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Takelma was the language spoken by the Latgawa and Takelma people and Cow Creek band of Upper Umpqua. It was first extensively described by Edward Sapir in his graduate thesis, ''The Takelma Language of Southwestern Oregon''. The last fluent speaker of Takelma, with whom Sapir worked while writing about the language, was
Frances Johnson Frances Johnson or Gwísgwashãn (died 1934) was the last fluent speaker of the Takelma language of Oregon, United States. In 1906, she worked with linguist Edward Sapir to document the language while living on the Siletz Reservation The Siletz Re ...
(Gwísgwashãn). A dictionary from English to Takelma is currently being created in the hopes it can be revived.


Dialects

* Latgawa dialect, spoken in southwestern Oregon along the upper Rogue River *Lowland ( Takelma) dialect, spoken in southwestern Oregon in the Rogue Valley There was possibly a Cow Creek dialect spoken in southwestern Oregon along the
South Umpqua River The South Umpqua River is a tributary of the Umpqua River, approximately long, in southwestern Oregon in the United States. It drains part of the Cascade Range east of Roseburg. The river passes through a remote canyon in its upper reaches then ...
, Myrtle Creek, and Cow Creek.


Genealogical relations

Takelma is commonly included in the controversial
Penutian Penutian is a proposed grouping of language families that includes many Native American languages of western North America, predominantly spoken at one time in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California. The existence of a Penutian s ...
macro-family, as first suggested by Edward Sapir. Within Penutian, Takelma has been grouped together with the Kalapuyan languages in a " Takelma–Kalapuyan" or "Takelman" language family. However, an unpublished paper by Tarpent & Kendall (1998) finds this relationship to be unfounded because of the extremely different morphological structures of Takelma and Kalapuyan. DeLancey follows this position.


Phonology


Consonants

The consonant phonemes as described by Sapir are:


Vowels

The vowel system of the Takelma language comprises the six vowels /a e i o u ʉ/, as well as their lengthened counterparts /aː eː iː oː uː ʉː/.


Tones

Three tones are noted as /v́/, /v̀/, and /v/.


Grammar

Takelma, like many Native American languages, is polysynthetic meaning that one can link together many different morphemes to form a word. Therefore one single word can often contain a lot of information that in English would be portrayed in a full sentence. This is mainly done by adding affixes to verbs.


Tense

Takelma has 6 different tenses listed below with the first (aorist) being the basic tense which is equivalent to the immediate future, present, and past. # Aorist # Potential # Future # Inferential # Present Imperative # Future Imperative


Person and possession

In Takelma, possession is marked by a set of affixes. Most of them are suffixes but there is one prefix. Below is a table of the four declensional sets. Set I is only ever used with terms of kinship. For example: Set II is used with bare stems or stems having the formant. For example: Alternations between –t and –tʰ in set II and set IV is regular and predictable. Set III is used with stems having other formants. For example: Set IV is used in locative constructions. For example: versus versus wa-té ‘to me’


Object markers

Takelma has a complex system of verbal pronominal suffixes and is also accompanied by the loss of case markers on nouns. This represents a complete shift to full head marking. In the 3rd person object marker in Takelma, the suffix –kʰwa which is realized on the verb. However the distribution of –kʰwa is very restricted. Here is the full set of object markers: For the 1st and 2nd person objects overt marking is required with clear difference between singular and plural. For 3rd person there is no difference between singular and plural and there is also alternation between the suffix –kʰwa and zero suffix. The zero variant occurs with animates as well as inanimate, covert pronouns, and overt nominals. However –kʰwa occurs in three distinct environments. First, when the subject is also 3rd person. Second, it is always used when the object is higher in animacy than the subject. This means that the object refers to a human also a mythic animal that is thought of as a human being. The third situation is when the subject and object are of equal animacy but the object outranks the subject in topicality.Aissen, Judith. Differential Coding, Partial Blocking, and Bidirectional OT. UC Santa Cruz, n.d. Web. 5 May 2015.


Words


References


Further reading

*
Comparative vocabulary of the languages spoken by the 'Umpqua,' 'Lower Rogue River' [Takelma] and 'Calapooia' tribes of Indians" (35 pp., original dated May 1859)
California Language Archive
OLAC resources in and about the Takelma language
{{North American languages L Penutian languages Indigenous languages of Oregon Indigenous languages of the Pacific Northwest Coast Extinct languages of North America Northwest Coast Sprachbund (North America) Language isolates of North America Languages extinct in the 1930s 1934 disestablishments in Oregon