Topic-Comment -- usually SOV or SVO |
| Morphological type: | Mostly isolating, some fusional clitic elements |
| Morphosyntactic alignment: | Accusative (?) |
| Created by: | |
| author | date |
For decades (if not centuries) the language spoken by a small and relatively isolated group of fishers and hunter-gatherers on the Pacific coast of Mexico was considered to be an indigenous Mesoamerican language, probably related to nearby Mixtecan languages. More recent work suggests that this language -- here termed "Fusangese" as a temporary and somewhat tongue-in-cheek placeholder -- is in fact a form of archaic Chinese with heavy contact influences from Mixtecan and Nahua languages.
These sub- and adstratum influences, particularly in the domain of phonology, combined with the obscurity of the community and the improbability of an unknown Chinese-speaking group living as Indians in modern Mexico, understandably led previous investigators to assign this language to the large and diverse Otomanguean group.
Considerable mystery and uncertainty still surrounds “Fusangese”, however. Is it simply a creolized form of modern Chinese, possibly a Minnan or Minbei dialect, spoken by post-Columbian immigrants from China? Or is it, as seems increasingly more likely, a cousin of the modern Chinese languages, descended from an earlier stage of Chinese? So little fieldwork has been done at this point, to say nothing of analysis, that these questions cannot yet be resolved. The genetic affiliation shown in the sidebar is simply a guess.
Watch this space!
UPDATE: In a disappointing development, it has been demonstrated recently that the "Fusangese" language is simply a dialect of Min Chinese -- specifically, a form of Puxian Min -- and that its speakers are descended from Chinese workers brought to New Spain in the early 1600s via the Philippines. The presence of a lateral fricative in "Fusangese" phonology can now be understood not as a contact borrowing from local Mesoamerican languages, but a direct inheritance from Puxian Min. Likewise, its complicated tone system is recognizable as clearly Min (to the extent that tone sandhi in Min is ever "clear") and not either Otomanguean nor a separate New World development of some Old Chinese original. The League of Lost Languages loses a member!
