Talk:Quileute language

Morphology

Mithun drew her description of these special forms in Quileute from Frachtenberg (1920, her 1920b), although she mistakenly attributes them to "Frachtenberg (1917)"; her bibliography includes Frachtenberg 1917a, 1917b, 1920a, 1920b, and a half-dozen others, but no "1917".

The phonological representations in § Morphology appear here filtered through several systems of notation: the one Frachtenberg (1920) used in his article that Mithun (1999) drew on; the one that Mithun translated his notation into; and the IPA that is used in this article, in the Phonology section as well as this one. I am responsible for this second stage of translation, relying on both authors' textual descriptions as well as Americanist notation.

Frachtenberg	Mithun	IPA
ʟ	ɬ	ɬ
ts!	c̓	t͡sʼ
s	s	s
tc	č	t͡ʃ
k	k	k
x̣	x̣	χ

--Thnidu (talk) 23:35, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

Prefix system

"Quileute features an interesting prefix system that changes depending on the physical characteristics of the person being spoken of, the speaker, or rarely the person being addressed.[7] When speaking of a cross-eyed person, /ɬ-/ is prefixed to each word. When speaking of a hunchback, the prefix /t͡sʼ-/ is used. Additional prefixes are also used for short men (/s-/), "funny people" (/t͡ʃk-/), and people that have difficulty walking (/t͡ʃχ-/).[8][7]"

This seems dubious at best, considering the primary source is from 1920. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Auvon (talk) 00:49, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

It seemed extremely dubious to me as well when I initially read it, but I tracked down the Mithun source, and to my very great surprise found that it actually does report this phenomenon (although that's not to say that the description is necessarily accurate, I suppose). Mithun compares it (as far as I can remember; I read it over a year ago) to the use of lisping in contemporary English to (offensively) mock a gay person when quoting or even discussing them, regardless of whether that person has a lisp. It may be that this feature of Quileute does exist, but is perhaps very marginal, like Mithun's English comparandum. RH 22:09, 14 July 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.162.0.41 (talk)