Wintu language
Encyclopedia
Wintu is an endangered
Wintuan
language spoken by the Wintu
people of Northern California
.
Wintu is the northernmost member of the Wintun
family of languages.
The Wintun family of languages was spoken in the Sacramento River Valley and in adjacent areas up to the Cardinez Strait of San Francisco Bay
.
Wintun is a branch of the Penutian stock of languages of western North America, more closely related to four other families of Penutian languages spoken in California
: Maiduan, Miwokan, Yokuts, and Costanoan
.
The Wintu were in contact also with adjacent speakers of Hokan languages such as Southeastern, Eastern, and Northeastern Pomo; Athabaskan languages
such as Wailaki
and Hupa
; Yukian languages such as Yuki
and Wappo
; and other Penutian languages such as Miwok
, Maidu
, Youkuts, and Saclan.
Besides these contiguous languages surrounding the Wintun
area wider contacts with speakers of Russian
, Spanish
, and English
.
s:
are nonnative phonemes borrowed from English. is a rare phoneme that occurred, only word finally, in only one of Pitkin's informants
(his main consultant. In other speakers, it has merged with /tɬ/.
s:
Some examples of a generic syllable structure are:
Consonant clusters result only from conjoined closed syllables. For example, clusters of consonants occur when a syllable ending in a consonant is followed in the same word by another syllable.
Some examples of consonant clusters are:
Vowels may be long, but sequences of vowels do not occur.
There are four phonemic junctures ranked by their magnitude: Plus/+/, hyphen/-/, comma/,/ and period/./.
Syllables are determined by the presence or absence of vowels and semi-vowels. Light syllables contain short vowels. Heavy syllables contain short vowels followed by a semi-vowel. Extra-heavy syllables contain long vowels. The prominent syllable of a phonemic word is always the first, unless the second syllable is heavier, in which case the second syllable is stressed.
In the primary stress the greater is the magnitude of the preceding juncture, the greater is the intensity of the stress.
The secondary stress, on the other hand, occurs when a heavy syllable follows the prominent syllable and varies in intensity.
The weakest stress occurs when a syllable is not stressed and follows immediately after a phonemic juncture.
Like the plus juncture, the hyphen juncture affects the location of higher pitch and stress. But instead of conditioning the location of the syllables like the plus juncture, the hyphen shifts the pitch and the stress. The Hyphen juncture is the juncture with the least magnitude, being the only one occurring within words (for example, following certain prefixes and preceding some auxiliaries and enclitics).
It has two phonetic features: a fully realised pause accompanied or preceded by glottal stricture.
It is the juncture with the greatest magnitude and it has four phonetic features:
Period juncture delimits phonemic sentences.
It consists of very high pitch and particularly heavy stress.
For example /k'/ becomes prevelar before /i/ and /e/ but it is velar before /ʔa/ and it is backed before /u/ and /o/.
In a similar way, the glottalized velar /q'/ is pronounced with more friction at the point of articulation as /q'ˣ/. It is in a frontal position before /i/ and /e/ and becomes backed with all the other vowels.
Nevertheless, the most common process is suffixation, which occurs primarily in verbs.
In Wintu, the vowel ablaut occurs only in the mutations of some verb-root vowels (called dissimilation), or in some root-deriving suffixes (assimilation).
Root-vowel dissimilation is conditioned by the height of the vowel in the following syllable, while the suffix vowel assimilation is conditioned by the quantity of the vowel in the preceding syllable.
An example of dissimilation takes place when /e/ and /o/, which occurs only in root syllables, are raised in height when they are preceded by a single consonant and followed by the low vowel /a/ in the next syllable.
Ex. lEla-/lila/ "to transform" and lElu-/lelu/ "transform".
An example of dissimilation takes place when the morphophoneme [V]assimilates completely to the quality of the vowel that precedes in the previous syllable.
Ex.cewVlVlVha=/ceweleleha/ "many to be wide open".
There are two different types of substantives: those formed directly from roots (pronouns, non possessed nouns, kinship terms) and those based on forms of complex derivation from radical and stems (mostly nouns).
Pronouns can be singular, dual, and plural. They have particular suffixes (possessive for instrumental functions and for marking plural humans.) They are also very similar to verbs.
Nouns have a variety of roots, they are an open class, they may show number in rare forms and they do not distinguish possessive from instrumental functions. Nouns can be classified in possessed and non possessed.
The noun is composed of two elements:a stem and a suffix. The stem is usually a root. The suffixes specify numbers, animateness, personification or individuation.
Some nouns have the same stem but have a different generic and particular meaning.
Ex. /tu/ (particular aspect) eye; (generic aspect) face(s).
The suffixes of the nouns can also have different cases: object [um](sedem-coyote), genitive[un](seden), locative [in], instrumental [r], possessive[t], emphatic possessive (reduplication of the last syllable).
Pitkin (1964) identifies three stem forms: indicative, imperative and nominal.
A morphological word,can be clitic or non clitic. The clitic word, is always dependent on the non-clitic. The clitic words can be proclitic and postclitic depending on their position. Some morphemic words can be both clitics and full words.
For example: the morphemic word / ʔel/, in, is both a full word in /qewelʔel/, in the house, and a proclitic in /ʔel-qewel/, which have the same meaning.
The largest syntactic unit is the sentence. Sentences are considered a sequences of full words terminated by a period juncture /./. The sentence can be considered a clause if it contains verbs, sentence if it contains nouns. Sentences never contains main verbs.
Clauses can be dependent or independent. This depends on the kind of suffix who forms the verb. Independent verbs take the personal inflectional suffixes while dependent verbs are characterised by the subordinating suffixes{r},{tan},{ʔa], {n},}{so}, and {ta}.
In the sentences the syntactic relationships between full words and clitics are indicated by the word order and by the inflectional and derivational suffixes.
Four types of functions can be distinguished for the sentences: head, attributive, satellite, and conjunction.
The head is usually a noun and it is not dependent on other forms as for example /winthu/Wintu people. The attributive preceded and modify the head as for example in /winthu•n qewelin/ in a Wintu house.
On the other hand, the satellite only occurs in clauses. A satellite could be either the subject or the object of a verb. If the satellite is the subject of the verb, it precedes the verb, as for example /po• m yel-hura/land destroyed, but if the satellite is the object and it is in a dependent clause or a noun-phrase containing a genitive attributive, follows.
For example: /sedet ʔelew'kiyemti•n/ coyote never speaks wisely, or /wayda me•m hina/ a northern flood of water (will) arrive.
Endangered language
An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use. If it loses all its native speakers, it becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all it becomes an "extinct language"....
Wintuan
Wintuan languages
Wintuan is a family of languages spoken in the Sacramento Valley of central Northern California.All Wintuan languages are severely endangered.-Family division:...
language spoken by the Wintu
Wintu
The Wintu are Native Americans who live in what is now Northern California. They are part of a loose association of peoples known collectively as the Wintun . Others are the Nomlaki and the Patwin...
people of Northern California
Northern California
Northern California is the northern portion of the U.S. state of California. The San Francisco Bay Area , and Sacramento as well as its metropolitan area are the main population centers...
.
Wintu is the northernmost member of the Wintun
Wintun
Wintun is the name generally given to a group of related Native American tribes who live in Northern California, including the Wintu , Nomlaki , and Patwin tribes. Their range is from approximately present-day Lake Shasta to San Francisco Bay, along the western side of the Sacramento River to the...
family of languages.
The Wintun family of languages was spoken in the Sacramento River Valley and in adjacent areas up to the Cardinez Strait of San Francisco Bay
San Francisco Bay
San Francisco Bay is a shallow, productive estuary through which water draining from approximately forty percent of California, flowing in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers from the Sierra Nevada mountains, enters the Pacific Ocean...
.
Wintun is a branch of the Penutian stock of languages of western North America, more closely related to four other families of Penutian languages spoken in California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
: Maiduan, Miwokan, Yokuts, and Costanoan
Ohlone languages
The Ohlone language family also known as "Costanoan", is a family of languages of the San Francisco Bay Area spoken by the Ohlone peoples. It is a member of the hypothetical Penutian language phylum or stock, and the Utian language family...
.
The Wintu were in contact also with adjacent speakers of Hokan languages such as Southeastern, Eastern, and Northeastern Pomo; Athabaskan languages
Athabaskan languages
Athabaskan or Athabascan is a large group of indigenous peoples of North America, located in two main Southern and Northern groups in western North America, and of their language family...
such as Wailaki
Wailaki
The Eel River Athapaskans include the Wailaki, Lassik, Nongatl, and Sinkyone groups of Native Americans that traditionally live on or near the Eel River of northwestern California....
and Hupa
Hupa
Hupa, also spelled Hoopa, are a Native American tribe in northwestern California. Their autonym is Natinixwe, also spelled Natinookwa, meaning "People of the Place Where the Trails Return." The majority of the tribe is enrolled in the federally recognized Hoopa Valley Tribe; however, some Hupa are...
; Yukian languages such as Yuki
Yuki tribe
The Yuki are a Native American people from the zone of Round Valley, in what today is part of the territory of Mendocino County, Northern California. Yuki tribes are thought to have settled as far south as Hood Mountain in present-day Sonoma County...
and Wappo
Wappo
The Wappo are a group of Native Americans who traditionally lived in Northern California in the areas of Napa Valley, the south shore of Clear Lake, Alexander Valley, and Russian River. When Mexicans arrived to colonize California, Wappo villages existed near the present-day towns of Yountville,...
; and other Penutian languages such as Miwok
Miwok
Miwok can refer to any one of four linguistically related groups of Native Americans, native to Northern California, who spoke one of the Miwokan languages in the Utian family...
, Maidu
Maidu
The Maidu are a group of Native Americans who live in Northern California. They reside in the central Sierra Nevada, in the drainage area of the Feather and American Rivers...
, Youkuts, and Saclan.
Besides these contiguous languages surrounding the Wintun
Wintun
Wintun is the name generally given to a group of related Native American tribes who live in Northern California, including the Wintu , Nomlaki , and Patwin tribes. Their range is from approximately present-day Lake Shasta to San Francisco Bay, along the western side of the Sacramento River to the...
area wider contacts with speakers of Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, and English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
.
Consonants
Wintu has 28 (to 30) consonantConsonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
s:
| Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals... |
Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth... |
Post- alveolar Postalveolar consonant Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate... |
Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).... |
Uvular Uvular consonant Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be plosives, fricatives, nasal stops, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and... |
Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider... |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| central Central consonant A central or medial consonant is a consonant sound that is produced when air flows across the center of the mouth over the tongue. The class contrasts with lateral consonants, in which air flows over the sides of the tongue rather than down its center.... |
lateral Lateral consonant A lateral is an el-like consonant, in which airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth.... |
|||||||
| Plosive Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &... / Affricate Affricate consonant Affricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative rather than directly into the following vowel.- Samples :... |
voiced Voice (phonetics) Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts. Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which the vocal cords vibrate... |
b | d | (d͡ʒ) | ||||
| aspirated Aspiration (phonetics) In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ... |
pʰ | tʰ | ||||||
| ejective Ejective consonant In phonetics, ejective consonants are voiceless consonants that are pronounced with simultaneous closure of the glottis. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated or tenuis consonants... |
pʼ | tʼ | t͡ɬʼ ⟨ƛ'⟩ | t͡ʃʼ ⟨ch'⟩ | kʼ | qχʼ | ||
| voiceless Voiceless In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, this is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word "phonation" implies voicing, and that voicelessness is the lack of... |
p | t | t͡ɬ ~ ɬ ⟨ƛ⟩ |
t͡ʃ ⟨j⟩ | k | q | ʔ ⟨’⟩ | |
| Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... |
(f) | (θ) | ʃ ⟨sh⟩ | x | χ | h | ||
| Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... |
m | n | ||||||
| Trill Trill consonant In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. Standard Spanish <rr> as in perro is an alveolar trill, while in Parisian French it is almost always uvular.... |
ṛ ⟨ṛ⟩ | |||||||
| Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no... |
w | l | j ⟨y⟩ | |||||
are nonnative phonemes borrowed from English. is a rare phoneme that occurred, only word finally, in only one of Pitkin's informants
Informant (linguistics)
An informant or consultant in linguistics is a native speaker who acts as a linguistic reference for a language being studied. The informant's role is that of a senior interpreter, who demonstrates native pronunciation, provides grammaticality judgments regarding linguistic well-formedness, and may...
(his main consultant. In other speakers, it has merged with /tɬ/.
- Dental stops are denti-alveolar: [d̪], [t̪], [t̪ʰ], [t̪ʼ]. Younger speakers, however, employ (apico-)alveolar-stop articulations as in English [t], [tʰ], [tʼ], [d] .
- The lateral /tɬ/ is usually a fricative [ɬ] but occasionally an affricate among McCloud speakers while Trinity speakers have only the affricate. It is interdental after non-low front vowels /i, e/, post-dental after low /a/, and retroflex after non-low back /u, o/.
- In the speech of older speakers, postalveolar /ʃ/ is retroflex [ʂ] adjacent to back vowels /u, o, a/.
- Velars /k, kʼ, x/ are advanced before non-low front vowels /i, e/ and retracted before non-low back vowels /u, o/. In the manner of articulation, velars and post-velars can be glottalized and non-glottalized (voiceless).
- The trill /ṛ/ is apico-postalveolar retroflex. It is occurs as a flap [ɽ] between vowels.
- The glottal stop /ʔ/ is weakly articulated except when the speaker is being deliberate or emphatic. It is always fully articulated in word-final position.
Vowels
Wintu has 10 (or 11) vowelVowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
s:
| Short Vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in... |
Long Vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in... |
|||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also... |
Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark... |
Front | Back | |
| High (close) | i | u | iː | uː |
| Mid Mid vowel A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned mid-way between an open vowel and a close vowel... |
e | o | eː | oː |
| Low (open) | a | aː | ||
| Anomalous | æ | |||
- Wintu has short and long vowels. is a phoneme that only occurs in borrowed English words.
- All vowels are slightly nasalized before the glottal stop /ʔ/
- All vowels are voiced and oral.
Syllable Structure
Segmental phonemes require obligatorily a single onset consonant. The rhyme is usually composed of a vowel nucleus of a long or a short vowel optionally followed by a single consonant. The syllabic canon is- CV(ː)(C).
Some examples of a generic syllable structure are:
- CV [qa]=and, or.
- CVː [miː]=tree
- CVC [nuq]=pus
- CVːC [baːs]=food.
Consonant clusters result only from conjoined closed syllables. For example, clusters of consonants occur when a syllable ending in a consonant is followed in the same word by another syllable.
Some examples of consonant clusters are:
- CVC.CVC [pot.xom]=poison oak.
- CVC.CVːC [net.taːn]=my father.
- CVC.CVC [ʔel.ʔih]=you put it in.
Vowels may be long, but sequences of vowels do not occur.
Stress
Syllable stress in Wintu are predictable components of two junctures hyphen/-/ and plus/+/.There are four phonemic junctures ranked by their magnitude: Plus/+/, hyphen/-/, comma/,/ and period/./.
- Plus juncture is a central juncture. In Plus Juncture the location of the pitch and the stress in a phonemic word is determined by the structure of the syllable and its position relative to the juncture.
Syllables are determined by the presence or absence of vowels and semi-vowels. Light syllables contain short vowels. Heavy syllables contain short vowels followed by a semi-vowel. Extra-heavy syllables contain long vowels. The prominent syllable of a phonemic word is always the first, unless the second syllable is heavier, in which case the second syllable is stressed.
- Degree of intensity
In the primary stress the greater is the magnitude of the preceding juncture, the greater is the intensity of the stress.
The secondary stress, on the other hand, occurs when a heavy syllable follows the prominent syllable and varies in intensity.
The weakest stress occurs when a syllable is not stressed and follows immediately after a phonemic juncture.
- Ex. Extra heavy syllable: bó•s= house.
- Ex. Syllable with secondary stress: ní= I.
- Ex. Light Syllable: Lilá•=to accuse.
- The Hyphen Juncture occurs with phonemic words and ir represents a phonemically functional unity with particular phonetic proprieties that contrast with other junctures.
Like the plus juncture, the hyphen juncture affects the location of higher pitch and stress. But instead of conditioning the location of the syllables like the plus juncture, the hyphen shifts the pitch and the stress. The Hyphen juncture is the juncture with the least magnitude, being the only one occurring within words (for example, following certain prefixes and preceding some auxiliaries and enclitics).
- Ex./+ma•tceki+/ ear wax.
- Ex./+ma•t-ceki-/one split ear.
- Ex./+ʔelwine+/ with, along, accompanying.
- Ex./+ʔel-wine-/ to look straight in the eye.
- Comma juncture/,/
It has two phonetic features: a fully realised pause accompanied or preceded by glottal stricture.
- Period Juncture/./
It is the juncture with the greatest magnitude and it has four phonetic features:
- A fully realised pause
- An associated glottal structure
- A preceding phrasal accent of unpredictable location
- A terminal pitch contour that drops sharply in pitch level and voicing
Period juncture delimits phonemic sentences.
- Ex. ba•-s-bo•sin+ net, nis+λiya. They threw rocks at me because I was eating.
- Ex. ba•s-bo•sin+ mat, mis+ λiya. They threw rocks at you because you were eating.
- Phrasal Accent
It consists of very high pitch and particularly heavy stress.
- Ex. Sukuyum+ límcada.=my dog is sick.
- EX. Súkuyum+ límcada.=my dog is sick.
Phonological Processes
A vast number of phonological processes occur in the Wintu language.- The glottalized velars are pronounced with a slight friction of the tongue when they are in contact with certain vowels in particular contexts.
For example /k'/ becomes prevelar before /i/ and /e/ but it is velar before /ʔa/ and it is backed before /u/ and /o/.
In a similar way, the glottalized velar /q'/ is pronounced with more friction at the point of articulation as /q'ˣ/. It is in a frontal position before /i/ and /e/ and becomes backed with all the other vowels.
- Among the stop consonants only /p/, /t/, and /k/ occur finally as well as initially.
- The labiodental /f/ is an anomalous phoneme and it occurs only in two borrowed forms /foriĴulay/, forth of july or in /friho• lis/ beans.
- Older speakers pronounce /s/ as /ṣ/, a retroflexed post-alveolar slit before or after /a/, /o/ and /u/ while younger speakers use /s/ everywhere.
- /h/ becomes a glottal spirant before /u/, /o/ and /a/, as in /ha•sma/, to keep on yawning.
- /r/ is a voiced trill but when it occurs between vowels it becomes a voiced flap, as for example /yor/ tear (imperative form) and /yura/ to tear (infinitive form).
- /l/ a lateral apical-alveolar, is sometime confused with /r/ as in the word /lileter/ a corn meal.
Morphology
Wintu possesses a sophisticated morphology with some polysynthetic characteristics. The combination of its morphemes into words involves several processes such as suffixation, prefixation, compounding, reduplication and consonant and vocalic ablaut.Nevertheless, the most common process is suffixation, which occurs primarily in verbs.
Vowel Ablaut
The Vowel Ablaut is a change in the height (gradation) of the root-syllable vowels and it affects the vowel quantity.In Wintu, the vowel ablaut occurs only in the mutations of some verb-root vowels (called dissimilation), or in some root-deriving suffixes (assimilation).
Root-vowel dissimilation is conditioned by the height of the vowel in the following syllable, while the suffix vowel assimilation is conditioned by the quantity of the vowel in the preceding syllable.
An example of dissimilation takes place when /e/ and /o/, which occurs only in root syllables, are raised in height when they are preceded by a single consonant and followed by the low vowel /a/ in the next syllable.
Ex. lEla-/lila/ "to transform" and lElu-/lelu/ "transform".
An example of dissimilation takes place when the morphophoneme [V]assimilates completely to the quality of the vowel that precedes in the previous syllable.
Ex.cewVlVlVha=/ceweleleha/ "many to be wide open".
Consonant Ablaut
A small amount of consonant ablaut is also present in Wintu, for example before word juncture /cʼ/ and /b/ change in /p/.Nouns
Substantives are marked for aspect and case.There are two different types of substantives: those formed directly from roots (pronouns, non possessed nouns, kinship terms) and those based on forms of complex derivation from radical and stems (mostly nouns).
Pronouns can be singular, dual, and plural. They have particular suffixes (possessive for instrumental functions and for marking plural humans.) They are also very similar to verbs.
Nouns have a variety of roots, they are an open class, they may show number in rare forms and they do not distinguish possessive from instrumental functions. Nouns can be classified in possessed and non possessed.
The noun is composed of two elements:a stem and a suffix. The stem is usually a root. The suffixes specify numbers, animateness, personification or individuation.
Some nouns have the same stem but have a different generic and particular meaning.
Ex. /tu/ (particular aspect) eye; (generic aspect) face(s).
The suffixes of the nouns can also have different cases: object [um](sedem-coyote), genitive[un](seden), locative [in], instrumental [r], possessive[t], emphatic possessive (reduplication of the last syllable).
Verbs
Verbs are the wider class of words in Wintu. Also several nouns derivate from verbs. The category of verbs has a very sophisticated morphological structure.Pitkin (1964) identifies three stem forms: indicative, imperative and nominal.
- Prefixes: optional in occurrence, when affixed directly to roots are followed by a hyphen juncture.
- Roots: the most part are monosyllabic and with the shape CVC or CV•C. Two important processes are root derivation and reduplication.
- Suffixes
- Root-deriving suffixes (suffixes added to the root): distributive, repetitive, iterative, transitive, stative, privative.
- Stem suffixes (added to the stem form):
- Imperative Stem Suffixation
- 1 position class derivation class=patient suffix, comitative suffix, generic comitative suffix
- 2 position class: reflexive
- 3 position class: causative
- 4 position class: reciprocal, benefactive
- 1 position class inflectional suffixes=warning, passive
- 2 position class. Inflectional =inevitable future, potential temporal simultaneity, jussive, hortative
- 3 position class= negative, dual hortative, necessary temporal anteriority, impersonal interrogative, temporal simultaneity or anteriority, personal object
-
- Indicative Stem Suffixation
- 1 position inflectional suffixes:non visual sensory evidential, hearsay evidential, inferential evidential, experiential evidential, subordinating causal anteriority, approximation
- 2 position inflectional suffixes:first person, second person, dubitative, completive, subordinating temporal anteriority, subordinating unexpected simultaneity
Syntax
The basic word order in Wintu is very flexible. A morphological word is the basic syntactical unit. In some cases a morphological word that is phonemically a single word can be syntactically two different words.A morphological word,can be clitic or non clitic. The clitic word, is always dependent on the non-clitic. The clitic words can be proclitic and postclitic depending on their position. Some morphemic words can be both clitics and full words.
For example: the morphemic word / ʔel/, in, is both a full word in /qewelʔel/, in the house, and a proclitic in /ʔel-qewel/, which have the same meaning.
The largest syntactic unit is the sentence. Sentences are considered a sequences of full words terminated by a period juncture /./. The sentence can be considered a clause if it contains verbs, sentence if it contains nouns. Sentences never contains main verbs.
Clauses can be dependent or independent. This depends on the kind of suffix who forms the verb. Independent verbs take the personal inflectional suffixes while dependent verbs are characterised by the subordinating suffixes{r},{tan},{ʔa], {n},}{so}, and {ta}.
In the sentences the syntactic relationships between full words and clitics are indicated by the word order and by the inflectional and derivational suffixes.
Four types of functions can be distinguished for the sentences: head, attributive, satellite, and conjunction.
The head is usually a noun and it is not dependent on other forms as for example /winthu/Wintu people. The attributive preceded and modify the head as for example in /winthu•n qewelin/ in a Wintu house.
On the other hand, the satellite only occurs in clauses. A satellite could be either the subject or the object of a verb. If the satellite is the subject of the verb, it precedes the verb, as for example /po• m yel-hura/land destroyed, but if the satellite is the object and it is in a dependent clause or a noun-phrase containing a genitive attributive, follows.
For example: /sedet ʔelew'kiyemti•n/ coyote never speaks wisely, or /wayda me•m hina/ a northern flood of water (will) arrive.
External links
- Wintu language overview at the Survey of California and Other Indian LanguagesSurvey of California and Other Indian LanguagesThe Survey of California and Other Indian Languages at the University of California at Berkeley documents, catalogs, and archives the indigenous languages of the Americas...