Analyzability of Nouns in Northwestern California

William Bright

Abstract for invited paper presented at
Conference on Ecology of Language
University of California, Berkeley
February 2004

Three American Indian tribes of northwestern California - Yurok, Hupa, and Karuk - share a nearly uniform culture, but they speak entirely distinct and unrelated languages. This is problematic for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which sees language and culture as closely linked. In an earlier paper, the matter was considered in the light of names for animals in the three languages. It was found that the majority of such names in Yurok consist of unanalyzable single morphemes, while the majority in Hupa are "descriptive" combinations of several morphemes; the Karuk language lies between the two others. A possible explanation was proposed in the historical operation of verbal taboo in the usage of hunters and on the names of the deceased. In the present paper, the analysis is extended to plant terms and to "basic vocabulary", but problems are noted in the latter concept. It is suggested that the patterns presented here form part of the status of native northwestern California not as a linguistic area in a strict sense, but as an ethnolinguistic area.

William Bright is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Anthropology at UCLA, Professor Adjoint of Linguistics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and editor of both Written Language and Literacy and Native American Placenames of the United States. He can be reached at William.Bright@Colorado.EDU.

Colorado Research in Linguistics - Volume 17, Issue 1 - June 2004