The Coosan (also Coos or Kusan) language family consists of two languages spoken along the southern
Oregon
Oregon () is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of its eastern boundary with Idah ...
coast. Both languages are now
extinct.
Classification
*
Hanis ''†''
*
Miluk ''†'' ( Lower Coquille)
Melville Jacobs
Melville Jacobs (July 3, 1902 – July 31, 1971) was an American anthropologist known for his extensive fieldwork on cultures of the Pacific Northwest. He was born in New York City. After studying with Franz Boas he became a member of the faculty ...
(1939) says that the languages are as close as
Dutch and
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ger ...
. They share more than half of their vocabulary, though this is not always obvious, and grammatical differences cause the two languages to look quite different.
The origin of the name ''Coos'' is uncertain: one idea is that it is derived from a Hanis stem ''gus-'' meaning 'south' as in ''gusimídži·č'' 'southward'; another idea is that it is derived from a southwestern
Oregon Athabaskan
Pacific Coast Athabaskan is a geographical and possibly genealogical grouping of the Athabaskan language family.
California Athabaskan
: 1. Hupa (dining'-xine:wh, a.k.a. Hoopa-Chilula)
:: dialects:
::* Hupa
::* Tsnungwe
::: - tse:ning-xwe
::: - ...
word ''ku·s'' meaning 'bay'.
Frachtenburg was the first major ethnolinguist to address the relatedness of these languages, saying that Hanis and Miluk were dialects of the same "Kusan" language.
Melville Jacobs
Melville Jacobs (July 3, 1902 – July 31, 1971) was an American anthropologist known for his extensive fieldwork on cultures of the Pacific Northwest. He was born in New York City. After studying with Franz Boas he became a member of the faculty ...
also said that they were two dialects of the same languages; though he did note that Mrs. Annie Miner Peterson said they were in fact distinct languages and that Miluk had two dialects. In 1916
Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American Jewish anthropologist- linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States.
Sa ...
suggested that the Coosan languages are part of a larger
Oregon Penutian
Oregon Penutian is a hypothetical language family in the Penutian language phylum comprising languages spoken at one time by several groups of Native Americans in present-day western Oregon and western Washington in the United States. Vari ...
genetic grouping. This analysis has been accepted by some.
However, more recent work has placed Hanis and Miluk as both separate languages and part of their own language family, with Douglas-Tavani doing a comparative reconstruction of Proto-Coosan's phonemes and vocabulary
Phonology
Vowels
Diphthongs
Three Series of Stops
Consonants
Key
* Glottal Stops are represented by ʔ for subscript epsilon
* Ejectives raised by an apostrophe (pʼ) can be substituted as exclamation points (p!)
* Length and gemination are shown by a dot (m·)
[Mithun, Marianne. The Languages of Native North America. Edited by R. M. W. Dixon and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Cambridge University Press, 2001.]
* Campbell, Lyle. (1997). ''American Indian languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America''. New York: Oxford University Press. .
* Frachtenberg, Leo J. (1914).
Lower Umpqua texts and notes on the Kusan dialects'. Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology (Vol. 4, pp. 141–150). (Reprinted 1969, New York: AMS Press).
*
Atlas of languages of intercultural communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas* Mithun, Marianne. (1999). ''The Languages of Native North America''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (hbk); .
* Whereat, Don. (1992). (Personal communication in Mithun 1999).
* Jacobs, Melville. (1940). Coos Narrative and Ethnologic Texts. University of Washington: Seattle.
* DeLancey, S., & Golla, V. (1997). ‘The Penutian Hypothesis: Retrospect and Prospect’. International Journal of American Linguistics, 63(1), 171-202.
* Douglas-Tavani, Jordan AG. (2021). 'Languages of the Bay: On the Proto-Coosan Hypothesis'. University of California: Santa Barbara. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/20f1966w
External links
Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw homepage
{{Authority control
Coast Oregon Penutian languages
Language families