The Southern Wakashan Project

John Stonham



This project encompasses language data from the three Southern Wakashan languages, Nuuchahnulth, Ditidaht and Makah. In each language directory, there will be links to texts in the respective languages collected by linguists of the respective languages and analyzed, translated and presented by Stonham. The format of the texts will be discussed below under Format.



Nuuchahnulth  
The Nuuchahnulth texts come from the fieldwork notebooks of Edward Sapir, gathered between 1910 and 1922, at a time when there were still many monolingual speakers of the language. The texts are drawn principally from the Tsishaath dialect, supplemented bysome in neighbouring Hupachasath, Ucluelet, and other central varieties.

The Sapir texts are supplemented by a large number of texts supplied to Sapir by Alex Thomas, a bilingual speaker of Tsishaath trained by Sapir to collect materials. His contributions are nearly as extensive as those of Sapir.




Ditidaht The Ditidaht texts were collected by Morris Swadesh and Mary Haas Swadesh in the summer of 1931. They are provided by two speakers from Pachena, Peter Batlisqawa and Jasper Peter.




Makah The texts in Makah were collected by William H. Jacobsen, Jr. over a period from 1962 until the late 1970s, from a number of speakers of the language, all bilingual in English. This constitutes a smaller number of texts from a later time period, but is the best available record of the third Southern Wakashan language.



Format 
Each text is organized by numbered sentence in the order of the original recording. Below the original sentence in phonemic transcription are the following aligned lines:

1.
Original text

2.
Morpheme-by-morpheme analysis of the sentence

3.
Gloss of each morpheme

4.
Word by word translation according to the morphemes

5.
Free translation of the sentence

Note:
Notes association with the specific content of the sentence, where available.