The Salish or Séliš language / ˈ s eɪ l ɪ ʃ / , also known as Kalispel–Pend d'oreille , Kalispel–Spokane–Flathead , or Montana Salish to distinguish it from other Salishan languages , is a Salishan language spoken (as of 2005) by about 64 elders of the Flathead Nation in north central Montana and of the Kalispel Indian Reservation in northeastern Washington state , and by another 50 elders (as of 2000) of the Spokane Indian Reservation of Washington. As of 2012, Salish is "critically endangered" in Montana and Idaho according to UNESCO.
54-528: Dialects are spoken by the Spokane (Npoqínišcn), Kalispel (Qalispé), Pend d'Oreilles , and Bitterroot Salish (Séliš). The total ethnic population was 8,000 in 1977, but most have switched to English. As is the case of many other languages of northern North America, Salish is polysynthetic ; like other languages of the Mosan language area , it does not make a clear distinction between nouns and verbs. Salish
108-419: A Ilmixʷm or chief and a sub chief, who were both selected to lead based on their leadership qualities. Decisions were made by consensus of the group. The Spokane had a matrilocal custom, in which the husband of a Spokane woman, after marriage, would join her and her people as the site of their home together. Occasionally, the wife would move to the husband's people. There was mobility between bands, by which
162-666: A Native American Plateau tribe who inhabit the eastern portion of present-day Washington state and parts of northern Idaho in the United States of America. The current Spokane Indian Reservation is located in northeastern Washington state, centered at Wellpinit (Sčecuwe). The reservation is located almost entirely in Stevens County , but also includes two small parcels of land (totaling about 1.52 acres [0.62 ha]) in Lincoln County , including part of
216-667: A complex of Winter dances, personal vision quests, and seasonal feasts tied to the annual subsistence cycle and the acquisition of guardian spirit powers"(Fisher). A few examples of spiritual dances include the Prophet Dance and the Spirit Dance , which took place in mid-January. Dancers sought to identify with the Prophet's spirit. In the Spirit Dance a shaman would call upon the spirit to visit an individual. It
270-561: A defining feature of all indigenous languages of the Americas . This characterization was shown to be wrong, since many indigenous American languages are not polysynthetic, but it is a fact that polysynthetic languages are not evenly distributed throughout the world, but more frequent in the Americas , Australia , Siberia , and New Guinea ; however, there are also examples in other areas. The concept became part of linguistic typology with
324-543: A dialect of Montana Salish . Therefore they are close kin both by language and culture to the neighboring Bitterroot Salish (Flathead) (Tˈatˈʔayaqn) and Pend d'Oreilles . They were in loose alliance with other Plateau tribes - and sometimes the Kutenai (Sqlˈse), Crow Nation (Stemčiʔ) and Cree-Assiniboine (Iron Confederacy) (Ncoʕʷaqs) joined in - against their common enemy (Sˈmen), the mighty Blackfoot Confederacy (Sčqˈʷišni) and later Lakota people (Hułnʔixʷtˈusm) on
378-589: A high degree of morphological synthesis, and which tend to form long complex words containing long strings of morphemes , including derivational and inflectional morphemes. A language then is "synthetic" or "synthesizing" if it tends to have more than one morpheme per word, and a polysynthetic language is a language that has "many" morphemes per word. The concept was originally used only to describe those languages that can form long words that correspond to an entire sentence in English or other Indo-European languages , and
432-411: A person or family could spend one winter with a band and the next winter with another. The Spokane diet consisted of fish, local game, and plants, including nuts and roots. The men hunted whitetail deer and mule deer, which provided essential protein and other nutrients in the winter. Individual hunters would track the deer and kill them using a bow and arrow. Fish, especially salmon, were a huge part of
486-542: A second person singular object). Many polysynthetic languages combine these two strategies, and also have ways of inflecting verbs for concepts normally encoded by adverbs or adjectives in Indo-European languages. In this way highly complex words can be formed, for example the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq which means "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer." The word consists of
540-444: A sequence of two affricates, whereas [stiʕít.ʃən] "killdeer" has a tee-esh sequence. All stop consonants are clearly released, even in clusters or word-finally. Though they are generally not aspirated, aspiration often occurs before obstruents and epenthetic schwas before sonorants. For example, the word /t͡ʃɬkʷkʷtˀnéˀws/ "a fat little belly" is pronounced [t͡ʃɬkꭩkꭩtʰəʔnéʔʍs] ; likewise, /t͡ʃt͡ʃt͡sʼéˀlʃt͡ʃn/ "woodtick"
594-496: A verb takes a direct object or it does not. For example, in (1) and (2), the single morphemes illustrate these properties rather than it being encoded in the verb as it is in English. ɫox̩ʷ open(ed) -nt - TR -en - 1sg . SUBJ ɫox̩ʷ -nt -en open(ed) -TR -1sg.SUBJ 'I made a hole in it' puls die, kill -VC - OC -st - TR -el' - SUCCESS puls -VC -st -el' {die, kill} -OC -TR -SUCCESS 'He got to kill (one)' Something that
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#1732787067377648-690: A vowel. Salish has pharyngeal consonants , which are rare worldwide and uncommon but not unusual in the Mosan Sprachbund to which Salish belongs. It is also unusual in lacking a simple lateral approximant and simple velar consonants ( /k/ only occurs in loanwords ), though again this is known elsewhere in the Mosan area. The post-velars are normally transcribed as uvular consonants : ⟨ q, qʼ, χ, qʷ, qʷʼ, χʷ ⟩. Salish contrasts affricates with stop – fricative sequences. For example, [ʔiɬt͡ʃt͡ʃeˀn] "tender, sore" has
702-614: Is believed the prophet Smohalla in a vision "foresaw the disappearance of the whites, the resurrection of the Indian dead, and the restoration of the world to a pristine state. This millennial transformation required no acts of violence — indeed, most Dreamers counseled pacifism — but to achieve it, the Indians had to obey the instructions of the Creator as conveyed through the prophets" (Fisher). The Dreamer Cult remained prominent within
756-573: Is complicated by the fact that morpheme and word boundaries are not always clear cut, and languages may be highly synthetic in one area but less synthetic in other areas (e.g., verbs and nouns in Southern Athabaskan languages or Inuit languages ). Many polysynthetic languages display complex evidentiality and/or mirativity systems in their verbs . The term was invented by Peter Stephen Du Ponceau , who considered polysynthesis, as characterized by sentence words and noun incorporation,
810-524: Is composed of the Greek roots poly meaning "many" and synthesis meaning "placing together". In linguistics a word is defined as a unit of meaning that can stand alone in a sentence, and which can be uttered in isolation. Words may be simple, consisting of a single unit of meaning, or they can be complex, formed by combining many small units of meaning, called morphemes . In a general non-theoretical sense polysynthetic languages are those languages that have
864-814: Is famous for native translations that treat all lexical Salish words as verbs or clauses in English—for instance, translating a two-word Salish clause that would appear to mean "I-killed a-deer" into English as I killed it. It was a deer. Salish is taught at the Nkwusm Salish Immersion School, in Arlee, Montana . Public schools in Kalispell, Montana , offer language classes, a language nest , and intensive training for adults. An online Salish Language Tutor and online Kalispel Salish curriculum are available. A dictionary, "Seliš nyoʔnuntn: Medicine for
918-514: Is one main stress in each word, though the location of stress is determined in a complex way (Black 1996). OC:out-of-control morpheme reduplication SUCCESS:success aspect morpheme Given its polysynthetic nature, Salish-Spokane-Kalispel encodes meaning in single morphemes rather than lexical items. In the Spokane dialect specifically, the morphemes ¬–nt and –el', denote transitivity and intransitivity, respectively. Meaning, they show whether or not
972-456: Is one of several tribal governments in the northwestern United States to offer free bus service on its reservation. The Spokane tribe was divided into three geographic divisions, upper, lower, and middle. Each area was divided into bands, which were composed of groups of related families or kin groups. The Upper Spokane or Sntʔtʔúlixʷ (Sntu't'ulixi) ("People of the Falls") resided along
1026-408: Is pronounced [t͡ʃt͡ʃt͡sʼéʔt͡ɬʃᵗʃən] , and /ppíˀl/ is [pʰpíḭᵗɬə̥] . Spokane vowels show five contrasts: /a/ , /e/ , /i/ , /o/ and /u/ , but almost all examples of /a/ and /o/ are lowered from /e/ and /u/ , respectively, when those precede uvulars, or precede or follow pharyngeals. Unstressed vowels are inserted to break up certain consonant clusters, with the vowel quality determined by
1080-581: Is teaching language classes in high schools. Salish-language Christmas carols are popular for children's holiday programs, which have been broadcast over the Salish Kootenai College television station, and Salish-language karaoke has become popular at the annual Celebrating Salish Conference, held in Spokane, Washington . As of 2013, many signs on U.S. Route 93 in the Flathead Indian Reservation were including
1134-517: Is unique to the Spokane dialect is the SUCCESS aspect morpheme: -nu. The SUCCESS marker allows the denotation that the act took more effort than it normally would otherwise. In (3) and (4) we can see this particular transformation. ɫip' mark -nt - TR -en - 1sg . SUBJ ɫip' -nt -en mark -TR -1sg.SUBJ 'I marked it' ɫip' mark -nu - SUCCESS -nt- Spokane tribe The Spokan or Spokane people are
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#17327870673771188-464: Is usually only marked for agreement with the subject (e.g. Spanish hablo "I speak" where the -o ending marks agreement with the first person singular subject), but in many languages verbs also agree with the object (e.g. the Kiswahili word nakupenda "I love you" where the n- prefix marks agreement with the first person singular subject and the ku- prefix marks agreement with
1242-485: The Columbia Plateau tribes and emerged from the pressures of colonization during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Dreamer Cult developed as a mix of traditional spirituality and aspects of Christianity. The Dreamer prophets rejected non-Native culture and belief systems. The prophets advocated returning to traditional ways of life. "[P]rior to contact, Plateau Indian spirituality revolved around
1296-591: The Spokane River . In total, the reservation is about 615 square kilometres (237 sq mi). The city of Spokane, Washington (Sʎˈetkʷ) is named after the tribe. It developed along the Spokane River, within the historic ancestral land of the tribe, but not within the reservation (see map). The Spokane language (Npoqínišcn ) belongs to the Interior Salishan language family , being
1350-423: The Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq . tuntu reindeer -ssur -hunt -qatar - FUT -ni -say -ksaite - NEG -ngqiggte -again -uq - 3SG . IND tuntu -ssur -qatar -ni -ksaite -ngqiggte -uq reindeer -hunt -FUT -say -NEG -again -3SG.IND "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer." Except for the morpheme tuntu "reindeer", none of
1404-855: The Columbia Plateau peoples until the early 1890s, when the major prophets died and their followers began to lose faith in the promise of a world free of white people. The closest contemporary religion to the Washani is the Seven Drums Religion . Polysynthetic In linguistic typology , polysynthetic languages , formerly holophrastic languages , are highly synthetic languages , i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone). They are very highly inflected languages. Polysynthetic languages typically have long "sentence-words" such as
1458-716: The Colville people (Sxʷyelpetkʷ). Not all the Spokane people moved from their traditional territory, which caused some conflict with white settlers. In the Coeur d'Alene War of 1858, the Spokane had allied with the Coeur d'Alene (Sčicwˈi), Yakima (Yiʔaqmeʔ), Palouse , and Paiute peoples against the European Americans. In the Nez Perce War of 1877, they remained neutral despite pleas from Nez Perce (Saʕaptni) chief Chief Joseph to join him in trying to expel
1512-692: The Little Spokane River and all the country east of the Lower Spokane to within the borders of the Coeur d'Alene and Kalispel, sometimes their name is given as Sineka'lt ("[People] at the Rapids"). The Middle Spokane or Snxʷme̓nʔey (Snx'w'meney) ("People of the steelhead river, i.e. Little Spokane River") occupied the area near Spokane Falls to Hangman (Latah) Creek and Deep Creek to Tum Tum, Middle Spokane territory includes Spokane House,
1566-475: The Salish Language," was expanded from 186 to 816 pages in 2009; children's books and language CDs are also available. Salish Kootenai College offers Salish language courses, and trains Salish language teachers at its Native American Language Teacher Training Institute as a part of its ongoing efforts to preserve the language. As of May 2013, the organization Yoyoot Skʷkʷimlt ("Strong Young People")
1620-558: The Spokane and related waterways, to generate hydroelectric power and provide water for irrigation in the arid eastern part of the state, has also affected the Spokane people. Construction of the Little Falls dam resulted in the end of most of the salmon run at Spokane Falls . The Grand Coulee Dam , on the Columbia River, blocked salmon from migrating upriver and ended all salmon runs on the Spokane River. The Spokane Tribe
1674-578: The Spokane children, from 1898 to 1906. The Spokane took prominent part in the so called Coeur d'Alene War (Spokane-Coeur d'Alene-Pend d'oreille-Paloos War) of 1858, a series of encounters between the allied Native American tribes of the Skitswish ("Coeur d'Alene"), Kalispell ("Pend'Oreille"), Spokane, Palouse and Northern Paiute against United States Army forces in Washington and Idaho which centered in ancestral Spokane territories. By treaty between
Salish–Spokane–Kalispel language - Misplaced Pages Continue
1728-403: The Spokane diet and also a large part of the trade economy. The Spokane people also ate trout and whitefish. They would smoke or dry the fish for trade or for storage in winter. Fish eyes were considered delicacies. Plants gathered by women provided nearly half of the caloric intake for the Spokane tribe. Men of the Spokane tribe created tools, fished, and hunted. After the tribe acquired horses,
1782-455: The adjacent consonants. The epenthetic vowel is often realized as /ə/ , but also /ɔ/ before rounded uvulars, and /ɪ/ before alveolars and palatals. The consonant inventory of Spokane differs from Salish somewhat, including plain and glottalized central alveolar approximants /ɹ/ and /ˀɹ/ , and a uvular series instead of post-velar. Spokane words are polysynthetic , typically based on roots with CVC(C) structure, plus many affixes . There
1836-452: The area. Since the early 20th century, their population has been steadily increasing: in 1985 tribal enrolled membership was reported as 1,961. In 2019 the tribe reported its population to be around 2,900 people. The name Spokane is first recorded in 1807. According to George Gibbs , the name was used by the Coeur d'Alene for one specific band of the Spokane, later transferred to all allied bands. A number of possible interpretations of
1890-464: The east. The precontact population of the Spokane people is estimated to be about 1,400 to 2,500 people. The populations of the tribe began to diminish after contact with settlers and traders due to mortality from new infectious diseases endemic among the Europeans, and to which the Spokane had no acquired immunity. By 1829 a Hudson's Bay Company trader estimated there were about 700 Spokane people in
1944-664: The encounter with the Lewis and Clark Expedition, fur traders and settlers arrived. In 1810, the North West Company opened the Spokane House near the confluence of the Spokane and Little Spokane (Nxweme'a'tkxy - "river where the Steelhead trout run") rivers as a trade post. The Pacific Fur Company established Fort Spokane (Čˈłyaqˈ) in 1811. Much later, the structure was used as an Indian boarding school for
1998-724: The federal government and the tribe, the people ceded most of their territory, accepting removal to the Spokane Reservation , which was established in 1881. In 1877, the Lower Spokane people (Scqesciłni) agreed to move to the Spokane Reservation. In 1887 the Upper (Sntʔtʔúlixʷ) and Middle Spokane people (Snxʷme̓nʔey) agreed to move to the Colville Reservation predominately inhabited by
2052-586: The head noun with agreement morphemes. There are some dependent-marking languages that may be considered to be polysynthetic because they use case stacking to achieve similar effects, and very long words. An example from Chukchi , a polysynthetic, incorporating , and agglutinating language of Russia which also has grammatical cases unlike the majority of incorporating polysynthetic languages: t- 1S . SUBJ meyŋ- great levt- head pəγt- hurt rkən 1S . PRES t- meyŋ- levt- pəγt- rkən 1S.SUBJ great head hurt 1S.PRES 'I have
2106-812: The historic Salish and Kutenai names for towns, rivers, and streams, and the Missoula City Council was seeking input from the Salish-Pend d'Oreille Culture Committee regarding appropriate Salish-language signage for the city of Missoula. Salish has five vowels, /a e i o u/ , plus an epenthetic schwa [ə] which occurs between an obstruent and a sonorant consonant , or between two unlike sonorants. (Differences in glottalization do not cause epenthesis, and in long sequences not all pairs are separated, for example in /sqllú/ → [sqəllú] "tale", /ʔlˀlát͡s/ → [ʔəlˀlát͡s] "red raspberry", and /sˀnmˀné/ → [səʔnəmˀné] "toilet". No word may begin with
2160-801: The men cared for and trained these animals, and horses became a measure of wealth. The animals allowed the people to travel wider territories, and were used also to carry or pull their supplies. The men rode the horses during hunting and warfare. Horses were introduced to the Spokane tribe from either the Nez Perce , Kalispel , or Flathead tribe. By about 1800, the Spokane tribe was acquiring herds, showing that they had fully embraced use of these animals. Spokane women made coiled baskets out of birch bark (or from cedar roots). They wove wallets and bags from strips of processed animal hide. They would also sew mats and other items which were sometimes traded with other Native peoples and white traders and settlers. Some of
2214-428: The morphemes tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq with the meanings, reindeer-hunt-future-say-negation-again-third.person.singular.indicative, and except for the morpheme tuntu "reindeer", none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation. Another way to achieve a high degree of synthesis is when languages can form compound words by incorporation of nouns, so that entire words can be incorporated into
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2268-522: The name have been proposed. Most frequently, the name has been translated as "Sun children", "Children of the Sun", or "Muddy people". According to Pritzker (2011), these interpretations are most probably popular etymologies (or "faulty translations") derived from an actual self-designation of Spoqe'ind , meaning "round head." The interpretation of "children of the Sun" was reported by Thomas Symons (1882), who attributed it to Ross Cox (1831), who mentioned
2322-534: The name of a chief in the region as Illim-Spokanée "Son of the Sun". The word for "Sun" is recorded as spukani for Bitterroot Salish , but as sokemm in Okanagan , and as ałdarench in Coeur d'Alene, all members of the Interior Salish branch of Salish. The word sqeliz , meaning "people", is also recorded as an autonym. For thousands of years the Spokane people lived near the Spokane River in
2376-435: The other morphemes can appear in isolation. Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have a very high ratio. There is no generally agreed upon definition of polysynthesis. Generally polysynthetic languages have polypersonal agreement , although some agglutinative languages that are not polysynthetic, such as Basque , Hungarian and Georgian , also have it. Some authors apply
2430-493: The plants they gathered were camas roots and local berries and barks. The women used digging sticks to uproot and gather their food. It was a fundamental tool for their lives, and it was a rite of passage for young girls to be given their first digging sticks. Women's graves were often marked with these sticks. A Spokane religion was the Dreamer Cult , also called Washani, meaning "worship" or "dancers". It developed in
2484-520: The settlers. Prior to colonization by European-Americans, Chewelah was home to a band of the Kalispel people. The band was known as the slet̓éw̓si, meaning "valley people". The Chewelah Band of Indians is currently part of the Spokane Tribe. Around the 1950s, uranium was discovered on the reservation. With the development of nuclear weapons and other tools, it was considered highly valuable. It
2538-501: The site of the first permanent white settlement in Washington State, another variant of their name is Snxwemi'ne ("People of the steelhead trout place"). The Lower Spokane or Scqesciłni (Scqecioni) ("People of Little Falls") traditionally occupied the lower Spokane River from Little Falls to the confluence of the Columbia River, also known as Squasi'lni ("Fishers", after a settlement name). Individual bands were led by
2592-422: The term polysynthetic to languages with high morpheme-to-word ratios, but others use it for languages that are highly head-marking , or those that frequently use noun incorporation . Polysynthetic languages can be agglutinative or fusional depending on whether they encode one or multiple grammatical categories per affix . At the same time, the question of whether to call a particular language polysynthetic
2646-452: The territory of present-day eastern Washington and northern Idaho , surviving by hunting and gathering. Spokane territory once sprawled over three million acres (12,000 km²) of land. The Spokanes lived along the river in three bands known as the Upper, Middle and Lower Spokane Indians. The Spokane bands were semi nomadic , following game and plants on a seasonal basis for nine months of
2700-441: The verb word, as baby is incorporated in the English verb babysit . Another common feature of polysynthetic languages is a tendency to use head marking as a means of syntactic cohesion. This means that many polysynthetic languages mark grammatical relations between verbs and their constituents by indexing the constituents on the verb with agreement morphemes, and the relation between noun phrases and their constituents by marking
2754-406: The word is still most frequently used to refer to such "sentence words". Often polysynthesis is achieved when languages have extensive agreement between elements verbs and their arguments so that the verb is marked for agreement with the grammatical subject and object. In this way a single word can encode information about all the elements in a transitive clause. In Indo-European languages the verb
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#17327870673772808-489: The work of Edward Sapir , who used it as one of his basic typological categories. Recently, Mark C. Baker has suggested formally defining polysynthesis as a macro-parameter within Noam Chomsky 's principles and parameters theory of grammar. Other linguists question the basic utility of the concept for typology since it covers many separate morphological types that have little else in common. The word "polysynthesis"
2862-404: The year, and settling in permanent winter villages for the other three. The first Europeans whom the Spokane people had contact with were fur traders and explorers. The Lewis and Clark Expedition encountered the Spokane tribe in 1805. Already the Spokane people were dwindling in population from introduced Eurasian diseases, such as smallpox , which were endemic among Europeans. Shortly after
2916-499: Was mined (under leases arranged on behalf of the Spokane by the federal government) from 1956 to 1962 out of an open pit . This practice was ended, and from 1969 to 1982, uranium was mined at the Midnite Mine . The now inactive mine is on the list of Superfund cleanup sites, as the mining process left the grounds and underground water highly contaminated by metals, radionucleides and acidic drainage . The creation of dams on
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