Kathlamet language
| Kathlamet | |
|---|---|
| Middle Chinook | |
| Native to | Washington, Oregon |
| Extinct | 1930s, with the death of Charles Cultee |
|
Chinookan
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 |
None (mis) |
| Glottolog | kath1253 |
Kathlamet was a Chinookan language that was spoken around the border of Washington and Oregon by the Kathlamet people. The most extensive records of the language were made by Franz Boas, and a grammar was documented in the dissertation of Dell Hymes. It became extinct in the 1930s and there is little text left of it.
Kathlamet was spoken in northwestern Oregon along the south bank of the lower Columbia River. It has been classified as a dialect of Upper Chinook, or as Lower Chinook, but was mutually intelligible with neither.
All of the Chinookan languages feature what Mithun (1999) describes as “rich consonant inventor(y) typical of [languages native to] the Northwest coast” and “elaborate phonological processes”. Kathlamet contains bilabial, dental, velar, and uvular stops p, t, k, q, and lateral and palatal affricatives χ, ts, Also lateral, dental, velar, uvular, and laryngeal fricatives, ɬ, tɬ, x, h and nasal m, n. Boas (1911b) reports that Kathlamet consonant clusters are defined by their position to the word initial, medial and final and the phonemic syllable initial and final. In sequences of consonant where a continuant occurs as nucleus, consonants following the nucleus are taken to appear the separate clusters, the nucleus in none.
Consonants
Vowels
Kathlamet lacks many of the distinguishing features found among the dialects of Upper Chinook including extensive use of sound symbolism, pervasive intervocalic voicing of consonants, and an elaborate tense prefix system. It also features a different collection of initial nominal prefixes and some additional morphemes, such as independent pronouns. (Mithun 1999) The glides [j], [w] are analyzed as allophones of the high vowels.
Kathlamet has four major word classes: pronouns, nouns, verbs, and articles. Pronoun words are always members of the pronominal stem class. And there are two subclasses of pronoun stems. The first stems of subclass occur with prefixes marking 1st, 2nd and 3rd person. The second stems of subclass occur with prefixed only marking 3rd person. Nouns can be inflected for the initial prefixes, possessive pronominal prefixes and initial prefixes (as nominalizers), in which in similar in form to the prefixes of demonstratives prefixes of verbs. Possessive pronominal prefixes may be inflected for person and number for gender and number prefixes. Verbs may contain initial tense prefixes. Unlike noun and pronoun words, verb may show more than one occurrence of the paradigm. The number of occurrences ranges from one to three mostly by relative order position, partly by special forms. Nouns may be used with the pronominal prefix as an absolutive. Verbs also are used as nominal. Nouns stem belonging to a joint class, such as VN, NP and VNP. Nouns can come in two different types; a simple noun, which is a single stem morpheme; and complex nouns, which have an apparent sequence. Similar to English, adverbials in Kathlamet may be used to indicate directional relations, such as “with” “for” “near” “toward” “out”.(Mithun 1999)
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