Takelma language

Takelma
Taakelmàʔn
Native to	United States
Region	Oregon, Rogue Valley along the middle course of the Rogue River
Ethnicity	Takelma, Latgawa
Extinct	1934, with the death of Frances Johnson
Language family	Penutian or language isolate
Language codes
ISO 639-3	tkm
Glottolog	take1257
Takelma (south), with the Kalapuyan languages to the north

Takelma /təˈkɛlmə/ was the language spoken by the Latgawa and Takelma people. 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 (Gwísgwashãn).

Dialects

• Latgawa dialect, spoken in southwestern Oregon along the upper Rogue River
• Lowland 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, Myrtle Creek, and Cow Creek.

Genealogical relations

Takelma is a language isolate.

Takelma was once considered part of a Takelma-Kalapuyan language family together with the Kalapuyan languages (Swadesh 1965). However, a 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. However, Takelma is commonly proposed as part of the Penutian super-family, as first suggested by Edward Sapir.

Phonology

Consonants

		Labial	Alveolar		Palatal	Velar	Glottal
			plain	fricated
Nasal		m	n
Occlusive	tenuis	p	t			k	ʔ
	aspirate	pʰ	tʰ			kʰ
	ejective	pʼ	tʼ	tsʼ	tʃʼ	kʼ
Continuant	voiceless	ʍ	ɬ	s	ʃ	x	h
	voiced	w	l		j

Grammar

Takelma like many Native American languages is polysynthetic meaning that you 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.

 1) Aorist
 2) Potential 
 3) Future 
 4) Inferential
 5) Present Imperative
 6) 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.

	1 sg.	2 sg.	3 sg/pl	1 pl.	2 Pl. reflexive	3 sg. reflexive	3 pl.
I	wi-	`-ʔth	-(x)	-tam	-ʔthpan	-(x)akwa	-(x)akwan
II	-t/thekh	-t/theʔ	-t/th	-tam	-t/thapaʔn	-t/thakwa	-t/thakwan
III	´-thkh	`-ʔth	`-(th)	-tam	`-ʔthpan	`-thkwa	`-thkwan
IV	-té:	-taʔ	`-ta	-tam	tapaʔn or `-ʔthpan	`-thkwa or `-takwa	`-takwan or `-thkwan

• Note that in all of these, the h should be upper subscript as well as w except for in the prefix wi-

Set I is only ever used with terms of kinship. For example:

Wi-wá:	wà:-ʔth	wi:-xa
‘my younger brother’	‘your younger brother’	‘his younger brother’

Set II is used with bare stems or stems having the formant. For example:

-x:hè:l	hè:l-thekh	hè:l-tha
‘song’	‘my song’	‘his song’

tàkax-tekh	tàkax-ta
‘my head’	‘his head’

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:

xá:n	xa:lám-thkh	xa:lám
‘urine’	‘my urine’	‘his urine’

tán	taná-thkh	taná
‘rock’	‘my rock’	‘his rock’

p’á:-n	p’á:n-thkh	p’á:n-th
‘liver’	‘my liver’	‘his liver’

Set IV is used in locative constructions. For example:

ha-wili-té

‘in my house’

          versus  

wili-thkh

‘my house’

xa:-kwel-té

‘between my legs’

                   versus    

kwé:lx-tekh

‘my legs’

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. So far the only actually examples I have found are in the 3rd person object marker in Takelma, which is 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:

Object Markers	Singular	Plural
1st	-xi	-am
2nd	-pi	-amph
3rd	∅/ -khwa	∅/ -khwa

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 O.

The O 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.

Words

• [mìːʔskaʔ] – one
• [kàːʔm] – two
• [xìpiní] – three
• [kamkàm] – four
• [déːhal] – five
• [haʔiːmìʔs] – six
• [haʔiːkàːʔm] – seven
• [haʔiːxín] – eight
• [haʔiːkó] – nine
• [ìxtiːl] – ten

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