Wiyot Tribe

Dagougaw!

"I'm working again!"

Hello friends, it has been a long time!  As many of you know, the tribal newsletter has not been up and running for the last few months; however, I want to assure you that Wiyot language work is still progressing every day.  I have recently learned to use some simple video editing software, and today I am uploading a short video with very basic Wiyot vocabulary, using images and narrated by tribal members Allie Wyland and Matt Green.  It is my intention to continue adding more "video lessons" as we create them here at Table Bluff.  If you enjoy this content and would like your own DVD to play at home on your TV, please contact me!

The video linked below is an adaptation of the same images we use in language classes here at Table Bluff, based on Dr. Stephen Greymorning (Arapaho)'s ASLA© language teaching methods.  For more about ASLA, read the information below the video link.

Click the link to watch & listen in a new window, and please send any feedback you may have to lynnika@wiyot.us!  I hope you enjoy this, and I hope & plan to make much more content available this way if you find it useful.  Hou'! (thanks)

[note:  link not working yet, I will try to get it up this week (3/16)]

Wiyot video vocabulary / ASLA Set 1:  simple nouns (people, animals, objects, transportation)

 

Maps of Wiyot Territory

(from the July 2010 newsletter article)

This month I began researching historical maps of Wiyot territory with the aim of eventually mapping the 200+ Wiyot place names that were recorded by J.P. Harrington and others.  I recently spent a week in Washington, D.C. where I was able to copy several historical maps of this area.  Here are some of the images that I found:

In this detail of an 1851 map of California’s “Gold Region”, Arcata is still called Union, and the Eel River is referred to as the “Mendocino or Eel River”.

Wiyot place names

• Goudini = Arcata
• Jaroujiji = Eureka

 

This detail of an 1852 Census map of California shows “Vandusen’s Fork” and Bucksport.  Notice how different Humboldt Bay and the mouth of the Eel River look compared to the map from just a year earlier!

 

This picture shows a detail of a 1907 map of the area, with more modern (English) place names.  At the time of this map, Eureka’s population was 7000 and Arcata’s was 1000.

More Wiyot place names

• Wigi’ = Humboldt Bay
• Wiya’t = Eel River
• Walupt = Table Bluff lighthouse

 

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ASLA Wiyot Vocabulary, Skill Set 1 (continued)

This month, I am printing a few more images from Skill Set 1 (nouns) of the ASLA© curriculum we are using to learn Wiyot.

Click on an image to hear the word:

 

To say "x and y" in Wiyot, you actually say something like "x, y also".  The word that means "also" is walh.

• hitwulh, plhutk walh = a basket and a rock
• tsanats, plhutk walh = a spoon and a rock

Now try these (using vocabulary from last month's article):

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Accelerated Second Language Acquisition© (ASLA) for Wiyot:  Set 1

(Vocabulary with audio from the June 2010 newsletter article)

ASLA© stands for “Accelerated Second Language Acquisition”, which is just a fancy way of saying “learning a language fast”. It was created by Dr. S. Nexooyet Greymorning, who is Arapaho and professor of Native American Studies at the University of Montana, specifically for Native American languages.  Dr. Greymorning has been using ASLA to teach the Arapaho language to UM students and tribal members for several years, and we recently began using his method for Wiyot language classes here at Table Bluff.

ASLA uses images and very structured content to help learners “figure out” the language—no grammar lessons, no quizzes, and no writing!

For those of you who don’t live near the Reservation but would like copies of the materials I am creating for our ASLA-style lessons, please contact me! For this month’s article, I am printing the images we are using for ASLA Skill Set 1 (nouns).

(I have included BOTH an archival recording of a Wiyot speaker and a new recording of myself for each word--the second is only to provide better audio quality in case the old recording is hard to hear, but you should use the native speakers as your guide when possible.)

 

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Grizzly Bears & Harmonicas

(Words with audio from the May '09 newsletter article)

1. goutsrróu'l (sugar = 'good-tasting')
2. hiwa'gurrughutsk (pea = 'little round thing')
3. wúladítk (peach = 'round fuzzy thing')
4. bou'chóulhilh (pig = 'he has a pointy nose')
5. gachwáyichanuwelh (handkerchief = 'it wipes the chin')
6. tvedgulóu'wul (nail = 'small thing that goes through with an instrument (?)')
7. tvuplhayóu'wulh (scythe = 'what one uses to go through hairlike objects [grass]')
8. tvutsguróuwulh (fork = 'instrument that goes through really small things (?)')
9. tsouwuliyu'n (violin = 'one bows it')
10. gougóutsurouy (whistle = 'the one that whistles')
11. wouda'lhabdoununi' (guitar = ???)

 

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Historical & Linguistic Background of Wiyot

The Wiyot language (called Soulátluk' — literally ‘your jaw’ — by some speakers) was the native language of the Wiyot people until the death of Della Prince, the last fluent Wiyot speaker to collaborate with linguists, in 1962. Wiyot is linguistically interesting for several reasons. First, along with Yurok, it is one of only two Algic (also called Algonguian) languages in the Pacific Northwest. Other Algic languages are found in Canada, the Great Lakes region, and the northern Atlantic coast, and include languages like Chippewa, Cree, Cheyenne and Arapaho. (see map below)

Another interesting characteristic of Wiyot is that it is a polysynthetic language, which means that complex ideas — sometimes the equivalent of an entire English sentence — can be expressed using a single verb with multiple prefixes and suffixes. Here are a couple of examples:

a.  gidutiguliswiwilh

gi     dutigulis     wiw     ilh

finish bathe       self     he/she

'S/he finishes bathing himself/herself.'

b.  dagudugunugulhu’n

da               gudugunu     gulh      u’n

for a while      very           hurt        its

'There is a lot of hurting.'

 

Language Materials

There are no remaining fluent speakers of Wiyot (no one alive today grew up speaking Wiyot as their first language). However, there is a great deal of documentation of the Wiyot language that was compiled when the language was still spoken natively. These materials include written word lists, texts, and grammatical descriptions dating from the late 1800’s to the 1960’s, as well as audio recordings of songs, words and phrases, and narrative texts from the 1950’s-1960’s. Here is a sample of what some of the written materials look like:

1. J. Curtin (1889):

2.  G. Reichard (1925):

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. G. Reichard (1922):

4.  Teeter & Nicholls (1993):

Because these documents were created by many different researchers, each of whom had a different system for writing the language, and contain information given by Wiyot speakers from different dialects and time periods, it is a challenge to form a complete picture of the language.

(To fully understand this, imagine that the last English speaker had died several decades ago. Then imagine that the only information we had today about the English language was a dozen or so texts and word lists collected by, say, Swahili-speaking researchers who did not know anything about English spelling. THEN imagine that the English speakers who provided the researchers with their information lived between about 1885 and 1960, and some of them were from Minnesota while others were from South Carolina or New York!

Revitalization

'Language revitalization' refers to efforts to bring endangered languages (languages with very few native speakers) back into broader use in a community by teaching the language to non-fluent or semi-fluent speakers. But can a language with no fluent speakers be brought back into use? It may be more difficult, but Wiyot would not be the first community to try it: revitalization of ‘extinct’ or ‘dormant’ languages (also called ‘language revival’) is underway in the Miami (Oklahoma — also an Algic language) and Mutsun California tribes; and modern Hebrew was revived from religious and traditional texts after centuries during which it was used only ceremonially.

Projects

Current activities

• Children’s language classes
• Adult language classes
• Language committee
• Multimedia dictionary creation
• Language articles in the Wiyot newsletter

Plans for the near future

• Online language-learning resources
• Digital texts with audio and word-level translation

Long-term goals

• Creation of a digital database containing ALL known Wiyot words, phrases and texts from manuscript, print, and audio sources
• Publication of a comprehensive Wiyot-English/English-Wiyot dictionary
• Training of language teachers within the Wiyot Tribe

Ideas?

If you are a Wiyot tribal member and have ideas or suggestions for learning or using Wiyot, I would love to hear from you at lynnika@wiyot.us or you can call the Reservation office or stop by the Cultural Center.

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