Kutenai, Algonquian, and the Pacific Northwest from an Areal Perspective*
Kutenai is a language isolate spoken in southeastern British Columbia and adjacent areas in northern Idaho and northwestern Montana. It is immediately to the west of the westernmost Algonquian language, Blackfoot. The other languages adjacent to Kutenai are Interior Salish languages, including Shusw...
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.693.8175 http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/dryer/dryer/DryerAlgonquian2006.pdf |
| Summary: | Kutenai is a language isolate spoken in southeastern British Columbia and adjacent areas in northern Idaho and northwestern Montana. It is immediately to the west of the westernmost Algonquian language, Blackfoot. The other languages adjacent to Kutenai are Interior Salish languages, including Shuswap and Kalispel. Although a language isolate, Kutenai bears a number of resemblances both to Algonquian languages and to Salish languages. The main thesis of this paper is that the resemblances of Kutenai to Algonquian are of a very different nature from the resemblances to Salish. In section 1 of this paper, I summarize some of the resemblances to Algonquian. There are roughly speaking two similarities. The first is that Kutenai has an obviation system that is strikingly similar to the obviation system of Algonquian languages. The second is that Kutenai has a set of words that I call preverbs that resemble preverbs in Algonquian in that they immediately precede the verb, they cover a range of meanings that are not commonly associated with a single word class in other languages, and they are preceded by a number of grammatical proclitics, including pronominal morphemes that code the person though not the number of the subject.1 These resemblances involve quirky features, features that few other languages share.2 The resemblances to Salish, in contrast, involve general typological features, like the presence of glottalized resonants and verb-subject word order, which are found in languages scattered around the world but which are particularly common, not only among Salish languages, but also among other languages in the Pacific Northwest, including Wakashan, Chimakuan, Tsimshian |
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