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Ritwan
The Algic languages (also Algonquian–Wiyot–Yurok or Algonquian–Ritwan) are an indigenous language family of North America. Most Algic languages belong to the Algonquian subfamily, dispersed over a broad area from the Rocky Mountains to Atlantic Canada. The other Algic languages are the Yurok and Wiyot of northwestern California, which, despite their geographic proximity, are not closely related. All these languages descend from Proto-Algic, a second-order proto-language estimated to have been spoken about 7,000 years ago and reconstructed using the reconstructed Proto-Algonquian language and the Wiyot and Yurok languages. History The term ''Algic'' was first coined by Henry Schoolcraft in his ''Algic Researches'', published in 1839. Schoolcraft defined the term as "derived from the words Allegheny and Atlantic, in reference to the indigenous people anciently located in this geographical area." Schoolcraft's terminology was not retained. The peoples he called "Algic" ...
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Proto-Algonquian Language
Proto-Algonquian (commonly abbreviated PA) is the proto-language from which the various Algonquian languages are descended. It is generally estimated to have been spoken around 2,500 to 3,000 years ago, but there is less agreement on where it was spoken. The Algonquian family, which is a branch of the larger Algic language family, is usually divided into three subgroups: Eastern Algonquian, which is a genetic subgroup, and Central Algonquian and Plains Algonquian, both of which are areal groupings. In the historical linguistics of North America, Proto-Algonquian is one of the best studied, most thoroughly reconstructed proto-languages. It is descended from Proto-Algic. History of research Most Algonquian languages are similar enough that their relatedness has been recognized for centuries and was commented on by the early English and French colonists and explorers. For example, in 1787 (over a decade before Sir William Jones' famous speech on Indo-European), the theologian an ...
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Proto-Algic Language
Proto-Algic (sometimes abbreviated PAc) is the proto-language from which the Algic languages (Wiyot language, Yurok language, and Proto-Algonquian) are descended. It is estimated to have been spoken about 7,000 years ago somewhere in the American Northwest, possibly around the Columbia Plateau.Paul Proulx, ''Proto-Algic I: Phonological Sketch'', in the ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', volume 50, number 2 (April 1984) It is an example of a second-level proto-language (a proto-language whose reconstruction depends on data from another proto-language, namely its descendant language Proto-Algonquian) which is widely agreed to have existed. Its main researcher was Paul Proulx. Vowels Proto-Algic had four basic vowels, which could be either long or short: :long: *i·, *e·, *a·, *o· :short: *i, *e, *a, *o Consonants Proto-Algic had the following consonants: :1 The identity of this consonant is not entirely certain; in Proto-Algonquian, it is sometimes alte ...
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Algonquian–Wakashan Languages
Algonquian–Wakashan (also Almosan, Algonkian–Mosan, Algonkin–Wakashan) is a hypothetical language family composed of several established language families that was proposed in 1929. The proposal consists of the following: I. Algic languages, Algic (Algonkin–Ritwan) : A. Algonquian languages, Algonquian (Algonkin) : B. Beothuk language, Beothuk : C. Wiyot language, Wiyot–Yurok language, Yurok (Ritwan) II. Kutenai language, Kutenai (also known as Kootenay; a language isolate) III. Mosan languages, Mosan : A. Wakashan languages, Wakashan : B. Chimakuan languages, Chimakuan : C. Salishan languages, Salishan Kutenai language, Kutenai may possibly be distantly related to the Salishan languages, Salishan family, but this link has not been demonstrated. The Mosan family proposal is also hypothetical and is currently considered undemonstrated, rather appearing to be a Sprachbund. External relationships Joseph Greenberg renamed Sapir's proposal ''Almosan'' and grouped it in an ...
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Wiyot Language
Wiyot (also Wishosk) or Soulatluk (lit. "your jaw") is an Algic languageCampbell (1997:152) spoken by the Wiyot people of Humboldt Bay, California. The language's last native speaker, Della Prince, died in 1962. Wiyot, along with its geographical neighbor, the Yurok language, were first identified as relatives of the Algonquian languages by Edward Sapir in 1913, though this classification was disputed for decades in what came to be known as the "Ritwan controversy". Due to the enormous geographical separation of Wiyot and Yurok from all other Algonquian languages, the validity of their genetic link was hotly contested by leading Americanist linguists; as Ives Goddard put it, the issue "has profound implications for the prehistory of North America". However, by the 1950s, the genetic relationship between the Algonquian languages and Wiyot and Yurok had been established to the satisfaction of most, if not all, researchers, giving rise to the term "Algic" to refer to the Algonq ...
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Yurok Language
Yurok (also Chillula, Mita, Pekwan, Rikwa, Sugon, Weitspek, Weitspekan) is an Algic language. It is the traditional language of the Yurok people of Del Norte County and Humboldt County on the far north coast of California, most of whom now speak English. The last native speaker died in 2013. As of 2012, Yurok language classes were taught to high school students, and other revitalization efforts were expected to increase the population of speakers. The standard reference on the Yurok language grammar is by R. H. Robins (1958). Robins, Robert H. 1958The Yurok Language: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon University of California Publications in Linguistics 15. Name Concerning the etymology of "Yurok" ( ''Weitspekan''), this below is from Campbell (1997): History Decline of the language began during the California Gold Rush, due to the influx of new settlers and the diseases they brought with them. Native American boarding schools initiated by the United States government with the inten ...
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Algonquian Languages
The Algonquian languages ( or ; also Algonkian) are a subfamily of Indigenous languages of the Americas, indigenous American languages that include most languages in the Algic languages, Algic language family. The name of the Algonquian language family is distinguished from the orthographically similar Algonquin language, Algonquin dialect of the Indigenous Ojibwe language (Chippewa), which is a senior member of the Algonquian language family. The term ''Algonquin'' has been suggested to derive from the Maliseet word (), "they are our relatives/allies". A number of Algonquian languages are considered extinct languages by the modern linguistic definition. Algonquian peoples, Speakers of Algonquian languages stretch from the east coast of North America to the Rocky Mountains. The proto-language from which all of the languages of the family descend, Proto-Algonquian language, Proto-Algonquian, was spoken around 2,500 to 3,000 years ago. There is no scholarly consensus about wh ...
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Northwestern United States
The Northwestern United States, also known as the American Northwest or simply the Northwest, is an informal geographic region of the United States. The region consistently includes the states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Some sources include Southeast Alaska in the Northwest. The related but distinct term "Pacific Northwest" generally excludes areas from the Rockies eastward, whereas the term "Inland Northwest" excludes areas east of the Cascades. The Northwestern United States is a subportion of the Western United States (which is, itself, even more ambiguous). In contrast, states included in the neighboring regions (Southwestern United States and Great Plains) and Utah are not simultaneously considered part of both regions. Like the southwestern United States, the Northwest definition has moved westward over time. The current area includes the old Oregon Territory (created in 1848–Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and areas in Montana west of the Contine ...
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Urheimat
In historical linguistics, the homeland or ''Urheimat'' (, from German '' ur-'' "original" and ''Heimat'', home) of a proto-language is the region in which it was spoken before splitting into different daughter languages. A proto-language is the reconstructed or historically-attested parent language of a group of languages that are genetically related. Depending on the age of the language family under consideration, its homeland may be known with near-certainty (in the case of historical or near-historical migrations) or it may be very uncertain (in the case of deep prehistory). Next to internal linguistic evidence, the reconstruction of a prehistoric homeland makes use of a variety of disciplines, including archaeology and archaeogenetics. Methods There are several methods to determine the homeland of a given language family. One method is based on the vocabulary that can be reconstructed for the proto-language. This vocabulary – especially terms for flora and fauna – can pr ...
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Lake Superior
Lake Superior in central North America is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface areaThe Caspian Sea is the largest lake, but is saline, not freshwater. and the third-largest by volume, holding 10% of the world's surface fresh water. The northern and westernmost of the Great Lakes of North America, it straddles the Canada–United States border with the province of Ontario to the north and east, and the states of Minnesota to the northwest and Wisconsin and Michigan to the south. It drains into Lake Huron via St. Marys River, then through the lower Great Lakes to the St. Lawrence River and the Atlantic Ocean. Name The Ojibwe name for the lake is ''gichi-gami'' (in syllabics: , pronounced ''gitchi-gami'' or ''kitchi-gami'' in different dialects), meaning "great sea". Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote this name as "Gitche Gumee" in the poem ''The Song of Hiawatha'', as did Gordon Lightfoot in his song " The Wreck of the ''Edmund Fitzgerald''". According to oth ...
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Columbia River
The Columbia River (Upper Chinook: ' or '; Sahaptin: ''Nch’i-Wàna'' or ''Nchi wana''; Sinixt dialect'' '') is the largest river in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. The river rises in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, Canada. It flows northwest and then south into the U.S. state of Washington, then turns west to form most of the border between Washington and the state of Oregon before emptying into the Pacific Ocean. The river is long, and its largest tributary is the Snake River. Its drainage basin is roughly the size of France and extends into seven US states and a Canadian province. The fourth-largest river in the United States by volume, the Columbia has the greatest flow of any North American river entering the Pacific. The Columbia has the 36th greatest discharge of any river in the world. The Columbia and its tributaries have been central to the region's culture and economy for thousands of years. They have been used for transportation since a ...
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Nivkh Language
Nivkh (; occasionally also Nivkhic; self-designation: Нивхгу диф, ''Nivxgu dif'', ), or Gilyak (), or Amuric, is a small language family, often portrayed as a language isolate, of two or three mutually unintelligible languages spoken by the Nivkh people in Outer Manchuria, in the basin of the Amgun (a tributary of the Amur), along the lower reaches of the Amur itself, and on the northern half of Sakhalin. "Gilyak" is the Russian rendering of terms derived from the Tungusic "Gileke" and Manchu-Chinese "Gilemi" (Gilimi, Gilyami) for culturally similar peoples of the Amur River region, and was applied principally to the Nivkh in Western literature. The population of ethnic Nivkhs has been reasonably stable over the past century, with 4,549 Nivkhs counted in 1897 and 4,673 in 1989. However, the number of native speakers of the Nivkh language among these dropped from 100% to 23.3% in the same period, so by the 1989 census there were only 1,079 first-language speakers left. ...
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Truman Michelson
Truman Michelson (August 11, 1879 – July 26, 1938) was a linguist and anthropologist who worked from 1910 until his death for the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution. He also held a position as ethnologist at George Washington University from 1917 until 1932. Michelson studied Indo-European languages, Indo-European historical linguistics at Harvard University, completing his doctoral degree in 1904, with further study at the Universities of University of Leipzig, Leipzig and University of Bonn, Bonn in 1904-1905, followed by study with Franz Boas. Soon after joining the Bureau of American Ethnology, Michelson began an extensive program of field research on North American Indian languages. Much of Michelson's research focused on languages of the Algonquian languages, Algonquian family. Bibliographies of his publications are available in Boas (1938), Cooper (1939), and Pentland and Wolfart (1982). He was the author of an early influential study classifyin ...
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