Talk:Salishan languages/Archive 1

Sinixt? ("Lakes")
I'd add Sinixt to the list of languages but I'm not sure where it goes; in Okanagan-Colville I think. It was the language spoken in the Arrow Lakes but that nation is officially extinct in Canada, although I understand there are some survivors/inheritors among the Colville or Sanpoil or one of the neighbouring US tribes. Might be considered a dialect of one of those, or of Okanagan. BTW the Nicola Valley name for the Okanagan people there is Syilx (or is it Siylx?)Skookum1 20:55, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Okanagan language
Will one of you linguists please write this? It's a big gap in the BC languages coverage in Wikipedia; almost everything else is in there, including several subdialects of Carrier, but there's nothing on Okanagan language (Siylx'tsn by one spelling I've seen), nor on the Okanagan people, either stateside or in the King George Illahee.Skookum1 19:45, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Consistency in links!
I just noticed the most recent change:
 * Columbian (a.k.a. Columbia, Nxaʔamxcín)
 * Columbian''' (a.k.a. Columbia, Nxaʔamxcín)

...and remarked on it for two reasons; one, I've never hear of a people or language named "Columbian" (and I thought I knew my stuff, for a layman) and the other is that the link is not to a language but to a government. Other links are to ethno/people articles, or individual community articles; and in some cases the breakdown is by political affiliation/community, and not by dialect; is Katzie a different dialect of Halqemeylem from Kwantlen, for example, and "Tait" links to that family name; all it is in an Indian Reserve name near Chilliwack, ditto Skway. The links should be to language articles only if they're supposed to represent dialects within the language(s); fine to have a list of which communities/nations speak/use/are associated with which language (or languages, with multi-tribal organizations/agencies/reservations/tribal councils); but a clear delineation should be going on here between language articles/links and those concerning the peoples/communities. This means a lot more articles, because there's language articles needing doing...."false links" give the impression, also, that such articles already exist; better to have redlinks to indicate that they don't...Skookum1 19:45, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Also, care should be taken to use the native-preferred spellings, vs the linguistics-preferred ones; I have no idea how Nxaʔamxcín would come out, especially if it's extinct, but in the case of Nlaka'pamux their version doesn't look like the one linguists prefer and which is listed here; this gets tanglier when it's an issue of this being English-language Wikipedia vs a wikipedia in any other language (see Talk:Squamish Nation and its corresponding articles linked there, or Kwakiutl language vs the local controversy about whether a certain main article should be Kwakiutl/Kwakawkwa'wakw]], with the implicit debate in that as to whether "Kwakiutl language" is a valid name for an article, or it should be "Kwak'wala" (precedents for the latter case exisst with Nuxalk language and St'at'imcets, instead of "Bella Coola language" and "Lillooet language", for instance - and St'at'imcets isn't even close to traditional anglicizations of "Stlatliumh" and "Stl'atl'imx" so is an imposition of a non-English orthographic system in English. Anyway, just a concern here about preferred forms vs what linguists prefer; I know linguists compiled this page (Hi User:Ish Ishwar, and User:billposer, hoping you'll weigh in on this) but "consistency" across the non-linguistics First Nations/Native American articles is what I'm on about here, and not just abhout titling; as also with the consistency in the links raised in the paragraph above.Skookum1 19:53, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Salish language redirects here
And maybe not-so-obviously shouldn't; properly "Salish" is the name of the Flathead people; currently their article is the Confederated Tribes of the Flathead and Kootenai Nations article, but it should be broken into ethno articles and there's no separate Salish language aka Flathead language article. All this by way of a discussion concerning the inappropriateness of the name "Salish Sea" for the Georgia Strait-Puget Sound Basin, cf Talk:Strait of Georgia. "Salish" is an ethnographer's/linguist's term that has entered the missconception of the public in thinking there is such a thing as a "Coast Salish nation" or a Coast Salish "ethnicity"; there are individual ethnicities within it, but the Salish Sea discussion has made me realize the actual inappropriateness of the term, as it's originally/properly for the Flathead, and of course simply means "the people" in that language; the relative equivalents here would be the Halkomelem and Lushootseed and North Straits Salish equivalent; of course there is no common term between those languages, either for the term "the people" (and then would mean only themselves, not their neighbours who also, in their own language, call themslves, "the people"), nor for the body of water under name-dispute elsewhere. I know these are impracticable thoughts on the terminology, and "Salishan languages" and "Coast Salish" et al are here to stay; but just a reminder that it's much as misnomer as "Asia" is for China and Japan (Asia originally meant Anatolia and Persia). With all the obsession about linguistic/political correctness, e.g. the change from Kwakiutl to Kwakwaka'wakw and the corrected inapplicability of "Northern Kwakiutl" to the Central Coast Wakashan peoples (Heiltsuk, Owekeeno, Haisla), that the inapporpriateness of "Salish" to coastal peoples, indeed to all non-Flathead peoples, would have "come up by now". Anyway, if there's anyone out there capable of writing a Salish language/Flathead language item, even its outline/stub, please do so.Skookum1 20:47, 12 April 2007 (UTC)