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Salishan languages

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The Salishan (also Salish / ˈ s eɪ l ɪ ʃ / ) languages are a family of languages of the Pacific Northwest in North America (the Canadian province of British Columbia and the American states of Washington , Oregon , Idaho and Montana ). They are characterised by agglutinativity and syllabic consonants . For instance the Nuxalk word clhp’xwlhtlhplhhskwts’ ( IPA: [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ] ), meaning "he had had [in his possession] a bunchberry plant", has twelve obstruent consonants in a row with no phonetic or phonemic vowels.

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59-546: The Salishan languages are a geographically contiguous block, with the exception of the Nuxalk (Bella Coola), in the Central Coast of British Columbia , and the extinct Tillamook language , to the south on the central coast of Oregon. The terms Salish and Salishan are used interchangeably by linguists and anthropologists studying Salishan, but this is confusing in regular English usage. The name Salish or Selisch

118-461: A certain state), that were then divided into first, second, and third persons, and either singular or plural. Tentative reconstructions of these suffixes include the neutral singular *-c (1st person), *-ci (2nd person), and *-∅ (3rd person), the causative singular *-mx (1st), *-mi (2nd), and *-∅ (3rd), the neutral plural *-al or *-muɬ (1st), *-ulm or *-muɬ (2nd), and the causative plural *-muɬ (1st and 2nd). In Salishan languages spoken since Proto-Salish,

177-532: A family, no progress has been made in reconstructing it. The Salishan languages, principally Chehalis , contributed greatly to the vocabulary of the Chinook Jargon . The syntax of Salish languages is notable for its word order (verb-initial), its valency-marking, and the use of several forms of negation. Although there is a wide array of Salish languages, they all share some basic traits. All are verb initial languages, with VSO (verb-subject-object) being

236-487: A free noun. Instead it appears as the lexical suffix -əyəł which is affixed to the verb root šk’ʷ- (which has changed slightly in pronunciation, but this can also be ignored here). The lexical suffix is neither "the baby" ( definite ) nor "a baby" (indefinite); such referential changes are routine with incorporated nouns. In orthography , the terms for affixes may be used for the smaller elements of conjunct characters. For example, Maya glyphs are generally compounds of

295-448: A head, like "the beans", and a restricting clause, like "that she re-fried", which references the head) omit person markers, while ergative relative clauses keep person makers on the subject, and sometimes use the topic morpheme -tali . Thus, St'át'imcets is split-ergative, as it is not ergative all the time. Subject and object pronouns usually take the form of affixes that attach to the verb. All Salish languages are head-marking. Possession

354-533: A list of Salishan languages, dialects, and subdialects. The genetic unity among the Salish languages is evident. Neighboring groups have communicated often, to the point that it is difficult to untangle the influence each dialect and language has upon others. This list is a linguistic classification that may not correspond to political divisions. In contrast to classifications made by linguistic scholars, many Salishan groups consider their particular variety of speech to be

413-488: A person's name becomes a taboo word immediately following their death . This taboo is lifted when the name of the deceased is given to a new member of their lineage. In the meantime, the deceased person's name and words that are phonetically similar to the name are considered taboo and can only be expressed via descriptive phrases. In some cases these taboo words are permanently replaced by their chosen descriptive phrases, resulting in language change. Stanley Evans has written

472-622: A segment from the first episode of its prequel involving the raven. British Columbia Coast The British Columbia Coast , popularly referred to as the BC Coast or simply the Coast , is a geographic region of the Canadian province of British Columbia . As the entire western continental coastline of Canada along the Pacific Ocean is in the province, it is synonymous with being

531-415: A semantic change to the word they are attached to. Inflectional affixes introduce a syntactic change, such as singular into plural (e.g. -(e)s ), or present simple tense into present continuous or past tense by adding -ing , -ed to an English word. All of them are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes . Changing a word by adding a morpheme at its beginning

590-603: A sentence initial negative particle that is often attached to the sentence's subject, and the last pattern simply involves a sentence initial negative particle without any change in inflectional morphology or a determiner/complementizer. In addition, there is a fourth restricted pattern that has been noted only in Squamish. Salishan languages (along with the Wakashan and the extinct Chimakuan languages) exhibit predicate/argument flexibility. All content words are able to occur as

649-504: A separate language rather than a dialect . Languages or dialects with no living native speakers are marked with † at the highest level. No relationship to any other language family is well established. Edward Sapir suggested that the Salishan languages might be related to the Wakashan and Chimakuan languages in a hypothetical Mosan family. This proposal persists primarily through Sapir's stature: with little evidence for such

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708-433: A series of crime fiction novels that use Salish lore and language. An episode of Stargate SG-1 (" Spirits ", 2x13) features a culture of extraterrestrial humans loosely inspired by Pacific coastal First Nations culture, and who speak a language referred to as "ancient Salish". In the video game Life Is Strange , the Salish lore was used on certain history of Arcadia Bay as totem poles are seen on some areas, including

767-566: A symbol of ethnic identity to an ethnic group. In the early 21st century, few Salish languages have more than 2,000 speakers. Fluent, daily speakers of almost all Salishan languages are generally over sixty years of age; many languages have only speakers over eighty. Salishan languages are most commonly written using the Americanist phonetic notation to account for the various vowels and consonants that do not exist in most modern alphabets. Many groups have evolved their own distinctive uses of

826-517: A total cargo volume of 76.5 million metric tons. By the same metric, the Port of Vancouver is also the fifth largest commercial shipping port in North America. The Port of Prince Rupert possesses the deepest ice-free natural harbour in North America, and the 3rd deepest natural harbour in the world. Situated at 54° North, the harbour is the northwesternmost port in North America linked to

885-1394: Is a mountain separating them. The rate of change between neighboring Salishan languages often depends on their environments. If for some reason two communities diverge, their adaptation to a new environment can separate them linguistically from each other. The need to create names for tools, animals, and plants creates an array of new vocabulary that divides speech communities. However, these new names may come from borrowing from neighboring languages, in which case two languages or dialects can grow more alike rather than apart. Interactions with outside influences through trade and intermarriage often result in language change as well. Some cultural elements are more resilient to language change, namely, religion and folklore. Salishan language communities that have demonstrated change in technology and environmental vocabulary have often remained more consistent with their religious terminology. Religion and heavily ingrained cultural traditions are often regarded as sacred, and so are less likely to undergo any sort of change. Indeed, cognate lists between various Salishan languages show more similarities in religious terminology than they do in technology and environment vocabulary. Other categories with noticeable similarities include words for body parts, colors, and numbers. There would be little need to change such vocabulary, so it's more likely to remain

944-503: Is called prefixation , in the middle is called infixation , and at the end is called suffixation . Prefix and suffix may be subsumed under the term adfix , in contrast to infix. When marking text for interlinear glossing , as shown in the third column in the chart above, simple affixes such as prefixes and suffixes are separated from the stem with hyphens. Affixes which disrupt the stem, or which themselves are discontinuous, are often marked off with angle brackets. Reduplication

1003-492: Is connected to the rest of B.C by various roads depending on the region. The populous Fraser Valley and Lower Mainland is linked to the rest of the province by Highway 1 (Fraser Canyon Highway), Highway 5 (Coquihalla Freeway), Highway 3 (Crowsnest Highway) and Highway 99 (Sea to Sky Highway). The Lower Mainland is also connected to the U.S. by four highway border crossings with the Peace Arch on Interstate 5 being

1062-406: Is indicated in Salish through an applicative affix on the verb. Applicative affixes increase the number of affixes a verb can take on, that is, its syntactic valence . They are also known as "transitivizers" because they can change a verb from intransitive to transitive. For example, in the sentence 'I got scared.', 'scared' is intransitive. However, with the addition of an applicative affix, which

1121-579: Is marked on the possessed noun phrase as either a prefix or a suffix, while person is marked on predicates. In Central Salish languages like Tillamook and Shuswap, only one plain NP is permitted aside from the subject. Salishan languages are known for their polysynthetic nature. A verb stem will often have at least one affix , which is typically a suffix. These suffixes perform a variety of functions, such as transitive , causative , reciprocal , reflexive , and applicative . Applicative affixes seem to be present on

1180-468: Is neutralised in predicative positions, words that can be categorised as 'verbs' are marked when used in syntactic argument positions. He argues that Salishan languages are omnipredicative, but only have 'uni-directional flexibility' (not 'bi-directional flexibility'), which makes Salishan languages no different from other omnipredicative languages such as Arabic and Nahuatl , which have a clear lexical noun-verb distinction. Beck does concede, however, that

1239-400: Is no north–south highway linking the coastal communities of the province between Port Hardy and Kitimat . Instead, travellers utilize one of the coastal ferry lines operated by BC Ferries . The exceptions are Bella Coola is accessible by a long largely gravel Highway 20 from the B.C interior over a high pass; and the towns of Terrace , Prince Rupert and Kitimat which is assessed from

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1298-488: Is not restricted to Lushootseed. This and similar behaviour in other Salish and Wakashan languages has been used as evidence for a complete lack of a lexical distinction between nouns and verbs in these families. This has become controversial in recent years. David Beck of the University of Alberta contends that there is evidence for distinct lexical categories of 'noun' and 'verb' by arguing that, although any distinction

1357-433: Is often shown with a tilde. Affixes which cannot be segmented are marked with a back slash. Semantically speaking, lexical affixes or semantic affixes , when compared with free nouns, often have a more generic or general meaning. For example, one denoting "water in a general sense" may not have a noun equivalent because all the nouns denote more specific meanings such as "saltwater", "whitewater", etc. (while in other cases

1416-461: Is syntactically transitive, the verb in Salish becomes transitive and the sentence can come to mean ‘I got scared of you.’. In some Salishan languages, such as Sḵwx̲wú7mesh, the transitive forms of verbs are morphologically distinctive and marked with a suffix, while the intransitive forms are not. In others such as Halkomelem, intransitive forms have a suffix as well. In some Salish languages, transitivizers can be either controlled (the subject conducted

1475-741: Is the endonym of the Flathead Nation . Linguists later applied the name Salish to related languages in the Pacific Northwest. Many of the peoples do not have self-designations ( autonyms ) in their languages; they frequently have specific names for local dialects, as the local group was more important culturally than larger tribal relations. All Salishan languages are considered critically endangered , some extremely so, with only three or four speakers left. Those languages considered extinct are often referred to as "dormant languages", in that no speakers exist currently, but still serve as

1534-749: The British Columbia Ministry of Forests , which uses an ecosystem classification system independent of the WWF and ECCC , the BC Coast is part of two distinct biogeoclimatic zones: Coastal Western Hemlock and Coastal Douglas-fir . Below are the 15 regional districts of British Columbia defined as being in the Coast region: The fishery of the Pacific Northwest Coast is legendary, especially for its many salmon runs and

1593-514: The Halkomelem language (the word order here is verb–subject–object ): In sentence (1), the verb "wash" is šak’ʷətəs where šak’ʷ- is the root and -ət and -əs are inflectional suffixes. The subject "the woman" is łə słeniʔ and the object "the baby" is łə qeq . In this sentence, "the baby" is a free noun. (The niʔ here is an auxiliary , which can be ignored for explanatory purposes.) In sentence (2), "baby" does not appear as

1652-687: The West Coast of Canada . While the exact boundaries are variously defined, the region is generally defined to include the 15 regional districts that have coastline along the Pacific Ocean or Salish Sea , or are part of the Lower Mainland , a subregion of the British Columbia Coast. Other boundaries may exclude parts of or even entire regional districts, such as those of the aforementioned Lower Mainland . While

1711-479: The 15 regional districts that have territory in this region. Among locals, the British Columbia Coast can further be divided into seven major subregions: Research from the 1990s has indicated that the Ice Age-era coastline of the British Columbia Coast was lower by about 100 m (330 ft). The effect of the sea level on the coastline was such that Queen Charlotte Sound , which is between Haida Gwaii and

1770-674: The B.C. interior on Highway 16 . Haida Gwaii has an extension of Highway 16 on it, one of Haida Gwaii's few paved roads. The sheltered waterways of the British Columbia Coast form part of the Inside Passage , a coastal maritime route along which vessels navigate to avoid the rough waters and bad weather of the open North Pacific . As such, the maritime route is heavily trafficked by cruise ships , cargo ships , ferries , and other marine vessels. BC Ferries , an independently managed publicly-owned company , operates scheduled daily crossings between major population centres throughout

1829-536: The BC Coast is part of five distinct ecoregions: Puget lowland forests , Central Pacific coastal forests , British Columbia mainland coastal forests , Haida Gwaii coastal forests , and Pacific Coastal Mountain icefields and tundra . According to the ecozone system used by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), the BC Coast is part of four distinct ecozones: Pacific Coastal Mountains , Coastal Western Hemlock-Sitka Spruce Forests , Pacific and Nass Ranges , and Strait of Georgia/Puget Lowland . According to

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1888-428: The British Columbia Coast. Dozens of smaller ferries ply lesser routes within and between these regions. The Alaska Marine Highway also operates nonstop ferry service through the British Columbia Coast along its Bellingham-Ketchikan route. The Port of Vancouver is the largest commercial shipping port in all of Canada and along the entire Pacific Ocean / Pacific coast of North America by metric tons , which handles

1947-579: The Coast Division. It was proposed by Morris Swadesh that the Olympic branch of Coast Salishan languages is a natural subdivision within the family, although linguists today generally accept the Olympic branch as a subgrouping within the Coast Salish division. The Interior Salish languages have a higher degree of closeness to each other than the more distant Coast Salish languages. Below is

2006-545: The Island. Although the Sunshine Coast is on the mainland it is connected to the highway network only by ferries. It has one route which is Highway 101 , a narrow curvy 2 lane road split in two by a ferry crossing. Texada Island , a large island off the Sunshine Coast and has its own network of highway standard roads although they are unnumbered. Owing to the challenging topography of the British Columbia Coast, there

2065-582: The Latin alphabet, however, such as the Saanich . The Salishan language family consists of twenty-three languages. The family is typically organized into two main divisions with variation: Coast Salish (Coast Division), Interior Salish (Interior Division), Tillamook, and Nuxalk. Nuxalk is sometimes classified as part of the Coastal Division of languages. Tillamook is also sometimes classfied as part of

2124-534: The Lushootseed argument ti ʔux̌ʷ ('the one who goes', shown in example sentence (1b) above) does represent an example of an unmarked 'verb' used as an argument and that further research may potentially substantiate Dale Kinkade 's 1983 position that all Salishan content words are essentially 'verbs' (such as ʔux̌ʷ 'goes' and sbiaw 'is a coyote') and that the use of any content word as an argument involves an underlying relative clause. For example, with

2183-503: The Salishan languages seems to depend on two main factors: the distance between speech communities and the geographic barriers between them. The diversity between the languages corresponds directly to the distance between them. Closer proximity often entails more contact between speakers, and more linguistic similarities are the result. Geographic barriers like mountains impede contact, so two communities that are relatively close together may still vary considerably in their language use if there

2242-403: The action on purpose) or limited-control (the subject did not intend to conduct the action, or only managed to conduct a difficult action). These transitivizers can be followed by object suffixes, which come to modern Salishan languages via Proto-Salish. Proto-Salish had two types of object suffixes, neutral (regular transitive) and causative (when a verb causes the object to do something or be in

2301-532: The continent's railway network. The port is the first inbound and last outbound port of call for some cargo ships travelling between eastern Asia and western North America since it is the closest North American port to key Asian destinations. Affix In linguistics , an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. The main two categories are derivational and inflectional affixes. Derivational affixes, such as un- , -ation , anti- , pre- etc., introduce

2360-408: The cultures that built on top of them throughout the region. Salmon runs have greatly diminished since pre-Contact years and the advent of commercial canning and, ultimately, depletion of stocks by high-seas fishing. Other commercial fisheries include halibut , herring and herring roe, sea urchin and other specialty sushis , hake , haddock , cod , crab and shellfish. The Coast Region of B.C

2419-518: The determiner ti translated as 'that which', the arguments ti ʔux̌ʷ and ti sbiaw would be most literally translated as 'that which goes' and 'that which is a coyote' respectively. There are twenty-three languages in the Salishan language family. They occupy the Pacific Northwest , with all but two of them being concentrated together in a single large area. It is clear that these languages are related, but it's difficult to track

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2478-409: The development of each because their histories are so interwoven. The different speech communities have interacted a great deal, making it nearly impossible to decipher the influences of varying dialects and languages on one another. However, there are several trends and patterns that can be historically traced to generalize the development of the Salishan languages over the years. The variation between

2537-572: The entire Canadian coastline. This coastal geography is shared with the neighbouring U.S. states of Alaska and Washington . The dominant landforms are the Insular Mountains of Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii , and the Coast Mountains that stretch along the entire length of the coast. The proximity of these mountains to the coast produce fjords that rival those of Norway in length and depth. Several large Islands fill

2596-551: The environment – rich in seafood , wild game , and greenery – combined with the ease of travel (by water) is seen in all cases (British Columbia, Denmark , Greece ) to have generated a dynamic and gifted civilization. And there are comparisons to be made between the artistic and political and social level of the Pacific Northwest Peoples and those of pre-Conversion pagan Scandinavia, Ireland and Archaic-Era Greece. The British Columbia Coast stretches from

2655-551: The foothills of the Pacific Ranges . Higher elevations feature a subpolar oceanic climate ( Köppen : Cfc) with cool summers, cold winters, and constant rainfall that peaks during the winter months. The highest elevations feature a subarctic climate ( Köppen : Dfc). The British Columbia Coast is dominated by temperate rainforest . According to the ecoregion system used by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF),

2714-575: The forms of those suffixes have been subject to vowel shifts, borrowing pronoun forms from other languages (such as Kutenai), and merging of neutral and causative forms (as in Secwepemc, Nlaka'pamuctsin, Twana, Straits Salishan languages, and Halkomelem). There are three general patterns of negation among the Salishan languages. The most common pattern involves a negative predicate in the form of an impersonal and intransitive stative verb, which occurs in sentence initial position. The second pattern involves

2773-664: The head of the predicate (including words with typically 'noun-like' meanings that refer to entities) or in an argument (including those with 'verb-like' meanings that refer to events). Words with noun-like meanings are automatically equivalent to [be + NOUN] when used predicatively, such as Lushootseed sbiaw which means '(is a) coyote'. Words with more verb-like meanings, when used as arguments, are equivalent to [one that VERBs] or [VERB+er]. For example, Lushootseed ʔux̌ʷ means '(one that) goes'. The following examples are from Lushootseed . An almost identical pair of sentences from St’át’imcets demonstrates that this phenomenon

2832-733: The largest. Several freeways connect lower mainland communities together. The backbone of Vancouver Island's highway network is the Highway 19 which along with a portion of Highway 1 forms the Island Highway . The Island highway is a mix of 4-lane freeway, 4 lane arterial highway and 2 lane highway running roughly along the east shore of Vancouver Island. Access to the west coast of Vancouver Island can be accomplished by crossing mountain passes on Highway 4 to Tofino and Highway 28 to Gold River . Thousands of other roads ranging from small freeways near Victoria to logging roads exist all over

2891-522: The lexical suffixes and free nouns of Northern Straits Saanich written in the Saanich orthography and in Americanist notation : Some linguists have claimed that these lexical suffixes provide only adverbial or adjectival notions to verbs. Other linguists disagree, arguing that they may additionally be syntactic arguments just as free nouns are and, thus, equating lexical suffixes with incorporated nouns. Gerdts (2003) gives examples of lexical suffixes in

2950-488: The lexical suffixes have become grammaticalized to various degrees.) Although they behave as incorporated noun roots/stems within verbs and as elements of nouns , they never occur as freestanding nouns. Lexical affixes are relatively rare and are used in Wakashan , Salishan , and Chimakuan languages — the presence of these is an areal feature of the Pacific Northwest of North America - where they show little to no resemblance to free nouns with similar meanings. Compare

3009-493: The most common word order. Some Salishan languages allow for VOS and SVO as well. There is no case marking, but central noun phrases will often be preceded by determiners while non-central NPs will take prepositions. Some Salishan languages are ergative , or split-ergative , and many take unique object agreement forms in passive statements. In the St'át'imcets (Lillooet Salish) language, for example, absolutive relative clauses (including

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3068-463: The northern end of Vancouver Island, was a coastal plain, as were all the straits inland from it, except for those that were mountain valleys. Underwater archaeology has shown the presence of permanent human habitations and other activity at the 100 m (330 ft) contour, and the Ice Age existence of such a coastal plain has put a new light on Ice Age populations in North America as well as on

3127-478: The same despite other changes between languages. The Coast Salishan languages are less similar to each other than are the Interior Salishan languages, probably because the Coast communities have more access to outside influences. Another example of language change in the Salishan language family is word taboo, which is a cultural expression of the belief in the power of words. Among the Coast languages,

3186-478: The southern tip of Vancouver Island along the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the community of Stewart at the head of Portland Canal . The aerial distance between these two points is approximately 954 km (593 mi). However, due to its deeply incised coastline and over 40,000 islands of varying sizes, the total length of the British Columbia Coast is over 25,725 km (15,985 mi), or approximately 10% of

3245-511: The strait between Vancouver Island and the Mainland with Texada Island , Cortes Island and Salt Spring Island being the largest in size. Fjords of note include Burrard Inlet , Burke Channel , Howe Sound , Jervis Inlet , Desolation Sound , Dean Channel , Douglas Channel , and Portland Inlet . The BC Coast is dominated by a moderate oceanic climate ( Köppen : Cfb) with warm summers, cool winters, and constant rainfall that peaks during

3304-671: The strong likelihood of this area having been the major migration route from (and perhaps to) Asia . The heavy indentation and mild climate of the British Columbia Coast have led to inevitable comparisons with the geography's predisposition to encouraging increased human settlement and movement as well as cultural foment and population growth in the Aegean, the Irish Sea/Hebrides and in the Danish Archipelago and adjoining Scandinavian coasts. The natural fecundity of

3363-493: The term British Columbia Coast has been recorded from the earliest period of non-native settlement in British Columbia, it has never been officially defined in legal terms. The term has historically been in popular usage for over a century to describe a region of the province that extends west from the Coast Mountains and North Cascades . This definition makes the term British Columbia Coast largely synonymous with

3422-401: The verb when the direct object is central to the event being discussed, but is not the theme of the sentence. The direct object may be a recipient, for example. It may also refer to a related noun phrase, like the goal a verb intends to achieve, or the instrument used in carrying out the action of the verb. In the sentence ‘The man used the axe to chop the log with.’, the axe is the instrument and

3481-461: The winter months. These areas enjoy the mildest winter weather in all of Canada, as temperatures rarely fall below freezing. The southernmost region of the coast (surrounding the Salish Sea ) features a warm-summer Mediterranean climate with warm, dry summers and cool, wet winters. This gradually transitions to a predominantly oceanic climate in the north along the coast and further inland into

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