Pre-Arawakan languages of the Greater Antilles


Several languages of the Greater Antilles, specifically Cuba and Hispaniola, appear to have preceded the Arawakan Taíno. Almost nothing is known of them, though a couple recorded words, along with a few toponyms, suggest they were not Arawakan or Cariban, the families of the attested languages of the Antilles. Three languages are recorded: Guanahatabey, Macoris, and Ciguayo.
Guanahatabey has in the past been called "Ciboney". The name is a misnomer. The Ciboney were an apparently Taíno population of the western Great Antilles, whose language is also unattested. A misreading of historical sources confused the Ciboney with the pre-Arawakan population of the islands.

Languages

There were three pre-Arawakan populations at the time of the Spanish Conquest, and they were extinct within a century. These were
They were evidently completely mutually unintelligible with Taíno. Ciguayo and Macorix were apparently moribund when chronicler De las Casas arrived on the island in 1502. He wrote in his Historia,
Es aquí de saber que un gran pedazo desta costa, bien más de 25 ó 30 leguas, y 15 buenas, y aún 20 de ancho, hasta las sierras que hacen desta parte del Norte la Gran Vega inclusive, era poblada de unas gentes que se llamaban mazoriges, y otras ciguayos, y tenían diversas lenguas de la universal de toda la isla. No me acuerdo si diferían éstos en la lengua, como ha tantos años, y no hay hoy uno ni ninguno a quien lo preguntar, puesto que conversé hartas veces con ambas generaciones, y son pasados ya más de cincuenta años.

However, elsewhere he notes that the neighboring languages were not intelligible with each other.
Tres lenguas habia en esta Isla distintas, que la una á la otra no se entendía; la una era de la gente que llamábamos del Macoríx de abajo, y la otra de los vecinos del Macoríx de arriba, que pusimos arriba por cuarta y por sexta provincias; la otra lengua fué la universal de toda la tierra.

Classification

Little else is known of the languages apart from the word for ‘gold’ in Ciguayo, tuob, mentioned in the sentence immediately preceding the first passage above:
Aquí no llamaban caona al oro como en la primera parte desta isla, ni nozay como en la isleta de Guanahaní o San Salvador, sino tuob.

Tuob – whether two syllables or one – is not a possible Taíno word. Both the Arawak and Carib languages had a simple -syllable structure, suggesting that Ciguayo was not just unintelligible, but actually of a different language family than the two known languages of the Caribbean. Granberry has speculated that they may have been related – not to the languages of South America as Taíno was – but to languages of Central America which had more similar syllable structures. Western Cuba is close enough to the Yucatán Peninsula for there to have been crossings by canoe at the time of the Conquest.
In Ciguayo, there is also the proper name Quisqueya, and in Macorix a negative form, baeza. The Guanahani Taino word for ‘gold’, nozay, elsewhere spelled nuçay, may be of Warao origin, as the Warao word for ‘gold’ is naséi simo. However, trade words like 'gold' are readily borrowed.