Language
The Karankawa language, of which only about a hundred words are preserved, cannot be classified, as so little is known of languages in this region. The meaning of the name Karankawa is not certain. It is believed to mean "dog-lovers" or "dog-helpers." That rendering seems credible, since the Karankawas had dogs, which were a fox or coyote-like species. In a nomadic-type culture, the people seasonally migrated between the mainland and the barrier islands.
Read more about this topic: Karankawa People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“These are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people, claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)