Virtually all scholars working on Numic languages have called [r] a spirant or listed it, without comment, as resulting from spirantization. However, Central Numic shows that [r] results from an early rule of tap formation applying to /t/, with subsequent application of spirantization then affecting other stops. When this analysis is extended to…

St. Clair's Comanche texts, collected in 1902, appear to exhibit a very uncharacteristic form of objective case marking along with "same subject" dependent clause types unknown elsewhere in the language. Proper interpretation of the materials and the circumstances in which they were transcribed leads to an analysis in which…

Comanche's mutation system, at first glance a relatively simple one, poses the following problems of analysis for both: (1) the variation in phonological substance manifested by the mutating segments themselves; and (2) the larger contextual pattern within which this mutation takes place. Comanche appears to exhibit a slightly skewed but typical…