Takelma language
| Takelma | |
|---|---|
| Taakelmàʔn | |
| Native to | United States |
| Region | Oregon, Rogue Valley along the middle course of the Rogue River |
| Ethnicity | Takelma, Latgawa, Cow Creek band of Upper Umpqua |
| Extinct | 1934, with the death of Frances Johnson |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | take1257 |
Takelma (south), with the Kalapuyan languages to the north
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Takelma /təˈkɛlmə/ was the language spoken by the Latgawa and Takelma people and Cow Creek band of Upper Umpqua. It was first extensively described by Edward Sapir in his graduate thesis, The Takelma Language of Southwestern Oregon. The last fluent speaker of Takelma, with whom Sapir worked while writing about the language, was Frances Johnson (Gwísgwashãn).
There was possibly a Cow Creek dialect spoken in southwestern Oregon along the South Umpqua River, Myrtle Creek, and Cow Creek.
Takelma is a language isolate.
Takelma was once considered part of a Takelma-Kalapuyan language family together with the Kalapuyan languages (Swadesh 1965). However, a paper by Tarpent & Kendall (1998) finds this relationship to be unfounded because of the extremely different morphological structures of Takelma and Kalapuyan. DeLancey follows this position. However, Takelma is commonly proposed as part of the Penutian super-family, as first suggested by Edward Sapir.
Takelma like many Native American languages is polysynthetic meaning that you can link together many different morphemes to form a word. Therefore one single word can often contain a lot of information that in English would be portrayed in a full sentence. This is mainly done by adding affixes to verbs.
Takelma has 6 different tenses listed below with the first (aorist) being the basic tense which is equivalent to the immediate future, present, and past.
In Takelma, possession is marked by a set of affixes. Most of them are suffixes but there is one prefix. Below is a table of the four declensional sets.
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