Gulf was proposed as a language family byMary Haas (Haas 1951,[1] 1952[2]), but the family has not been rigorously established by the comparative method. Historical linguists such asLyle Campbell (Campbell and Mithun 1979,[3] Campbell 1997[4]) list the relationship as unproven, though a number of Muskogean scholars believe that Muskogean is at least related to Natchez (Campbell 1997:305).
However, the Gulf hypothesis is considered by a number of specialists onMuskogean languages, including Mary Haas andPamela Munro. Munro (1995) has regarded the hypothesis of a Gulf family of languages as promising; Haas thought the closest language to Muskogean would be Natchez, followed by Tunica, Atakapa, and, rather dubiously, Chitimacha.[5] A difficulty in evaluating the hypothesis is the lack of available data. Most of the data on Chitimacha and Natchez is still unpublished and held in archives.
Additionally, Haas (1958) proposed that the Gulf languages are related to theAlgonquian languages.[6]
Below are pronouns comparisons by Geoffrey Kimball (1994) showing areal similarities among the "Gulf" languages.[7]: 39 Note that Tunica distinguishes masculine and feminine pronominal forms.
^Haas, Mary. (1951). The Proto-Gulf word for water (with notes on Siouan-Yuchi).International Journal of American Linguistics 17: 71-9.
^Haas, Mary. (1952). The Proto-Gulf word for 'land' (with notes on Proto-Siouan).International Journal of American Linguistics 18: 238-240.
^Campbell, Lyle and Marianne Mithun. 1979.The Languages of Native America: A Historical and Comparative Assessment. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
^Campbell, Lyle. 1997.American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
^Munro, Pamela. 1995. Gulf and Yuki-Gulf.Anthropological Linguistics 36: 125-222.
^abKimball, Geoffrey. 1994. Comparative difficulties of the "Gulf" languages. In Langdon, Margaret (ed.),Proceedings of the Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous languages of the Americas July 2–4, 1993 and the Hokan-Penutian Workshop July 3, 1993 (both held at the 1993 Linguistic Institute atOhio State University inColumbus, Ohio).Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, Report 8. Berkeley: University of California.
