Loup language facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Loup |
|
|---|---|
| Pronunciation | [lu] |
| Native to | United States |
| Region | Massachusetts, Connecticut |
| Ethnicity | Nipmuck? |
| Extinct | 18th century |
| Language family | |
| Linguist List | xlo Loup A |
| xlb Loup B | |
Loup is an extinct Algonquian language, or possibly group of languages, spoken in colonial New England. Loup ("Wolf") was a French colonial ethnographic term, and usage was inconsistent. In modern literature, it refers to two varieties, Loup A and Loup B.
Attestation
Loup A, which may be the language of the Nipmuck, is principally attested from a word list recorded from refugees by the St. Francis mission to the Abenaki in Quebec. The descendants of these refugees became speakers of Western Abenaki in the eighteenth century. Loup B refers to a second word list, which shows extensive dialectal variation. This may not be a distinct language, but just notes on the speech of various New England Algonquian refugees in French missions.
Phonology
The phonology of Loup A (Nipmuck), reconstructed by Gustafson 2000:
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal/ Postalveolar |
Velar | Glottal | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | pal. | plain | lab. | ||||
| Nasal | m | n | |||||
| Plosive | p | t | tʲ | k | (kʷ) | ||
| Affricate | tʃ | ||||||
| Fricative | s | h | |||||
| Lateral | l | ||||||
| Approximant | w | j | |||||
| Front | Back | |
|---|---|---|
| Close | i, iː | u |
| Mid | e | o, oː |
| Open | a, aː, ã | |
The vowel sounds likely have the same phonetic quality as other southern New England Algonquian languages. The short vowels /i o e a/ may represent the sounds as [ɪ], [ʊ], [ɛ,ə], and [ʌ], while the long vowels /iː/, /oː/, and /ã/ correspond to /i/, /o/, and /ã/.
