A Dying Language and a Breath of Life

[Tiassa]

A Dying Language and a Breath of Life

The Klallam people, in the modern day, are reduced to four tribal groups in Washington state and British Columbia. As with many indigenous words, the name has been variously rendered over time; in 1854, the Washington Territory legislature spelled it, "Clallam", which survives today Clallam County, the northernmost on the Olympic Peninsula. Other spellings include, "S'Klallam"—used in the Point No Point Treaty of 1855, and the United States Department of the Interior in 1981 when recognizing three of the four modern Klallam tribal groups—"Khalam", and, among the stranger variants, "Noodsdalum", "Nooselalam", "Noostiatum", "Wooselalim", and "Tialam".

Those unfamiliar with indigenous cultures surviving in the modern United States might notice something that seems problematic: What is the real word?

Then again, those of us who live in areas with more apparent indigenous influences often instinctively ignore that aspect; after you get used to words like "Puyallup"°, "Chimakum", "Skookumchuk", "Chilliwack", "Stillaguamish", "Snoqualmie"°, and my personal favorite from youthful immaturity, "Humptulips", you stop worrying about the variations. This is a region rife with indigenous names.

Still, indigenous languages are often preserved from oral traditions, which means that as younger generations participate ever more in modern American culture, those traditional tongues die out.

An effort of passion spanning over thirty-four years, however, will preserve a record of the Klallam language:

It weighs in at nearly six pounds, fills more than 1,000 pages, and represents the work of many hands and hearts.

The Klallam people’s first dictionary for what was always an unwritten language was built syllable-by-syllable, from tapes and spoken words transcribed into a phonetic alphabet.

The work was a race against time: About 100 people spoke Klallam as their first language when he first began learning Klallam in 1978, said Timothy Montler, a University of North Texas linguistics professor, and author of the dictionary. By the time the dictionary was published by the University of Washington Press last September, only two were left ....

The language is a jawbreaker for English speakers, with some words containing back-to-back consonants that are true pronunciation gymnastics. Klallam is the native language of the 5,000 or so people who today live on and around the three reservations on the Olympic Peninsula at Elwha, Jamestown and Port Gamble, and across the Strait of Juan de Fuca at Beecher Bay.

The language is a window into a way of life: The plural conveys not just the idea of more than one, but of a collective. The Klallam word for “sky,” for a people for whom Nature is central, can also mean “universe.” It takes four words in English to say “walking along the water.” It takes only one in Klallam.

(Mapes)​

Phil Charles, an elder of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, said, "It's been a long time coming," and recalled his own younger years in which the language was "beat out of us", and condemned as evil, as children were punished for speaking the language at school. "I just wish our elders who are gone could see this day," he added. "My mom and my dad probably wouldn’t even believe it."

The dictionary itself has been under construction for twenty-one years, and the Lower Elwha Klallam now include the language in education, "from Head Start all the way through high school". In Port Angeles, Washington, the public high school offers three language courses for graduation credit: French, Spanish, and Klallam.

Jamie Valadez, Klallam language instructor at the high school and a Lower Elwha Klallam tribal member, said it is exciting to see the students she first started teaching 15 years ago begin to have kids of their own, and pass the language on to them.

“It’s working,” she said, “We have turned the corner, where the language is going on into the next generation. Now we just have to keep it going.”

At Dry Creek Elementary School, a Port Angeles School District public school, kindergartners work in classrooms with the Klallam and English words for the numbers one through ten on the walls.

Little kids were gleefully calling them out in a recent session with Klallam language teacher Wendy Sampson. “You’ll be counting to 100 by the end of the year,” she predicted as the kids shouted “thank you” in Klallam.​

The Klallam will not go quietly into that proverbial night, but this is not a cry of rage. Rather, it is an appeal to life, and the preservation of an integral part of our American heritage.
____________________

Notes:

° Puyallup — I do know that Davey Jones of The Monkees couldn't pronounce it, when noting during some television interview decades ago that the group would play the Puyallup Fair, but that was well before the days of instant outrage via Twitter and Facebook, so nobody really cared.

° Snoqualmie — Useless trivia facts: Those who played the video game Deus Ex some years ago might recall the "Northwest Secessionist Forces", which were overrun at "Squalnomie"; and fans of the television series Twin Peaks might recall exterior shots of the "Great Northern Hotel" (Salish Lodge) at Snoqualmie Falls.

Works Cited:

Mapes, Lynda V. "Klallam dictionary opens window into tribal heritage". The Seattle Times. January 22, 2013. SeattleTimes.com. January 23, 2013. http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2020190972_klallamdictionaryxml.html

 

[Randwolf]

° Snoqualmie — Useless trivia facts: Those who played the video game Deus Ex some years ago might recall the "Northwest Secessionist Forces", which were overrun at "Squalnomie"; and fans of the television series Twin Peaks might recall exterior shots of the "Great Northern Hotel" (Salish Lodge) at Snoqualmie Falls.

That's interesting Tiassa. I used screensavers branded "Snoqualmie" several years back and wondered about the etymology of the word. (link)

Zen Light started out as Snoqualmie from Syntrillium Software back in 1997. This version is much improved over the original Snoqualmie with more intense colors, smoother flowing patterns, and vastly greater variety in possible designs.​

The area I live in (Florida) is also sprinkled with native American town names: Homosassa, Kissimee, Thonotosassa, etc. One does get used to them after awhile. It is good that the languages in your area are being preserved for future generations. (At least one, anyway...)

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

The Klallam people, in the modern day, are reduced to four tribal groups in Washington state and British Columbia.

That puts them way ahead of many other native American peoples who no longer exist. An unknown number had already been wiped out (or nearly so and therefore merged with other tribes) before scholars arrived to catalog and study them.

The Navajo are the largest tribe in the USA, with an enormous reservation occupying much of northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico, which they govern with less interference from U.S. and state authorities than any other rez. Their language still thrives, and was used as a code in WWII by Navajo "code-talkers," on the (valid) premise that no Japanese had ever studied it. Their reservation is so big that the Hopi reservation is completely surrounded by it.

The Cherokee are the most successful tribe, due to forceful relocation from their ancestral home in Florida to what is now Oklahoma. An untold portion of the population (possibly a majority) died along the way, which is forever remembered as "the Trail of Tears." When the Industrial Era came into full flower petroleum was discovered in Oklahoma and the Cherokee people became wealthy. They have hospitals, universities and business corporations, and generally live among us. Chief Sequoia invented an alphabet for their language (more properly called a syllabary, each symbol represents a consonant-vowel combination like Japanese kana), and Cherokee became the first written Native American language. With their newspapers and other publishing enterprises, at the end of the 19th century the rate of literacy was higher among the Cherokee than among the Euro-Americans of Oklahoma.

As with many indigenous words, the name has been variously rendered over time; in 1854, the Washington Territory legislature spelled it, "Clallam", which survives today Clallam County, the northernmost on the Olympic Peninsula. Other spellings include, "S'Klallam"—used in the Point No Point Treaty of 1855, and the United States Department of the Interior in 1981 when recognizing three of the four modern Klallam tribal groups—"Khalam", and, among the stranger variants, "Noodsdalum", "Nooselalam", "Noostiatum", "Wooselalim", and "Tialam". Those unfamiliar with indigenous cultures surviving in the modern United States might notice something that seems problematic: What is the real word? Then again, those of us who live in areas with more apparent indigenous influences often instinctively ignore that aspect; after you get used to words like "Puyallup"°, "Chimakum", "Skookumchuk", "Chilliwack", "Stillaguamish", "Snoqualmie"°, and my personal favorite from youthful immaturity, "Humptulips", you stop worrying about the variations. This is a region rife with indigenous names.

European explorers often encountered more than one group living in an area--different clans of one tribe or even different tribes--speaking different dialects of the same language. "Dakota," for example, is rendered "Lakota" and "Nakota" in various dialects.

Still, indigenous languages are often preserved from oral traditions, which means that as younger generations participate ever more in modern American culture, those traditional tongues die out.

Since the mid-20th century there has been a renaissance of sorts in the USA (and some other countries) in which minority cultures unrelated to the culture in power reclaim their native heritage for the sake of history, and also in order to not lose the philosophy of their ancestors--not to mention their cool legends and songs. The Museum of the American Indian here in Washington has a rotating set of several dozen extremely well-funded and curated exhibits (after all it's part of the Smithsonian Institution) that not only help share those cultures with us "white folks" but also draw their own young people back into the cultures with the reward of a trip to Washington and a bit of fame and honor.

Unfortunately I didn't get around to the opening exhibit, and missed my own local tribe, the Hupa. Which is spelled "Hoopa" in the name of the town in the center of their reservation. Most of them commute to Eureka or one of the smaller cities in the county for work.

Of course this is not limited to our native peoples. The "Chicano Pride" movement has been underway for four decades, as kids whose parents never taught them Spanish suddenly renamed the Southwest Aztlán and their generation La Raza.

An effort of passion spanning over thirty-four years, however, will preserve a record of the Klallam language: It weighs in at nearly six pounds, fills more than 1,000 pages, and represents the work of many hands and hearts.

The technology of the Electronic Age has given this work a boost. It's now a trivial effort to record a song or film a dance. The few remaining native speakers of a language can be taped and the material reviewed later.

The Klallam people’s first dictionary for what was always an unwritten language was built syllable-by-syllable, from tapes and spoken words transcribed into a phonetic alphabet.

Have they identified its family? Many languages in western USA and Canada belong to the Na-Dene family, including Navajo and Tlingit. Just since the turn of the millennium Na-Dene was discovered to be related to the Yenisei language of Siberia. (This is still somewhat controversial but if the relationship is not real it's a bunch of large and amazing coincidences.) This is the first time that languages of the New World and Old World have been linked, and it means that the technology of language is at least 15,000 years old, going back to the separation. Languages change so fast that the hints at their relation to one another vanish (for example, Chinese has not always been tonal), so until now there's been no convincing proof that the technology was invented more than six or seven thousand years ago, so if this is true it's a champagne-and-balloons event for linguists. Of course anthropologists think it has to go back to Africa around 70KYA, because that's when they see the sudden emergence of coordinated activities that simply could not have been done without intricate oral communication.

The language is a jawbreaker for English speakers, with some words containing back-to-back consonants that are true pronunciation gymnastics.

Some African and Australian languages also do that. It seems that as a community advances out of the Stone Age, and begins merging with other nearby communities to form villages, towns, cities, and eventually nations, intricate phonetic idiosyncrasies are leveled out to make the language easier for outsiders to master. Even today, phonetics is almost always the most difficult part of learning a foreign language for adults or even teenagers, even those who are precocious enough to master bewildering grammar and daunting vocabulary.

As far as I know, Hawaiian has the easiest set of phonemes: AEHIKLMNOPUW and the glottal stop written as an apostrophe as in Hawai'i. The original Polynesian language had to be aggressively simplified in order to be understood when shouted between rafts on their long ocean voyages. Tahitian tabu becomes Hawaiian kapu, Samoan salofa becomes Hawaiian aloha.

Klallam . . . . is a window into a way of life: The plural conveys not just the idea of more than one, but of a collective. The Klallam word for “sky,” for a people for whom Nature is central, can also mean “universe.” It takes four words in English to say “walking along the water.” It takes only one in Klallam.

Every language is an expression of the community's culture. Look at the proliferation of acronyms--strictly speaking, an abbreviation that can be pronounced as a word. Radar, Cobol, Laser: these words could only have been invented by a population that had invented the technology of writing.

And look at Chinese. Its grammar operates entirely without inflections. No singular/plural, no nominative/accusative, no masculine/feminine and no present/past/future. Does this sound like the language of a people who have had a continuous civilization for three thousand years, so they are accustomed to today, tomorrow and yesterday always being pretty much the same?

Phil Charles, an elder of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, said, "It's been a long time coming," and recalled his own younger years in which the language was "beat out of us", and condemned as evil, as children were punished for speaking the language at school. "I just wish our elders who are gone could see this day," he added. "My mom and my dad probably wouldn’t even believe it."

That was unfortunately common worldwide in the "reeducation" of colonized people. Although scholars managed to record many of these languages before they were lost, if only in rough phonetic alphabets, many others are gone without a trace.

The dictionary itself has been under construction for twenty-one years, and the Lower Elwha Klallam now include the language in education, "from Head Start all the way through high school". In Port Angeles, Washington, the public high school offers three language courses for graduation credit: French, Spanish, and Klallam.

Cool!

Jamie Valadez, Klallam language instructor at the high school and a Lower Elwha Klallam tribal member, said it is exciting to see the students she first started teaching 15 years ago begin to have kids of their own, and pass the language on to them. “It’s working,” she said, “We have turned the corner, where the language is going on into the next generation. Now we just have to keep it going.” t Dry Creek Elementary School, a Port Angeles School District public school, kindergartners work in classrooms with the Klallam and English words for the numbers one through ten on the walls. Little kids were gleefully calling them out in a recent session with Klallam language teacher Wendy Sampson. “You’ll be counting to 100 by the end of the year,” she predicted as the kids shouted “thank you” in Klallam.

Tears of joy for this amateur linguist.

Even Irish might have vanished. When the whole country was occupied by the Brits, they tried to outlaw it, especially the written language. There is an anecdote that may be apocryphal, but knowing how the British felt about foreigners in the 19th century, it could just as easily be true. A kosher butcher put a sign in Hebrew in the window of his shop. The English cops were there in an hour, demanding that he take it down and threatening to throw him in jail. It turned out that these guys could not distinguish the Hebrew abjad (an "alphabet" with no vowels since they're not phonemic in the Afro-Asiatic language family) from the stylized form of the Roman alphabet used for writing Irish.

The Klallam will not go quietly into that proverbial night, but this is not a cry of rage. Rather, it is an appeal to life, and the preservation of an integral part of our American heritage.

Saving our species's history, one language at a time.

Puyallup — I do know that Davey Jones of The Monkees couldn't pronounce it, when noting during some television interview decades ago that the group would play the Puyallup Fair, but that was well before the days of instant outrage via Twitter and Facebook, so nobody really cared.

My first wife was from Bremerton, so I know it's pronounced pyoo-OLL-up.

The area I live in (Florida) is also sprinkled with native American town names . . .. One does get used to them after awhile.

Actually they're quite common all over the USA. 29 of our 50 state names are of native origin. Each region transcribes Indian names in the language of its settlers. In the East it's English or French. In California they look like Spanish names because of the Spanish spelling, but they're not. Cucamonga, Tujunga, those are all native names.

Alabama: Name of a native people
Alaska: Aleut, "The object toward which the action of the sea is directed."
Arizona: Probably from a local name meaning "having a little spring," but it could be the Basque word arizonak, "good oaks," brought over by the Spaniards.
Arkansas: The name given to the Quapaw people by Algonquian speakers
(California is NOT an Indian name but most people think so. It's an imaginary place in "The Exploits of Esplandián" by Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo.)
Connecticut: Mohican for "at the long tidal river."
Hawaii: "Place of the gods"
Idaho: The Athabaskan word for "enemy," given by them to the Comanches
Illinois: Unidentified Algonquian language, apparently literally, "one who sounds normal" (i.e., speaks an Algonquian language)
Iowa: Chiwere branch of the Aiouan language family; said to be from Dakota ayuxba "sleepy ones."
Kansas: The Kansa, a Siouan people, same root as "Arkansas."
Kentucky: Iroquois or Shawnee, perhaps Wyandot for "meadow"
Massachusetts: Name of Great Blue Hill south of Boston, literally, "at the big hill"
Michigan: Perhaps from Old Ojibwa (Algonquian) meshi-gami "big lake."
Minnesota: Dakota mnisota, "cloudy water."
Mississippi: Algonquian "big river."
Missouri: Name of a group of native peoples among Chiwere tribes, Algonquian for "people of the big canoes."
Nebraska: Siouan name for the Platte River, literally "water flat."
[New] Mexico: Nahuatl name of the ancient Aztec capital.
[North and South] Dakota: Name of a group of native peoples from the Plains states, Dakota for "friendly."
Ohio: Seneca "good river."
Oklahoma: Choctaw, "red people." Coined after the Christian invasion by Choctaw scholar Allen Wright, and first used in the Choctaw-Chickasaw treaty of April 28, 1866.
Oregon: Origin is uncertain and disputed, but sure looks like Algonquian.
Tennessee: Cherokee name given to a village, but origin unknown.
Texas: Caddo, "friends, allies."
Utah: Name of the Uto-Aztecan people that we now call the Utes, probably named by the Apaches from their word "high," a reference to them living in the mountains.
Wisconsin: Native name, although meaning and exact origin unknown.
Wyoming: Originally a region in Pennsylvania, popularized by a poem by a Scots poet. Subsequently this native name was given to several other locations including the state.

Notice how common it is for our name for a people to actually be some other people's name for them, rather than their own. Many Paleolithic tribes simply called themselves "the people" and only have names for other groups, quite often of the form "those guys on the other side of the river" or "crazy people who eat fungus."

 

[Tiassa]

This and That

That's interesting Tiassa. I used screensavers branded "Snoqualmie" several years back and wondered about the etymology of the word.

Truly awesome.

The area I live in (Florida) is also sprinkled with native American town names: Homosassa, Kissimee, Thonotosassa, etc. One does get used to them after awhile.

I suppose it's also true that the indigenous names in other parts of the country are considerably more foreign to me.

• • •​

Have they identified its family? Many languages in western USA and Canada belong to the Na-Dene family, including Navajo and Tlingit.

The highest classification I've found is Salishan, which is apparently distinct from Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit, Tsimshianic, Wakashan, and Algonquian. I have yet to find a resource placing Salishan within the Na-Dene family. Wikipedia describes Salishan as its own family consisting of twenty-three languages, all of which are classified as either extinct or endangered.

Every language is an expression of the community's culture.

True, though I would note that at the level of a newspaper article, one is safe in presuming that most American English speakers do not recognize the degree to which English does this. Analogously, I recall an anecdote about the formulation of barbarian, from barbaros, but you already covered that.

There is an anecdote that may be apocryphal, but knowing how the British felt about foreigners in the 19th century, it could just as easily be true. A kosher butcher put a sign in Hebrew in the window of his shop. The English cops were there in an hour, demanding that he take it down and threatening to throw him in jail. It turned out that these guys could not distinguish the Hebrew abjad (an "alphabet" with no vowels since they're not phonemic in the Afro-Asiatic language family) from the stylized form of the Roman alphabet used for writing Irish.

That doesn't surprise me, though I've been trying very hard in recent years to stop being so smug about British colonialism; we Americans aren't doing much better.

My first wife was from Bremerton, so I know it's pronounced pyoo-OLL-up.

My preferred pronunciation, indeed. But popular pronunciation probably prefers the breve over the circumflex umlaut (hey, I just learned something; I had thought â was pronounced as in "father", but my memory of actually reading a paper dictionary is apparently wrong). Of course, this is a region where, if we were consistent, most people would pronounce the comedian's name "Ricky Jervis". Some in Oregon get even more ridiculous, pronouncing the small town's name, "Jarvis".

Actually they're quite common all over the USA. 29 of our 50 state names are of native origin.

True, but most people don't notice unless it really sticks out. Pontiac? Michigan? Manhattan? Most people don't notice until their tongues twist, or they have to do a double-take. Some of the easier words up here: Nisqually, Snohomish, Skykomish, Tahoma (Tacoma), Sealth (Seattle), and Spokane.

And, of course, there is a reason children learn about Chief Joseph, Whitebird, and Looking Glass when discussing the Nez Perce. Toohoolhoolzote, Hahtalekin, Husishusis Kute, and Cuupn'itpel'uu are all really hard words to teach the young ones, though that last (approximately, "we walked out of the mountains") is rendered, in English, as "Chopunnish".

I remember when I was young, the story generally started with Joseph. In later years, Toohoolhoolzote was included, though his name was degraded to something near to "Tooloolzote".
____________________

Notes:

Wikipedia. "Salishan languages". December 27, 2012. En.Wikipedia.org. January 25, 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salishan_languages

—————. "Gervais, Oregon". January 5, 2013. En.Wikipedia.org. January 25, 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gervais,_Oregon

"Word Pronunciations". The Unword Dictionary. (n.d.) Unwords.com. January 25, 2013. http://www.unwords.com/view/pronounce.html