Fwd: Re: Twana

[Liland Brajant ROS']

>>From: Mike Cleven <ironmtn at bigfoot.com>
>>Subject:      Re: Twana
>>Comments: To: David Robertson <drobert at tincan.tincan.org>
>>
>[Dave:]
>>>The T at waduxq are Salishan, not Chinookan -- the "contact" I'm
>[Mike:]
>>I must be mistaken in who I'm thinking of, then; a tribe on the eastern
>>area of Puget Sound, maybe the Bangor area, about whose language and
>>culture little is known, as they were nearly extinct by the time of the
>>"opening up" of the region from the 1840s onwards, and already on the
>>wane at the time of Contact.....

Sounds to me like you're thinking of the group whose name is usually
anglicized somewhere between Chemacum and Chimakum.  I think their base
of operations was a bit NW of where you've got them, more up towards Port
Townsend, but I'm not sure. Their name was taken from them and attached
to its family, which also includes the still not quite extinct Quileute
(the family is called Chemacuan, Chimakuan and waystations between).  I
think it's generally held to be distinct from Chinookan as well as from
Wakashan and Salishan, but perhaps a bit closer to Chinookan than to the
other two, I'm not sure.  Quileute shares (with Twana and Lushootseed,
among others) the absence of nasal consonants. I don't know if this was
true of Chimakum, too, or not.  (In some of these languages, anyway, I
get the impression that the nasal consonants were denasalized quite
recently, perhaps too recently for languages that passed away as early as
Chimakum to share the trait?) I think the Chimakum-speakers' descendants
were among the tribes (along with some Klallams and the Twana) that were
thrown together at Skokomish, but I'm saying this all from my untutored
and all too fallible memory; if I'm off by much somebody please correct me.

lil at nd

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Liland Brajant Ros' * UEA-D, Seatlo Usono * FD Baptismo, AA, US-lit-ro
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