#salishan language

[linguisticdiscovery]

That combining apostrophe above the letters is hell to find fonts for lemme tell ya...

[acelessthan3]

Why is it so impossible to find something as basic as what Pacific Madrones were called in any of the dozens of Salishan languages where the damn tree is indigenous.

Finally found it via the glossary section of a txʷəlšucid (twulshootseed aka Puyallup Tribal language) program website after much variations on searches and also a Lummi Language Vocabulary by a 19th century ethnobotanist: ɡʷuƛ̕əc (and the anglified version: kō-kwéltsh).

[casiavium]

Dictionary.com | Meanings & Definitions of English Words

Any of the words in here?

... no.

[metamatar]

something something american necropolitics the tillamook county creamery association found online on tillamook dot com that sells many dairy products in the united states under the brand name tillamook has no relationship and makes no acknowledgement of the tillamook people from whom it get its name. the name comes from the chinook translation of the people of nehalem. early contact with european sailing ships is dated to the 1770s. in 1805 lewis and clark's "discovery" expedition noted at the time that many large villages had been depopulated by pandemics and many adults had smallpox scars. this followed a period of fur trading with the involvement of hudson bay corporation. in 1850, the us govt passed the oregon donation land act, announcing over 2,500,000 acres of land as available for settlers to seize, which happened in patterns whose violence mirrors that of the continent. there was no treaty. in 1907, the tribe sued and was paid 23,500 dollars for the land the us govt has seized from them when it forced them onto the siletz reservation. the tillamook language is a salishan language that lost its last fluent speaker in 1970. many descendants are considered part of the confederated tribes of siletz. other nehalem are part of the unrecognized clatsop nehalem confederated tribes. the nehalem-tillamook were also socially and economically integrated with the clatsop peoples. today the town of tillamook has a population that is only 1.5% native american. the modern day corporation started as a settler coop created in 1909. it is the 48th largest dairy processor in north america and posted $1 billion in sales in 2021.

[ukfrislandembassy]

We all can understand that Esperanto's system of using word-final vowels to denote word classes is not especially naturalistic and frankly is pretty clunky in many regards. However, there do appear to exist languages in numerous places around the world which exhibit some segmental correlates of word-class. Here's a list of those that I'm aware of off the top of my head.

Yoruba (and I'm guessing this is true of Kwa more broadly) appears to overwhelmingly have vowel-initial nouns in native vocabulary. This seems to tie in with a trend towards deriving nouns from consonant-initial verb roots using V-prefixes, as well as perhaps being a relic of a previous noun class system (more on that below).

Salishan languages (outside of Bella Coola) generally show an s- prefix, even on seeming root nouns, in part doubtless to do with it being a nominalising prefix and thus kinda essential in an omnipredicative language.

A number of Oceanic languages, mostly in Melanesia, have either vowel-initial or n-initial nouns from univerbation of one of the Proto-Oceanic articles (*qV and *na respectively). Often the distribution seems to fall along semantic lines, with *qi for humans and proper nouns and *na everything else, though some languages divide it differently, e.g. Torres-Banks, where *na has specifically ended up as an inalienable marker, though there it is still kind of an article. Notably, even in languages where this correlation does not hold for the majority of nouns, some 'article accretion' as François terms it often still occurs

Moskona, in a curious parallel to the Oceanic system, has native alienable nouns begin with m- and inalienable ones with a vowel, or rather the root begins with vowel to which possessor prefixes are added. No clues as to the etymology.

To this we might add systems where noun class also plays a role. For instance, in Berber languages masculine nouns seem to usually begin with a vowel, with a t-...-t circumfix for feminines, e.g. Amazigh 'Berber people' → Tamazight 'Berber language' (though for non-Tuareg varieties I think vowel syncope obscures this a little?). Similarly, some Bantu noun-class systems such as those of isiZulu have a vocalic 'augment' to their noun class prefixes which is basically an echo vowel of the prefix, which I suspect is related to what's going on in Yoruba, especially if Niger-Congo is a thing.

Any other examples you're aware of feel free to add, as I'm wondering if this might be a good thing to do a paper on sometime.

[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.

[fagtendo64]

I spent a lot of my childhood growing up on the rez. And at home, we spoke some Salish in our day-to-day dealings. Not much, just a word or phrase here and there (that I've mostly forgotten).

One of those phrases was "Q'lal'ŝ", which just means "suppertime", or something similar. And it was how my family would call everybody to the table for a meal. Mom would say "go get your siblings for supper" and so we would just holler "q'lal'ŝ!!" down the hallway.

But as a kid, I didn't know that we were speaking Salish, a dead language that nobody really speaks anymore. I just thought that was a normal regular American thing to do. And so like, even when staying at a friend's house, that's how I would call them to supper.

Nobody pointed it out to me until middle school, when my friend Tyler's mom very politely asked me "what the HELL did you just say?", and I found out that, no, in fact. The average American does not sprinkle phrases in upper Salishan dialects into their day-to-day vernacular.

[wordacrosstime]

Ingush Grammar

[Ingush Grammar. Johanna Nichols. First Edition: March 2011. University of California Press. Series: UC Publications in Linguistics. Pages: 830. Trim Size: 7 x 10 inches.  Illustrations: 1 map. Paperback. ISBN: 9780520098770]

Readers of my book reviews cannot help but notice my interest in – nay, my fascination with – linguistics and languages.  I am no stranger to Professor Nichols’s work: I read her award-winning treatise Linguistic Diversity in Time and Space a few years ago and was captivated by her command of language reconstruction principles.   Recently, it came to my attention that there might (in principle) be a call for persons to assist in national security-related activities who are fluent in, or at least familiar with, the Northeast Caucasian languages, especially Chechen and Dagestani.  The language discussed here, Ingush, is a closely-related language with a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility with Chechen, Dagestani and Baltsi.  Since I couldn’t find a suitable book from which to learn Chechen, I thought I’d check this tidy little volume out.

“Tidy” is not the correct word for this work.  It tips the scales at almost 800 pages.  However, it is an undeniable tour-de-force of scholarship in the documenting of a comparatively obscure language. Prof. Nichols herself acknowledges that this tome is the culmination of about 30 years of work with Ingush, at least ten of which were spent in the homeland of the language itself, a region now known as Ingushetia in southern Russia adjacent to the Republic of Georgia and Chechnya.

The Northeast Caucasian languages are a small primary language family spoken almost exclusively in the region between the Republic of Georgia and the north end of the Caspian Sea.  Significant cities in this region are Ongusht (whence the name Ingush), Groznyy (the capital of Chechnya) and Makhachkala (the capital of Dagestan).   Though these languages share many features with Georgian (known as Kartuli to its speakers) and the similarly-named Northwest Caucasian languages (examples are Abkhazi and Cherkessian), they are not, in fact, related to them in any meaningful way.  This may seem surprising when one looks at a map of the region.  The area covered by these three language groups (Georgian is part of its own tiny language family called the Kartulian languages) is fairly small.  However, the area is peppered with mountain ranges that have carved it up geographically to a point where very ancient steppe peoples had settled in individual valleys and had no direct contact with even neighboring valleys for centuries. Little wonder, then, that language families developed independently from a still-more-ancient proto-language (as yet unidentified or classified).

Ingush, as alluded to in the previous paragraph, was named after a prominent community in its sprachbund, or speaking area.  Ingush people do not use this term, referring to their language as vai mott (our language) or, if speaking to non-Ingush speakers, vai neaxa mott (our people’s language).  Given that the homeland for this language has at least three well-defined geographic zones (alpine highlands, piedmont, and plains), it is not surprising that various dialects of Ingush have emerged.  All of these dialects are highly mutually intelligible, far from any objective criteria that would categorize them as distinct languages in their own right.

Nichols herself, in the introductory material, lists Ingush as one of the most morphologically complex languages in her experience, outstripping even daunting native American languages like Lakhota (a Siouan language of the northern Great Plains) and Halkomelem (a Salishan language from the Pacific Northwest in the USA).  Ingush has unusually large inventories of elements (phonemes, etc.), a high degree of inflectional synthesis in the verb (this is similar to some native American languages, especially the Athapaskan group) and a variety of categories of words, many of which do not have an analogue in English or any Indo-European language.  She comments that this might go some way toward explaining why this book took 30 years to produce!

Since the volume is so detailed, I will simply summarize my observations of its style and completeness.  I confess that I haven’t actually read the entire volume – I’ve probably read about 150 pages, or nearly 20% of it all told – but I have dipped into it in various places along its length to see what it was all about.  It is impossible for me to imagine that Prof Nichols missed anything; every conceivable component of Ingush seems to be covered here.  The book has 35 major sections, any one of which is worthy of at least a semester-long course of study (for the subject itself, not necessarily for Ingush per se).  Her writing tone and style strike an admirable balance between being very scholarly (it certainly is that) and yet being profoundly informative to a non-specialist like myself who is also not a trained linguist.

The best affirmation I can make of this book is that it is quite possibly the best template for any field linguist to follow when documenting and characterizing a language.  This is certainly true for someone working with an Endangered language, of which there are literally thousands still being spoken (some just barely) in the world today.  The level of commitment Prof Nichols has brought to bear on this work seems nothing short of miraculous.

This is definitely not a book for just anyone.  Like attempting to read all of Proust in the original French while not actually speaking French, a true appreciation of this book requires enormous patience and strong memory skills.  Prof Nichols refers to sections back and forth across the book, of necessity since linguistic elements do not exist in a vacuum.  That said, to truly appreciate the scope and even grandeur of this volume will command great mental agility and focus.  For anyone who is up to the challenge, I say, “Good luck – and enjoy!”  Even if you never speak Ingush or travel to that part of the world, this book will teach you something useful, edifying, and mind-expanding.

[Photo credits with thanks to : Book cover ©  2011 University of California Press / Portrait © 2012 Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin]

Kevin Gillette

Words Across Time

28 September 2022

wordsacrosstime

[whitepolaris]

On the Trail of Bigfoot

Forgetting the tabloid newspaper stories about Bigfoot coming from outer space to make with humans, tales of Bigfoot (also known as Sasquatch) in the Pacific Northwest go back hundreds-possibly thousands-of years. Recent archaeological investigators have shown that across the world many creatures thought to have been extinct survived into our modern age. Some believe that Bigfoot was the first great ape to inhabit the Pacific Northwest, with man followign second.

The native people have many stories about the Sasquatch. They said it resembled human beings, but did not speak human languages. Almost all legends also say it was gigantic and smelled bad. The feet of eighteen inches long. They lived in holes in the ground in the mountains or deep in the woods, and emerged in the spring and fall to fish by the river, mostly avoiding people. Some were friendly, while others were thieves and very dangerous.

The Lummi Indians of the Puget Sound frequently saw two kinds of Sasquatch. There was a big, peaceful timber giant and a small, meaner one. The second creature carried a magic stick, with which it could hit any tree truck three times and knock the tree down. Other stories about the Sasquatch say that they chattered like animals or owls and charmed people. They entered human camps and stole things, and sometimes kidnapped or killed children.

Scientists have discovered fossils in Asia of a great ape they called Gigantopithecus. Based on fossils evidence, the Gigantopithecus was a vegetarian creature that stood over six feet high. People looking for an explanation for Bigfoot believe that the Gigantopithecus spread to North America, and while the Asian Gigantopithecus died out, its North American relatives survived.

Sasquatch in Love

Many cryptozoologists believe that as vegetarians, the Sasquatch are not normally aggressive. An exception to this is when a male detects the presence of a fertile female, whether Sasquatch or human. Their need to mate might drive them to kidnap the female, as the following stories seem to indicate.

Puget Sound

On the Fraser River, along the Canadian-Washington border, a Salishan woman was captured by a Sasquatch, who took her for a mate. She came back to her people with hair growing over her body and unable to speak her tribal language. It took several powerful shamans to return her to normal. Later she was with some hunters who saw some Sasquatch. She asked the hunters not to shoot them, because they could be members of her family.

Fort Vancouver

In the 1830s, the Indian wife of Hudon Bay Company employee was kidnapped by a Sasquatch while walking outside the Fort Vancouver stockade. It carried her into the woods, but by screaming and fighting, she escaped after a few minutes. She encountered some hunters who pursued the creature. They may have shot at it and tracked it for a while, but it escaped them.

Patrick, the Sasquatch Boy

The Colville Indians encountered several of the small, stick-wielding Sasquatch, which they called the Skanicum. In the 1980s, a group of Colville camped near Keller, along the Sanpoil River. A new bride left camp and went to the river to fetch water, where a Skanicum kidnapped her and made her his wife. The next year the Indians rescued the woman, who was pregnant. She carried the baby to term and named him Patrick.

According to Dr. Edward Fusch, in Scweneyti and the Stick Indians of the Colvilles, the Indians said Patrick was short-about five feet four inches tall-but his arms hung down to his knees. He had large and strong hands, a sloping forehead, a large lower jaw with teeth that stuck out, and pointed ears. Despite his odd appearance, he was very smart and successful. Although he died around the age of thirty, he had three daughters and two sons. All of his children had some Skanicum features.

The Burgoyne Brothers

In the mid-1800s, many men abandoned their farms in the lowlands of the Pacific Northwest to look for precious metals in the Cascade Mountains. Three brothers, the Burgoynes, lives and farmed in Kelso but had a small cabin at Grizzly Lake, near Mount Saint Helens. After harvest and before the winter snows blocked the mountain passes, the brothers mined copper there. One winter, one of the brothers decided to stay at the cabin, while the other two took their ore and returned to Kelso.

When the summer came, the two brothers returned to the mountains with fresh supplies. The cabin was in shambles, with signs of a struggle everywhere, and their brother had disappeared. His diary was still there, however, and in it the surviving brothers found descriptions of strange, hairy men hanging around the cabin. One of the remaining brothers, seemingly not disturbed by the tales told by his mysteriously missing kin, decided to stay over the next winter. When the third brother returned the following summer, the second brother was missing as well. Taking the hunt, the last Burgoyne brother never turned to the cabin.

Attack at Ape Canyon

In the early twentieth century, Fred Beck and four other men operated a mining claim, called the Vander White, in a narrow valley east of Mountain Saint Helens. Today, the area is known as Ape Canyon, named after their experiences there.

The men had built a sturdy log cabin at the bottom of the valley, near their claim, which they had worked at for six years. In the last year, 1924, they noticed several large footprints near their workings. They also heard a weird whistling noise every night around their cabin. One day they saw a large hairy creature watching them from behind a tree. Beck and one of the miners shot at it. They may have hit the beast, but it still ran away.

That night the apes struck back. From the top of the canyon, they stopped rocks onto the cabin. Later they surrounded it, pounding on the walls and rood and tearing off large pieces of framing as they tried to break through the door. At one point, a hairy arm reached through a gap in the log walls and attempted to take an axe leaning against the wall. Back managed to turn the axe head sideways, blocking its removal, as another man shot at the creature. This did not drive off the attackers, who stayed until dawn.

The next day the miners abandoned their claim. Before they left, Beck saw one of the strange beasts standing at the rim of the canyon. He shot at it, and watched it fall to the canyon floor. The miners came back later with curious friends and saw several sets of large footprints, but no trace of living creatures.

Bigfoot Sightings, Real or Not?

Most Bigfoot sightings last only a few seconds. A confused mind could easily interpret the rush of a large bear, an elk, or a horse running in front of a car's headlights as a Sasquatch. There are also cases where the Bigfoot legend has been promoted by people deliberately faking footprints and sightings. But not all the sightings can be explained away as fakes or the results of confused witnesses. Can there have been thousands of stories about the Sasquatch for hundreds of years without there being some truth to the matter? The real question is, How much truth?

Bigfoot at Camp Bonneville

I remember my father telling a story about something that happened to a friend of his. In the 1960s he was in the National Guard. On one of his drill weekends, he and his unit were at Camp Bonneville, in southwest Washington. One of the soldiers left in search of a "green latrine" in the woods. The isolated spot he chose was near one of the camp garbage damps. Shortly after he got there, he heard heavy bodies moving through the garbage. He turned around and saw four or five tall, furry creatures rooting through the piles of garbage. They turned and looked at him. There was a stand-off for several seconds until he remembered to run away. The creatures headed in the opposite direction. By the time the soldier gathered some friends to investigate, there was no trace of a Bigfoot or any other creatures near the dump. Everyone was convinced it was a family of bears, but he denied that theory. -JD

Sasquatch on the Rocks

There were three Bigfoot sightings near Orting, in the vicinity of Mount Rainier, in one year. In one case, on September 26, two bow hunters confronted a Bigfoot from a distance of about three hundred yards. They had no desire to get any closer to the beast and watched it through binoculars for several minutes. The critter stood facing them, standing upright on the edge of a rock outcrop on a cliff face. It was covered with shiny black fur and had a simianlike body, wide shoulders, and a broad chest. They described its face as being apelike. When it left, they investigated the place where it had been standing bit did not find any footprints or other signs. If they had been watching this creature with only their naked eyes, we might think it was just a bear, but since they used binoculars, that explanation is unlikely.

Bigfoot on Film

One of the most recognizable pieces of motion picture films in the world is a 1967 movie taken by Roger Paterson and Bob Grimlin that shows what seems to be a Sasquatch that shows to be a Sasquatch walking through a logging clear-cut and gradually fading into the woods. Almost from the moment that Patterson and Grimlin showed their film, supporters and critics surrounded them.

In December 1998, the Fox network aired World's Greatest Hoaxes: Secrets Finally Revealed, which claimed that the 1967 film was a fake. And in fact, the next few years two men came forward claiming they were parties to the hoax. One, named Philip Morris, made gorilla suits for show business. He claimed he sold Roger Patterson a gorilla suit, which Patterson modified for the film. The second man, a retired Pepsi company worker from Yakima named Bob Heironimus, said that he wore the suit for Patterson and Grimlin's film.

Eventually, Seattle author Greg Long took up the story. Long spent several years interviewing witnesses and finally wrote a book entitled The Making of Bigfoot: The Inside Story, debunking the whole affair. Strangely enough, the book, which was released in 2004, did not change anyone's mind. To those who thought the film was fake, the witnesses' statements of how it was done reaffirmed their belief. To those who believed the film was real, many of those statements were inconsistent, or had holes, which proved the book was wrong and reinforced their belief that the Patterson film was real. Debate still rages today.

Bigfoot Saved My life

Back in the '80s I would go into town every so often and check my post office box. Sometimes when I walked by Main Street, a voice shout out "Bigfoot saved my life." I would turn around and see no one there. This went on for a couple of years, around once every two weeks or so.

Then, I finally saw the man who yelled it. I went over and talked to him. He told me that someday when he got up enough courage he would tell me the story of how Bigfoot saved his life.

A full year passed, then I heard it again. "Bigfoot saved my life." The man motioned for me to come over, told me his name was Mike, then shared the following story:

"It took me a long time to decide I'd tell this story because I don't know how would to believe. It is a short story and a true story about how Bigfoot saved my life. It happened four years ago, I was hunting deer with tree friends back in some log hills above the town of Duvall. I turned around in a partially logged area and saw my three friends lagging way behind. So I kept on going and was way ahead of them. I pulled out some candy and started chewing on it. Well, I tripped on a root and fell and the candy caught. I was choking. I couldn't breathe and it seemed like the end for me. Just as I was breathing my last, I looked up and saw Bigfoot. The check of it forced the candy dislodge. It was good knowing I was going to live. I looked up again and Bigfoot was gone. Bigfoot saved my life. -Cliff Crook

[yerpenachams]

countries most closely correlated with a single language family (roughly ranked)

Japan, Japonic

Georgia, Kartvelian

Central African Republic, Ubangian (controversial classification as Niger-Congo)

Mongolian, Mongolic (point of diversity is in Mongolia, but most of the branches/subbranches are centered in Russia or China)

Australia, Pama-Nyungan (pre-contact; non-Pama-Nyungan was historically only spoken in a small part of the country)

Indonesia, Austronesian (while Taiwan is clearly the point of diversity for Austronesian, and there are several branches not spoken in Indonesia, i.e., Palauan, Chamorro, Polynesian, various Philippine branches... and there are Papuan languages spoken in Indonesia, Indonesia contains most Austronesian speakers and contains many Malayo-Polynesian branches)

India, Dravidian (~20% of the country speaks a Dravidian language, and the only language centered outside India is Brahui)

Thailand, Kra-Dai (~60% of speakers of languages in this family are Thai speakers, and 96% of Thailand speaks it as L1 or L2)

Sudan, Nilo-Saharan (This may be one of the most arbitrary. Assuming settlement of native ethnic groups was similar before Arab settlement, almost everyone in what is now Sudan spoke a language classified as Nilo-Saharan. Of course, Nilo-Saharan is a very controversial language family. Also, there were [controversial?] Niger-Congo speakers in the Kordofan/Nuba Mountains, and Beja on the Red Sea. Several few Nilo-Saharan branches aren't spoken in Sudan at all; Kunama, Nara, Surmic, Songhay and Kuliak. A few are barely spoken in the country, like Nilotic or Maban. There are so many holes to poke in this, but if you assumed the demographics of non-Arabs in the country would be directly extrapolated to 100% pre-contact, I think it would make the top 15 in the world in correlation between language family and political borders)

Korea, Koreanic (if it was a unified country)

Bougainville, Northern Bougainville & Southern Bougainville (It's hard to determine speaker counts for these languages; while the largest language in the hypothetical future country is Austronesian, these two Papuan [non-Austronesian] language families dominate the main island)

Guatemala, Mayan (Mamean, K'iche'an and Q'anjob'alan are centered in the country. Yucatecan, Huastecan and Ch'olan-Tzeltalan are not.)

Nicaragua, Misumalpan

Bolivia, Aymara (there are many language families with members in Bolivia, and isolates in Bolivia, but... about 80% of speakers are in Bolivia, and about 40% of indigenous language speakers in Bolivia speak Aymara)

Paraguay, Tupi-Guarani (While there are many minor Tupi-Guarani languages spoken outside of Paraguay, and several other language families and isolates spoken in Paraguay, the majority of people in Paraguay speak Guarani, there are still monolingual speakers, etc.)

Panama, Chibchan (pre-contact)

Uruguay, Charruan (pre-contact)

Namibia, Khoe-Kwadi (Kwadi was centered in Angola and Kalahari Khoe is centered in Botswana, but the majority of speakers of a Khoe language are Khoekhoe speakers, and 11% of people in Namibia speak Khoekhoe. Certainly not as close a correlation as in many of these countries)

East Timor, Timor-Alor-Pantar

In terms of US states, the following stick out:

Oklahoma, Caddoan (pre-contact; I know nomadic groups can be hard to pin down, apply that disclaimer to some of the items above, too)

New York, Iroquoian (there were also Algonquian languages spoken in New York, and Tuscarora, Nottoway and Cherokee were spoken further south, while Huron-Wyandot was spoken in Canada... please note that Lake Iroquoian was not the point of diversity for the family. This situation is a lot like Mongolia, with other branches being spoken outside of the state, and the sister branch, Huron-Wyandot, being spoken elsewhere, too)

Washington, Salishan (it's bizarre that anywhere on the west coast could be very closely correlated to a single language family, given the west coast is overall the most diverse area in North America, linguistically, by far. There are Chimakuan languages and a Wakashan language, Makah, spoken at the northern end of the Olympic peninsula. There are Chinookan and Sahaptian/Plateau Penutian languages spoken at the southern and eastern edges of the state. Kwalhoquia-Tlatskanai is a subbranch of Northern Athabaskan spoken in the state, too. And of course, Bella Coola and Tillamook are divergent branches of the family spoken outside of Washington, and there are Coast Salish languages in BC; the Interior Salish area also extends into BC, Idaho and Montana. However, probably at least 80% of land in Washington was settled by Salishan peoples at the time of contact)

Florida, Timucua

A lot of this is really hard to quantify, but it's an interesting overlap of figures to consider.

[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.

[twinkl22004]

Morris Swadesh, "Internal Relationships in Salish", International Journal of American Linguistics, year 1950, volume #16, pages 157-167.

    Morris Swadesh, “The Origin and Diversification of Language”, 1968, PART TWO (II) was the topic of an earlier blog post. Here I present: Morris Swadesh’, “Salish Internal Relationships”, International Journal of American Linguistics, year 1950, volume #16, pages 157-167. The map BELOW shows where the Salish  family  (or called Salishan) is located in North America.  This is a family of…

[catsnuggler]

I feel like the cobra of a snake charmer when listening to Arabian or Arabian-themed music, what with the drums, the flutes, the stringed instruments... I just wanna like, vibe while slithering from side to side, or fall asleep in my basket, while listening to this stuff. Or maybe ride a camel in a merchant caravan. That kind of Ali Baba-type stuff, y'know?

[linguisticmaps]

Nonconcatenative morphology

Nonconcatenative morphology, also called discontinuous morphology and introflection, is a form of word formation in which the root is modified and which does not involve stringing morphemes together sequentially.

It may involve apophony (ablaut), transfixation (vowel templates inserted into consonantal roots), reduplication, tone/stress changes, or truncation. 

It is very developed in Semitic, Berber, and Chadic branches of Afro-Asiatic. It also occurs extensively among other language families: Nilo-Saharan, Northeast Caucasian, Na-Dene, Salishan and the isolate Seri (in Mexico).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonconcatenative_morphology 

[yetanotherthriftblog]

the yardsale gods were tossing me tasty crumbs

So here is what I came away with after 3 hours of driving around through HOA neighborhoods and the ruralities...

Tom Thumb steel toy cash register, because heavy things with sharp edges are what adults gave kids to play with in the 1950s-1960s, and each of the keys and price slips work! Only issue is the cash drawer -- the only plastic part on the entire toy beside the keycaps -- has a small chunk taken out of the right bottom side (it’s vaguely visible in the photo), but when I can get for $5 what the antique stores sell for $50...

Nine Tales of Coyote, “by” Fran Martin (actually by centuries-old Native Americans), for $1. The writer of the book got her stories from a Nez Perce storyteller and also were derived from two collections of Salishan and Sahaptin tales, published in 1917 and 1891. Since I was raised on the Yakama Reservation and the elders speak Sahaptin, this has some relevance to me. I’ve only heard a couple of stories about the trickster Coyote (his actual name is Speel-yi) so this will let me catch up on things, plus I’m sure my best friend’s mother who is an elder and for years taught tribal preschoolers the language would appreciate it.

Atari 2600 joystick for $1. Because you can never have too many.

A mess of Perler beads and grids, $6 after some haggling. Because she had them and wanted to get rid of them but knew she’d invested a bunch of money into all this so wanted to recoop the cost of at least one set.

The real finds of the day were two hand drills. The smaller one was $1 at one yardsale and moved great in the field, plus has 7 bits in the handle, so it was a no-brainer. The larger with the shoulder brace was TWENTY-FIVE CENTS and worked a little sporadic, so just needed a good dousing with WD-40 and an adjustment to one collet to get the gear teeth to mesh without slipping. I am super-happy to have found these for ridiculously low prices.

Bonus image of something I didn’t buy, which was at the same garage sale as the smaller drill:

The ice man cometh! This is a pair of tongs used to carry a block of ice before refrigeration was a thing, and one thing I’d never expected to see for $4.

[neechees]

I don’t think that word from Sasquatch comes from the salish language (flathead nation, it’s the only language that is thee salish language), but I think it did come from a different salishan language, Nlaka'pamuctsin (Thompson River). “Ogopogo” is also a syilx spirit we call nx̌ax̌aitkʷ. Dhfjgk I hope this doesn’t come across as rude, I really appreciate the time you took to make such a big list!!! Just a few lil corrections

No I appreciate it!! Ty :)