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28-524: The river's name comes from a Nuu-chah-nulth word meaning "washing". The Stamp River flowing out of Great Central Lake and Sproat River join to form the Somass River, which flows generally southeast and south into Alberni Inlet and the harbour of Port Alberni . The river crosses Highway 4 outside of Port Alberni in Tseshaht First Nation territory. Several kilometres of the lower course of

56-583: A predicate . Affixes can be appended to those clauses to signify numerous grammatical categories , such as mood , aspect or tense . Aspects in Nuu-chah-nulth help specify an action's extension over time and its relation to other events. Up to 7 aspects can be distinguished: Where each "–" signifies the root. Tense can be marked using affixes (marked with a dash ) and clitics (marked with an equal sign ). Nuu-chah-nulth distinguishes near future and general future: The first two markings refer to

84-504: A century ago. The dictionary, however, is a subject of controversy, with a number of Nuu-chah-nulth elders questioning the author's right to disclose their language. Nuu-chah-nulth has 12 different dialects: Nuuchahnulth had a name for each place within their traditional territory. These are just a few still used to this day: A Ehattesaht iPhone app was released in January 2012. An online dictionary, phrasebook, and language learning portal

112-551: A defining feature of all indigenous languages of the Americas . This characterization was shown to be wrong, since many indigenous American languages are not polysynthetic, but it is a fact that polysynthetic languages are not evenly distributed throughout the world, but more frequent in the Americas , Australia , Siberia , and New Guinea ; however, there are also examples in other areas. The concept became part of linguistic typology with

140-511: A general event that will take place in the future (similar to how the word will behaves in English) and the two other suffixes denote that something is expected to happen (compare to the English going to ). Past tense can be marked with the =mit clitic that can itself take different forms depending on the environment and speaker's dialect: Grammatical mood in Nuu-chah-nulth lets the speaker express

168-534: A high degree of morphological synthesis, and which tend to form long complex words containing long strings of morphemes , including derivational and inflectional morphemes. A language then is "synthetic" or "synthesizing" if it tends to have more than one morpheme per word, and a polysynthetic language is a language that has "many" morphemes per word. The concept was originally used only to describe those languages that can form long words that correspond to an entire sentence in English or other Indo-European languages , and

196-753: A merger of /qʼ/ and /qʷʼ/ (which are now absent from the language). Nuu-chah-nulth vowels are influenced by surrounding consonants with certain "back" consonants conditioning lower, more back vowel allophones . The mid vowels [ɛː] and [ɔː] appear in vocative forms and in ceremonial expressions. [ə] is a possible realization of /a/ after a glottalized sonorant. In the environment of glottalized resonants as well as ejective and pharyngeal consonants, vowels can be "laryngealized" which often means creaky voice . In general, syllable weight determines stress placement; short vowels followed by non-glottalized consonants and long vowels are heavy. In sequences where there are no heavy syllables or only heavy syllables,

224-531: A second person singular object). Many polysynthetic languages combine these two strategies, and also have ways of inflecting verbs for concepts normally encoded by adverbs or adjectives in Indo-European languages. In this way highly complex words can be formed, for example the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq which means "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer." The word consists of

252-672: Is a Wakashan language in the Pacific Northwest of North America on the west coast of Vancouver Island , from Barkley Sound to Quatsino Sound in British Columbia by the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples. Nuu-chah-nulth is a Southern Wakashan language related to Nitinaht and Makah . It is the first language of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast to have documentary written materials describing it. In

280-592: Is available at the First Voices Ehattesaht Nuchatlaht Community Portal. Polysynthetic language In linguistic typology , polysynthetic languages , formerly holophrastic languages , are highly synthetic languages , i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone). They are very highly inflected languages. Polysynthetic languages typically have long "sentence-words" such as

308-564: Is complicated by the fact that morpheme and word boundaries are not always clear cut, and languages may be highly synthetic in one area but less synthetic in other areas (e.g., verbs and nouns in Southern Athabaskan languages or Inuit languages ). Many polysynthetic languages display complex evidentiality and/or mirativity systems in their verbs . The term was invented by Peter Stephen Du Ponceau , who considered polysynthesis, as characterized by sentence words and noun incorporation,

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336-520: Is composed of the Greek roots poly meaning "many" and synthesis meaning "placing together". In linguistics a word is defined as a unit of meaning that can stand alone in a sentence, and which can be uttered in isolation. Words may be simple, consisting of a single unit of meaning, or they can be complex, formed by combining many small units of meaning, called morphemes . In a general non-theoretical sense polysynthetic languages are those languages that have

364-459: Is usually only marked for agreement with the subject (e.g. Spanish hablo "I speak" where the -o ending marks agreement with the first person singular subject), but in many languages verbs also agree with the object (e.g. the Kiswahili word nakupenda "I love you" where the n- prefix marks agreement with the first person singular subject and the ku- prefix marks agreement with

392-579: The Chinookan -speaking peoples of the lower Columbia River led to the foundations of the trade jargon that became known as Chinook. Nootkan words in Chinook Jargon include hiyu ("many"), from Nuu-chah-nulth for "ten", siah ("far"), from the Nuu-chah-nulth for "sky". A dictionary of the language, with some 7,500 entries, was created after 15 years of research. It is based on both work with current speakers and notes from linguist Edward Sapir , taken almost

420-423: The Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq . tuntu reindeer -ssur -hunt -qatar - FUT -ni -say -ksaite - NEG -ngqiggte -again -uq - 3SG . IND tuntu -ssur -qatar -ni -ksaite -ngqiggte -uq reindeer -hunt -FUT -say -NEG -again -3SG.IND "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer." Except for the morpheme tuntu "reindeer", none of

448-428: The 1780s, Captains Vancouver , Quadra , and other European explorers and traders frequented Nootka Sound and the other Nuu-chah-nulth communities, making reports of their voyages. From 1803–1805 John R. Jewitt , an English blacksmith , was held captive by chief Maquinna at Nootka Sound . He made an effort to learn the language, and in 1815 published a memoir with a brief glossary of its terms. The provenance of

476-467: The 2021 census, Statistics Canada reported that 665 individuals could conduct a conversation in Nuu-chah-nulth. This represents a 23% increase over the 2016 census. The total included 280 speakers who reported the language as a mother tongue. The 35 consonants of Nuu-chah-nulth : The pharyngeal consonants developed from mergers of uvular sounds; /ħ/ derives from a merger of /χ/ and /χʷ/ (which are now comparatively rare) while /ʕ/ came about from

504-477: The attitude towards what they're saying and how did they get presented information. Nuu-chah-nulth's moods are: Not counting the articles, all moods take person endings that indicate the subject of the clause. The Nuu-chah-nulth language contributed much of the vocabulary of the Chinook Jargon . It is thought that oceanic commerce and exchanges between the Nuu-chah-nulth and other Southern Wakashan speakers with

532-417: The first syllable is stressed. Nuu-chah-nulth has phonemic short and long vowels. Traditionally, a third class of vowels, known as "variable length" vowels, is recognized. These are vowels that are long when they are found within the first two syllables of a word, and short elsewhere. Nuu-chah nulth is a polysynthetic language with VSO word order . A clause in Nuu-chah-nulth must consist of at least

560-586: The head noun with agreement morphemes. There are some dependent-marking languages that may be considered to be polysynthetic because they use case stacking to achieve similar effects, and very long words. An example from Chukchi , a polysynthetic, incorporating , and agglutinating language of Russia which also has grammatical cases unlike the majority of incorporating polysynthetic languages: t- 1S . SUBJ meyŋ- great levt- head pəγt- hurt rkən 1S . PRES t- meyŋ- levt- pəγt- rkən 1S.SUBJ great head hurt 1S.PRES 'I have

588-428: The morphemes tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq with the meanings, reindeer-hunt-future-say-negation-again-third.person.singular.indicative, and except for the morpheme tuntu "reindeer", none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation. Another way to achieve a high degree of synthesis is when languages can form compound words by incorporation of nouns, so that entire words can be incorporated into

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616-435: The other morphemes can appear in isolation. Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have a very high ratio. There is no generally agreed upon definition of polysynthesis. Generally polysynthetic languages have polypersonal agreement , although some agglutinative languages that are not polysynthetic, such as Basque , Hungarian and Georgian , also have it. Some authors apply

644-444: The river are tidal. 49°14′46″N 124°49′11″W  /  49.24611°N 124.81972°W  / 49.24611; -124.81972 This article about a location on the Coast of British Columbia , Canada is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Nuu-chah-nulth language Nuu-chah-nulth ( nuučaan̓uɫ ), a.k.a. Nootka ( / ˈ n uː t k ə / ),

672-481: The term "Nuu-chah-nulth", meaning "along the outside [of Vancouver Island]" dates from the 1970s, when the various groups of speakers of this language joined together, disliking the term "Nootka" (which means "go around" and was mistakenly understood to be the name of a place, which was actually called Yuquot ). The name given by earlier sources for this language is Tahkaht ; that name was used also to refer to themselves (the root aht means "people"). Using data from

700-422: The term polysynthetic to languages with high morpheme-to-word ratios, but others use it for languages that are highly head-marking , or those that frequently use noun incorporation . Polysynthetic languages can be agglutinative or fusional depending on whether they encode one or multiple grammatical categories per affix . At the same time, the question of whether to call a particular language polysynthetic

728-441: The verb word, as baby is incorporated in the English verb babysit . Another common feature of polysynthetic languages is a tendency to use head marking as a means of syntactic cohesion. This means that many polysynthetic languages mark grammatical relations between verbs and their constituents by indexing the constituents on the verb with agreement morphemes, and the relation between noun phrases and their constituents by marking

756-406: The word is still most frequently used to refer to such "sentence words". Often polysynthesis is achieved when languages have extensive agreement between elements verbs and their arguments so that the verb is marked for agreement with the grammatical subject and object. In this way a single word can encode information about all the elements in a transitive clause. In Indo-European languages the verb

784-483: The work of Edward Sapir , who used it as one of his basic typological categories. Recently, Mark C. Baker has suggested formally defining polysynthesis as a macro-parameter within Noam Chomsky 's principles and parameters theory of grammar. Other linguists question the basic utility of the concept for typology since it covers many separate morphological types that have little else in common. The word "polysynthesis"

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