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Re: Ethnologue exercise

From:J Matthew Pearson <pearson@...>
Date:Tuesday, August 29, 2000, 18:47
Here's my entry. A word about place names, since Tokana is spoken in an alternate
history timeline:
'Native' place names are given first, followed by their equivalents in our universe in
angled brackets.

TOKANA (SUL TOKANA) [TOK] Estimated 30,000 speakers along the northwest coast of Nala
<North America>.
Territory ranges from the Ksoleu <Quileute> river in the north to the Hinan <Nehalem> river in the
south, and from the coast as far inland as the Kemo <Cowlitz> river and the southern
tip of Sutu Tohmi
<Puget Sound>, with major settlements along the Moson <Chehalis> river, the Ahkasiha
<lower Columbia
River>, and the Sutu Kes drainage basin <Willapa Bay>. Independent branch of the
Kman-Tokana family,
with extensive borrowings from neighbouring unrelated languages (Tshashal, Hbana, Auari, etc.).
Dialects: COASTAL TOKANA, INLAND TOKANA (RIVER TOKANA), OUTIKFE (the latter, spoken
along the southern
shore of Ahkasiha, is highly conservative, and sometimes classified as a separate
language). Typology:
Limited phonemic inventory, head-initial, suffixing, XVSO (X = topic) word order,
active [ergative] case
system, no agreement. The Tokana: Sedentary hunter-gatherer + small-scale
horticulture, arboriculture,
timber-harvesting; animist religion; kinship-based social structure, prestige/concensus-based power
structure; extensive trade networks with neighbouring peoples.