George L. Trager

Taos and Picuris: How Long Separated?

0. The purpose of this paper is to point to some of the unmeasurable and unpredictable factors that must be taken into account in any attempt to determine time depth in linguistic comparison. To avoid any misunderstanding, I wish to state explicitly that I am not discussing glottochronology or lexicostatistics. As Morris Swadesh knew from the several discussions he and I had at intervals over the

Taos I: A Language Revisited

1. The present paper is the first of a series embodying restatements of OTG,1 and presenting hitherto unpublished text material, with analyses. It also contains some general conclusions resulting from what were in effect two entirely distinct sets of field observations. In most studies of the languages of preliterate peoples, the material is collected in one extended field trip or several such trips close together in time, with no further contact with the speakers; it becomes a closed file, as it were (very much like the extant material of a dead language). On the