The Kitsai (also Kichai) language is an extinct member of the
Caddoan language family. The French first record the
Kichai people
The Kichai tribe (also Keechi or Kitsai) was a Native American Southern Plains tribe that lived in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. Their name for themselves was K'itaish.
History
The Kichai were most closely related to the Pawnee. French explo ...
's presence along the upper
Red River in 1701. By the 1840s Kitsai was spoken in southern
Oklahoma, but by the 1930s no native speakers remained. It is thought to be most closely related to
Pawnee Pawnee initially refers to a Native American people and its language:
* Pawnee people
* Pawnee language
Pawnee is also the name of several places in the United States:
* Pawnee, Illinois
* Pawnee, Kansas
* Pawnee, Missouri
* Pawnee City, Nebraska ...
. The Kichai people today are enrolled in the
Wichita and Affiliated Tribes (Wichita, Keechi),
Waco
Waco ( ) is the county seat of McLennan County, Texas, United States. It is situated along the Brazos River and I-35, halfway between Dallas and Austin. The city had a 2020 population of 138,486, making it the 22nd-most populous city in the st ...
and
Tawakonie), headquartered in
Anadarko, Oklahoma
Anadarko is a city in Caddo County, Oklahoma, United States. The city is fifty miles southwest of Oklahoma City. The population was 5,745 at the 2020 census. It is the county seat of Caddo County.
History
Anadarko got its name when its post of ...
.
Phonology
Consonants
Kitsai's
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wi ...
inventory consists of the
phonemes
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
shown in the chart below. The phoneme /c/ is analyzed below as a
palatal
The palate () is the roof of the mouth in humans and other mammals. It separates the oral cavity from the nasal cavity.
A similar structure is found in crocodilians, but in most other tetrapods, the oral and nasal cavities are not truly separ ...
stop, even though its typical realization is
alveolar with
delayed release, so as to not have an affricate "series" consisting of only one phoneme. Similarly, /w/ is analyzed as a velar (i.e.
labio-velar) rather than a
labial so as to not be the only labial consonant.
Vowels
Kitsai has the following vowel phonemes:
Documentation
Kitsai is documented in the still mostly-unpublished field notes of anthropologist
Alexander Lesser, of
Hofstra University. Lesser discovered five speakers of Kitsai in 1928 and 1929, none of whom spoke English. Communicating to the Kitsai speakers through Wichita/English bilingual translators, he filled 41 notebooks with Kitsai material.
[Salvador Bucca and Alexander Lesser]
"Kitsai Phonology and Morphophonemics,"
(University of Chicago Press, 1969): 7.
Kai Kai was the last fluent speaker of Kitsai. She was born around 1849 and lived eight miles north of Anadarko. Kai Kai worked with Lesser to record vocabulary and
oral history and prepare a grammar of the language.
In the 1960s, Lesser shared his materials with
Salvador Bucca of the
Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, and they published scholarly articles on Kitsai.
[
]
Vocabulary
Some Kitsai words include the following:"Kitsai and Caddoan Word Set."
''Native Languages.'' (retrieved 3 May 2010)
*Bear: Wari:ni
*Corn: Kotay
*Coyote: 'Taxko
*Grass: A'tsi'u
*Man: Wí:ta
*Sweet potato: 'Ihts
*White: Kaxtsnu
*Wind: Ho'tonu
*Woman: Tsakwákt
Notes
References
* Sturtevant, William C., general editor, and Raymond D. Fogelson, volume editor. ''Handbook of North American Indians: Southeast. Volume 14''. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2004. .
External links
Native Languages
{{Caddoan languages
Caddoan languages
Extinct languages of North America
Wichita tribe
Languages extinct in the 1930s