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18-644: Mugu Lagoon ( / m uː ˈ ɡ uː / ; Chumash : Muwu , meaning "Beach") is a salt marsh located within the Naval Base Ventura County at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains in Ventura County, California . The lagoon extends for 4.3 miles parallel to a narrow barrier beach. The first European to come ashore here was Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo on October 10, 1542. Cabrillo was the first European to visit present-day California, and he named

36-659: A later cataloger described how opening each box of his legacy was "an adventure in itself." He published very little of his work; many of his notes appear to have been deliberately hidden from his colleagues. After his death, Smithsonian curators discovered over six tons of boxes stored in warehouses, garages and even chicken coops throughout the West. Harrington is virtually the only recorder of some languages, such as Obispeño (Northern) Chumash, Kitanemuk , and Serrano . He gathered more than 1 million pages of phonetic notations on languages spoken by tribes from Alaska to South America. When

54-411: A symmetrical six-vowel system. The distinctive high central vowel is written various ways, including <ɨ> "barred I," <ə> "schwa" and <ï> "I umlaut." Contemporary users of the languages favor /ɨ/ or /ə/ . Striking features of this system include The Central Chumash languages have a complex inventory of consonants. All of the consonants except / h / can be glottalized; all of

72-558: Is recent (within a couple thousand years). There is internal evidence that Obispeño replaced a Hokan language and that Island Chumash mixed with a language very different from Chumashan; the islands were not in contact with the mainland until the introduction of plank canoes in the first millennium AD. Although some say the Chumashan languages are now extinct or dormant, language revitalization programs are underway with four of these Chumashan languages. These languages are well-documented in

90-574: Is well-illustrated in "Tobacco among the Karuk Indians of California," one of his relatively few formally published works. Rumsen Cultural Bearer Isabel Meadows works with J.P. Harrington In 1933, at age 87, Isabel Meadows was invited to Washington D.C., to assist Harrington with his research on the Rumsen life, language, and culture in the Carmel Valley, California and Big Sur regions. Isabel

108-545: The Chumash , Mutsun , Rumsen , Chochenyo , Kiowa , Chimariko , Yokuts , Gabrielino , Salinan , Yuma , and Mojave , among many others. Harrington also extended his work into traditional culture, particularly mythology and geography. His field collections include information on placenames and thousands of photographs. The massive collections were disorganized in the extreme, and contained not only linguistic manuscripts and recordings, but also objects and realia of every stripe;

126-451: The 1770s and 1830s: Roland Dixon and Alfred L. Kroeber suggested that the Chumashan languages might be related to the neighboring Salinan in a Iskoman grouping. Edward Sapir accepted this speculation and included Iskoman in his classification of Hokan . More recently it has been noted that Salinan and Chumashan shared only one word, which the Chumashan languages probably borrowed from Salinan (the word for 'white clam shell', which

144-624: The Universities of Leipzig and Berlin , Harrington became a high-school language teacher. For three years, he devoted his spare time to an intense examination of the few surviving Chumash people. His exhaustive work came to the attention of the Smithsonian Museum's Bureau of American Ethnology . Harrington became a permanent field ethnologist for the bureau in 1915. He was to hold this position for 40 years, collecting and compiling several massive caches of raw data on native peoples, including

162-424: The consonants except / h /, / x / and the liquids can be aspirated. Proto-Chumash reconstructions by Klar (1977): John Peabody Harrington John Peabody Harrington (April 29, 1884 – October 21, 1961) was an American linguist and ethnologist and a specialist in the indigenous peoples of California . Harrington is noted for the massive volume of his documentary output, most of which remains unpublished:

180-635: The floodplain and the deposited sediment created the rich agricultural lands of the Oxnard Plain . With year-round agriculture in the floodplain, concrete channels and dirt levees have been built to contain the flow. This has delivered increased sediment to Mugu Lagoon and flooding during extreme rain events. 34°06′07″N 119°05′38″W  /  34.102°N 119.094°W  / 34.102; -119.094 Chumashan languages The Chumashan languages may be, along with Yukian and perhaps languages of southern Baja California such as Waikuri , one of

198-648: The lagoon Mugu after Muwu , which is Chumash meaning "beach" or "seashore". When the Europeans first discovered the lagoon, it functioned as the capital village of the Chumash Indians settled around Point Mugu . The Calleguas Creek , and its tributaries such as Arroyo Conejo and Arroyo Simi , discharges into the Pacific Ocean at its estuary in Mugu Lagoon. Historically, Calleguas Creek flood flows spread across

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216-521: The mainland in the early 19th century. John Peabody Harrington conducted fieldwork on all the above Chumashan languages, but obtained the least data on Island Chumash, Purisimeño, and Obispeño. There is no linguistic data on Cuyama, though ethnographic data suggests that it was likely Chumash (Interior Chumash). The languages are named after the local Franciscan Spanish missions in California where Chumashan speakers were relocated and aggregated between

234-642: The older names based on the local missions. Obispeño was the most divergent Chumashan language. The Central Chumash languages include Purisimeño, Ineseño, Barbareño and Ventureño. There was a dialect continuum across this area, but the form of the language spoken in the vicinity of each mission was distinct enough to qualify as a different language. There is very little documentation of Purisimeño. Ineseño, Barbareño and Ventureño each had several dialects, although documentation usually focused on just one. Island Chumash had different dialects on Santa Cruz Island and Santa Rosa Island , but all speakers were relocated to

252-409: The oldest language families established in California, before the arrival of speakers of Penutian , Uto-Aztecan , and perhaps even Hokan languages . Chumashan, Yukian, and southern Baja languages are spoken in areas with long-established populations of a distinct physical type. The population in the core Chumashan area has been stable for the past 10,000 years. However, the attested range of Chumashan

270-774: The shelf space in the National Anthropological Archives dedicated to his work spans nearly 700 feet. Born in Waltham, Massachusetts , Harrington moved to California as a child. From 1902 to 1905, Harrington studied anthropology and classical languages at Stanford University . While attending specialized classes at the University of California, Berkeley , he met anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber . Harrington became intensely interested in Native American languages and ethnography . Rather than completing his doctorate at

288-400: The technology became available, he supplemented his written record with audio recordings - many recently digitized - first using wax cylinders, then aluminum discs. [1] He is credited with gathering some of the first recordings of native languages, rituals, and songs, and perfecting the phonetics of several different languages. Harrington's attention to detail, both linguistic and cultural,

306-489: The unpublished fieldnotes of linguist John Peabody Harrington . Especially well documented are Barbareño , Ineseño , and Ventureño . The last native speaker of a Chumashan language was Barbareño speaker Mary Yee , who died in 1965. Six Chumashan languages are attested , all now extinct. However, most of them are in the process of revitalization, with language programs and classes. Contemporary Chumash people now prefer to refer to their languages by native names rather than

324-407: Was used as currency). As a result, the inclusion of Chumashan into Hokan is now disfavored by most specialists, and the consensus is that Chumashan has no identified linguistic relatives. The Chumashan languages are well known for their consonant harmony (regressive sibilant harmony). Mithun presents a scholarly synopsis of Chumashan linguistic structures. The Central Chumash languages all have

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