#salish languages

[americangirlstar]

Two Hawks’s Name

So. I got curious about what Two Hawks’s name would be in his own language. I mean, I’m curious about what all of Kaya’s contemporaries would be named, but a few weeks ago I got hit with a strong desire to look into Two Hawks’s name specifically while doing research on the Salish nations.

As Two Hawks lives in the general Washington area, he would liikely use the Kalispel or Spokane dialect of his language. In both Kalispel and Spokane, “Esel” means “two,” but it was a bit hard to find a word for “hawk” or “hawks.”

So I ended up on native-languages.org, a non-profit organization site dedicated to the survival of Native languages. They have a specific page in which you can email their experts and request to know a word in exchange for a $10 donation. So I did send them a request, telling them that a character in a book I liked was named “Two Hawks” in the Salish Kalispel-Spokane language and I would like to know what his name would be.

They actually did respond to it, which I’m very excited about! I’m posting the email they sent to me below w/ a transcription under it. (Note: I wasn’t sure if Ms Redish’s email was from the site or personal? So to be safe I blacked it out). The tl;dr is there’s three possibilities for Two Hawks’s name, which is very exciting!

Thanks for taking part in our fundraiser!

Well, the Salish word for "Two" is "esel," but there are several different words for hawks in Salish. A fish hawk or osprey is c'ixʷc'xʷ. It's very typical of Salish words to be eye-popping tongue-twisters like this, the Salishan languages are considered to be among the most difficult in the world for English speakers to pronounce. The c' is pronounced like the "ts" in "cats" but with a clicking sound, and the "xʷ" sounds a bit like the "hw" sound you might make blowing out a candle. So c'ixʷc'xʷ is pronounced a little like tseets only with extra clicking and guttural blowing sounds. A red-tailed hawk is c'lc'lšmu, which is easier to pronounce, it sounds a little like chull-chull-shmoo only with clicks.

A sparrow hawk or falcon is the easiest to say, Aatat (pronounced ah-tot.) So this character's name could have been something like Esel C'ixʷc'xʷ, Esel C'lc'lšmu, or Esel Aatat.

Hope that is interesting to you, have a good day! Laura Redish Native Languages of the Americas

Everyone say thank you Laura Redish!!

What do you think is most likely to be Two Hawks’s name? Personally I think Esel C'lc'lšmu is the most likely, as I feel the translated name would have reflected it if he was named after an osprey or falcon, but any of them are possible.

[damnicantcontroltheweather]

I love you Homo Neanderthalensis. No one could ever make me hate you 💞💞💞

[triedpklove]

the next person who makes a joke about how silly goofy funny sequim is pronounced should owe the s’klallam tribe 100 dollars

[linguisticdiscovery]

Last fluent speaker of Wenatchee-Columbian Salish (n̓xaʔm̓xčín̓) dies at 96

[happi-speech]

Salish Language with Shirley Trahan (2003) Pt. 1 and 2

Indented are video descriptions from SKC-TV on their respective YT videos

Salish Language Specialist Shirley Trahan of the Salish Pend d'Oreille Culture Committee teaches basic Salish Language at the SKC Media/KSKC TV studio recorded on October 14, 2003.

Salish Language Specialists Shirley Trahan of the Salish Pend d'Oreille Culture Committee teaches fundamental Salish words and phrases with guest Felicity McDonald taped in October, 2003 at the SKC Media/KSKC TV studio.

[starclad]

Hiya! My name is Leona, my father grew up on the Colville Reservation, and this is his grandmother! I'm named after her granddaughter (my father's mother), who was named after her sister. I don't use this site, but you can find me on FB* and a few other sites that don't blow as many whale chunks as this one does. I wouldn't advise following me here, I don't plan to post any personal content outside of a few neat facts I've learned from my dad about our family history. I wanted to share her all with you, and the language she preserved. There's not a lot of platforms for me to share this on where I think people would find it all that interesting, but there's a tag for everything on toomblreer dot com, so I figured why not show it to people I know might find it interesting. Read about the Nsyilxcən recordings she did with Tony Mattina here! Note: Unfortunately, the links to the recordings are currently broken. I will find a substitute as soon as possible. *Facebook, in fact, does blow major whale chunks; but it's where my dad's family stays connected, and I'm really happy to be a part of that. c:

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Long considered extinct, pentl'ach has now been declared a living language and added to British Columbia's official list of First Nations languages.  The reclassification of pentl'ach (pronounced "PUNT-lutch") was the result of both linguistic and administrative work by the Qualicum First Nation on Vancouver Island's east coast, with support from the First Peoples' Cultural Council.  The Coast Salish language had been considered extinct because the last well known fluent speaker died in the 1940s.  But Mathew Andreatta, a Qualicum member and researcher with the pentl'ach revitalization project, said the language was never truly gone.  Andreatta called the reclassification "an affirmation of something that we've always known and that we've always felt." He said the move is important because it is healing for his people, but also because it opens more doors to continue revitalizing the language. 

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[mapsontheweb]

Franz Boas's 1924 map of Salish & surrounding languages.

[mathosapabeads]

salish sea dentalium and abalone earrings

these earrings are made with the inspiration of interconnected trade routes and plains indian sign language across turtle island that lead to the trade of shells among other things from the salish sea to my ancestors in the plains, particularly with the cultural tradition of stickgame in mind, as something that became so wide spread across the land

made with dentalium shells from trade with a tlingit and cowlitz tribal member, fish leather from an alutiiq tribal member, glass beads, and resin coated abalone saved from being thrown away

[cleolinda]

Weekend links, April 7, 2024

My posts

This week feels like it has been a hundred years long (not in a bad way). 

Somehow we joined together to balance the seesaw just right so Ava Gardner and Jean Seberg could both go through in the Hot Vintage Lady polls (percentages rounded). Like, I’m wearing the Ava jersey and even I encouraged people to vote Jean when necessary. Honestly, I just wanted to see if it could be done. And it COULD. 

Round three has begun. It is already horrific. This is the first round that’s really going to hurt because we spent the last one really getting down in the dirt and championing our ladies, or learning about actresses we’d never heard of before and getting attached to them. And now? We are reminded: memento mori. Everyone loses but one. 

(I personally pitched in for Sara Montiel. “BUT JUST LOOK AT--” Yeah, I did, thanks.)

Reblogs of interest

April Fool’s Day: You were here for the Boopening, yes? The whole thing was that you only got badges for giving boops, not receiving them, which is a great way to not reward popularity contests, but also means that every last one of us was out here trying to figure out who to bap with a cat’s paw 1000 times. I said, listen, my notifications are already trash garbage today. I’ll take the bullet. Boop at will.

The Activity graph isn’t too clear on this point, but it looks like I had something like 65,000--hits? engagements? boops?--that day. Listen, I got the black paw badge too. We all did what we had to do in the Boopening. 

A Shakespearean boop of goodly length: “And, Meowntague, come you this afternoon, to know our further pleasure in this case, to old Food-bowl, our common judgment-place.” 

I had to go lie down awhile after a pun like “The Purrge.”

--

I had just gotten up from that pun and then I had to go lie down again.

Account security gothic

The Canada griffin

Dinotopia nostalgia

Two pairs of spectacles, one made from slices of emerald, and the other from slices of diamond

An old favorite: Cerberus as a puppy, guarding the gates to heck

I feel like these two posts have the same energy: Time cops will not let you travel back to the Titanic and bloodthirsty gazebos are currently in a dormancy period.

The birds are still troubled

PSA: The best sunscreens for your face

Video

A collection of various American Indian/indigenous American languages, including Navajo, Tlingit, Lakota, Colville Okanagan Salish, Cherokee, Yucatec Maya, Greenlandic, Mohawk, Yup'ik, and Mi'kmawi'simk. 

A trans health-and-wellness fundraiser (Mercury Stardust, Point of Pride, and friends) kept getting banned off Tiktok due to assholes. Here’s how to donate; I saw a few “here’s how they helped me” notes, so it seems like these programs are both legit and effective. 

You think you’re going to sit staring at this video because Chocolate Guy is weaving chocolate. Then you get into it, and it just keeps going.

“Too Sweet” is doing hilariously well on the charts for a song that didn’t even make the album proper. Hozier’s bees would like to thank you for your support.

I know I said that Stevie Nicks would make you sing backup on your own haunting, but late in this 1997 live performance of “Silver Springs,” she makes Lindsey Buckingham, the man she wrote this song about, look her in the eye while she belts it at him. This specific performance was released as a single (I was there, Gandalf) and nominated for a Grammy. Watch the video and you will see why.

The Women Those ‘Evolution Of Beauty’ Videos Leave Out

I don’t really know how to describe this rubberhose-style cartoon of Cab Calloway as a singing nightmare clown. Betty Boop is also there. “You just described it!” No, I really didn’t. 

How movable type worked 1000 years ago, from scratch.

Unrestrained seasonal yak fun

A snowy raven photoshoot

The sacred texts

I don’t know how to explain this double Sacred Text about ominous dreams that comes with its own comic, except to say that they’re so iconic that I first saw both posts in lo-res Pinterest screencaps.

April Fool’s: The ultimate sacred text.

Personal tag of the week

Wet beast Wednesday, which had both a headshake stickflip and bears on a swan boat.

[formlines]

We Lift the Sky Together

Malynn Wilbur Foster, Mike Foster, and Randy Foster

from the website: My commissioned artwork is a story box, symbolic of a bentwood box, with all sides painted on stretched canvas. It is a collaboration between my husband Mike and I, and our sons. I listened to the Lifting the Sky legend and was moved very much by it. Being a huge fan of Vi and all of her work, I saw images of many of the main characters and their roles in the story. I painted the portraiture in our ancient Salish style, and worked directly on the canvas to give me the freedom to listen to the piece and what it wanted to be.

the story: A long time ago, the sky was too low. Tall people kept bumping their heads. Many different communities gathered to do something about it. They spoke different languages, but realized they only needed to know one word in common to understand each other. That word was yəhaw̓ - that means to proceed, to go forward, to do it. The people made long poles out of saplings and lifted them against the sky. They heaved upwards as they called out yəhaw̓ in unison to synchronize their efforts. After a few tries, they succeeded - changing the world as we know it. Together, we can lift the sky.

[zaagi-studies]

studyblr / langblr intro *ੈ✩‧₊˚

🌿 about me *ੈ✩‧₊˚

he/they + two-spirit

21

afro-indigenous [ojibway & ethiopian]

from: treaty 4 territory

currently in: coast salish territory

🌿 languages *ੈ✩‧₊˚

currently focus languages are arabic [levantine] & nakawemowin [ojibway]

used to study korean, mandarin, & nehiyawewin [plains cree]

🌿 school *ੈ✩‧₊˚

in my 2nd year of indigenous teacher education [4th year overall]

specialization: secondary [high school] history & social studies

my program is kinda weird but it's basically a 5 year dual degree in education + the equivalent of a double major in history & social studies. i think i'm taking 6-7 years to do my degree tho !

academic interests: turtle island history, african diasporic identity, indigenous communism, settler-colonialism, settler identity, philosophy of identity, pretendians/ethnic fraud, genocide studies, etc

long-term goal: being a historian of my people <3

🌿 current classes *ੈ✩‧₊˚

history of the indigenous peoples of north america (turtle island)

global indigenous histories

education classroom seminar

🌿 other random facts and things *ੈ✩‧₊˚

i'm a director of a queer library

i have mutiple disabilities

i play bass & electric guitar

i'm in a t4t relationship with a smart biology girly

my favourite music genres are conscious hiphop, nu-metal, and kpop

🌿 my other blogs !! *ੈ✩‧₊˚

@punk-by-the-book ~ main blog (v active)

@zaagis-archive ~ writing & photography (not super active)

[japhugmafia]

To be fair I feel like there's a lot of nuance that is often lost in how linguists collect data with transitive sentences. Like, I know that some Salish languages were documented with dated elicitation methods and make little remarks of how expressing both NPs in a transitive is rare in most languages (often even downright impossible; cf. dxʷləsúcid) where only A xor O can be overt in a sentence—and there's a orienting suffixes on the verb to denote whether the overt NP is a A/O. (A/O can be expressed by pronouns but are not NPs)

from Beck 1996

I do wonder whether there's a similar discussion to be had about how (dis-)similar Taiwanese AN languages are with the Paiwan discourse archetype (Chang 2006), where only a fraction of sentences in discourse actually have both A&O as full NPs.

[sqebu]

I’d love to hear you talk more about your Indigenous Simon hc!

Okay. So firstly, Simon is just Ambiguously Olive Toned so I don't care whatever anyone else thinks. He could be one of many possible Ethnicities and I support that. But here are my thoughts.

I see a few main possibilities:

Indigenous Siberian (eg. Chukchi, Sakha)

The name is a big reason of course, as well as the ice theme. Many Indigenous Siberians have Russian names as a result of Russification. I had a Sakha professor for a linguistics course in uni and it was interesting to learn about parallels in our experiences of colonial influence/language loss/etc. Of course there are differences but the Indigenous experience spans continents for sure...

The following guesses would still involve him being mixed Russian (or mixed with option 1 here) or adopted.

2. Indigenous Peruvian or Mexican?

He uses medicine (palo santo? Also could be poorly drawn sage but I have faith in the crew. We also don't burn it like that)! There were also various references to Mexican culture while he was Ice King that I don't have at hand. I remember another user mentioning it back in the day though.

3. Salish?!?!?!

This is purely because it would make me happy lmao, but it's unlikely. Anyway he and Betty met at the University of Washington, and I get that academics travel and he was likely visiting from another university but what if he was from Washington...and Seattle...what if he was a Lushootseed-speaking Salish person just like me......sobbing with desperation.

Also if it was poorly drawn sage this one gets at least 1 more point.

[salishdictionary]

The Salish Language Dictionary is a valuable online resource that documents and aids in the preservation of numerous endangered Salishan languages native to the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Central Salish languages such as Lushootseed, Nisqually-Puyallup, and Southern Puget Sound Salish are included, as are Northern Coast Salish languages such as Straits Salish. It contains thousands of Salish vocabulary phrases with headwords, parts of speech, meanings, and example sentences. There are also audio recordings of native speakers reciting numerous words. The purpose of the dictionary is to help language revitalization by gathering and organizing Salish language data into one publicly accessible database. It is a great resource for linguists, anthropologists, educators, and Salish community members who want to study or teach their ancestral dialects.