For many years, and initially somehow by mere chance, I have been fascinated by the Native American languages of the Pacific Northwest. Being so completely different from the Austronesian languages which have been "my life" for so many years, I felt a real challenge of approaching a world of ejective stops, voiceless laterals and vowel-less roots, literally twisting my Austronesian tongue. One particular language captured my attention, viz. Miluk Coos (or Miluk), since it was quite well-documented by a good number of texts collected by the linguist-anthropologist Melville Jacobs, and at the same time had not been subject to any detailed descriptive research, at least by 2008 when I started studying the Melville corpus (Coos Narrative and Ethnographic Texts / Coos Myth Texts, University of Washington Publications in Anthropology, vol. 8. Seattle, WA: The University of Washington).
Miluk was spoken by a relatively small ethnic group living along the Coquille river and at Coos Bay in Oregon, in close contact with Hanis Coos speakers and ethnic groups speaking Athabascan languages. Miluk quicky vanished as a spoken language in the first half of the 20th century, due to the turmoil of displacement as a result of the genocidal relocation policy of the US government and army in the late 19th century. It is Jacobs' great merit of describing the loss not just of a language, but of a complete culture, with apparent empathy, which is a particular trait also felt in his text collections from other Native American languages.
Miluk was spoken by a relatively small ethnic group living along the Coquille river and at Coos Bay in Oregon, in close contact with Hanis Coos speakers and ethnic groups speaking Athabascan languages. Miluk quicky vanished as a spoken language in the first half of the 20th century, due to the turmoil of displacement as a result of the genocidal relocation policy of the US government and army in the late 19th century. It is Jacobs' great merit of describing the loss not just of a language, but of a complete culture, with apparent empathy, which is a particular trait also felt in his text collections from other Native American languages.
Genetically, Miluk Coos has long been grouped together with Hanis Coos as one of the two Coosan languages, mostly based on a large number of lexical agreements. Within the framework of the larger classification schemes of Native American languages, Coosan is placed together with Alsea and Siuslaw in the Coast Oregon branch of Penutian. The Penutian hypothesis, which groups together a number of languages and language groups along the American West Coast, is still disputed, and the inclusion of Miluk Coos within Penutian is at best speculative at the current stage.
Only recently, I stumbled across the 2012 dissertation by Christopher S. Doty on the genetic relation of Miluk (http://www.csdoty.com/resources/Doty-Dissertation.pdf). I read it with great excitement: in the first place to see how far Doty's analysis would agree or differ with mine, but also with an anxious feeling that the results of my amateur research might simply become obsolete in the light of a full treatment by an academic scholar. As a matter of fact, Doty's dissertation gives an excellent first impression of Miluk structure, with many features for the first time being correctly decribed. Yet, there are several points where I still believe the I can contribute to a better understanding of Miluk grammar, even by using this non-academic platform to distribute my results.
In this blog, I want to present my research results on Miluk as a work in progress, focussing on several aspects of phonology, morphology and syntax. Hopefully and if time allows, I will later be able to arrange my material in a format that is appropriate to appear as an article in a peer-revised journal. But even before that stage, I hope that my small pieces presented here nevertheless will be of interest to fellow linguists.
Next: Phonology >>
Only recently, I stumbled across the 2012 dissertation by Christopher S. Doty on the genetic relation of Miluk (http://www.csdoty.com/resources/Doty-Dissertation.pdf). I read it with great excitement: in the first place to see how far Doty's analysis would agree or differ with mine, but also with an anxious feeling that the results of my amateur research might simply become obsolete in the light of a full treatment by an academic scholar. As a matter of fact, Doty's dissertation gives an excellent first impression of Miluk structure, with many features for the first time being correctly decribed. Yet, there are several points where I still believe the I can contribute to a better understanding of Miluk grammar, even by using this non-academic platform to distribute my results.
In this blog, I want to present my research results on Miluk as a work in progress, focussing on several aspects of phonology, morphology and syntax. Hopefully and if time allows, I will later be able to arrange my material in a format that is appropriate to appear as an article in a peer-revised journal. But even before that stage, I hope that my small pieces presented here nevertheless will be of interest to fellow linguists.
Next: Phonology >>
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