Piro is an extinct Tiwa dialect of the Tanoan languages once spoken in the more than twenty Piro Pueblos near Socorro, New Mexico.
Classification Piro has generally been classified as one of the Tiwa languages,Newman, Stanley (1954) "American Indian Linguistics in the Southwest" American Anthropologist New Series, 56(4): pp. 626-634, 631 though Leap (1971) contested whether or not Piro is truly a Tanoan language at all.Leap, William L. (1971) "Who Were the Piro?" Anthropological Linguistics 13: pp. 321-330 The last known speaker, an elderly woman, was interviewed by Mooney in 1897, and by 1909 all Piro members had Mexican Spanish as their native language.
Corpus The corpus of Piro is limited to place names, two vocabularies and an 1860 translation of the Lord's Prayer using Spanish orthography:
, quoted in
The Piro-origin place names listed by Bandelier are Abo, Arti-puy, Genobey, Pataotry, Pil-abó, Qual-a-cú, Quelotetrey, Tabirá (Gran Quivira), Ten-abó, Tey-pam-á, Trenaquel and Zen-ecú (Senecú).
Vocabulary As Piro was morphologically agglutinative, words were built from prefixes, stems and suffixes. For example, quen-lo-a-tu-ya-é ("mosquito") is glossed as "the insect that bites".
Piro was reportedly mutually intelligible with Isleta with many shared words and case stems. Of the 180 words in Bartlett's Piro vocabulary, 87% were identical or nearly so to their corresponding stems in Southern Tiwa. The vocabulary created by Harrington also contains several loanwords from Spanish, such as pipa-hem for "pipe" (from Spanish ).
References
External Resources 1894-7 Field Notes by James Mooney