The Tahoe Tongue: Blankets, Blood, and Bone

The first "grammatical" chapter of Jacobsen's Washo grammar - it seems to be a language learning book tradition to treat proper pronunciation as a section before a chapter - discusses possessive prefixes on vowel-initial stems. A complete Washo "word" always begins with a consonant, of which the glottal stop is one. The expected three persons, a grammatical trinity appear here, with a fourth, more neutral, form, but there is no distinction of number. The ways of plurality and duality will be revealed in later chapters, but the idea of plurality seems less central to Washo than English. This, I am given to understand, is fairly common among North American indigenous languages, and certainly many Spanish and Chinese primary language speakers drop the English plural and find context sufficient.

The method by which the language indicates a possessor is prefixation. Thus 'my house' is láŋal, 'your house' is máŋal, and 'his/her/its/their house' is ťáŋal. Since Washo is a language in the real world, naturally this elegant system comes with a few notes. The first person prefix is not l-, but le-, in which the superscript e indicates that the /i/ of a root becomes /e/ after the first person prefix. This 'vowel coloring' will appear in later prefixed forms. What is necessary now is to note that the series 'my blanket, your blanket, his blanket' appears in Washo as lépi?, mípi?, ťípi?, in which the root is 'blanket' ípi?. The other caveat about these forms is that there exists a fourth form, d-, which indicates no particular possessor. The d- prefix, however, does not occur on every form. Vowel-initial stems for words which indicate physical relationships or parts of the body that would identify the species must take ť-. The physical relationship requirement is the clearer of the two categories; íyeš means 'daughter-in-law', and one must be a daughter-in-law in relation to someone else. The latter category can be best illustrated by two roots: ášaŋ, 'blood', and á:daš, 'meat'. The source of blood, prior to the modern era, was not immediately identifiable if the source had departed, but the source of meat could be identified by the meat itself. Rattlesnake tastes different (and worse, so I'm told) than venison. Thus dášaŋ and ťášaŋ are valid forms, but ťá:daš is the only valid form for its root.