Marie-Lucie Tarpent | |
---|---|
Born | November 9, 1941 |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Paris BA Cornell University MA University of Victoria PhD |
Thesis | A Grammar of the Nisgha Language (1987) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Linguist |
Institutions | Coast Mountain College (formerly Northwest Community College) Mount Saint Vincent University |
Main interests | Nisga'a language |
Notable works | "Documenting Alaskan and Neighboring Languages." |
Marie-Lucie Tarpent (born November 9,1941) is a French-born Canadian linguist,formerly an associate professor of linguistics and French at Mount Saint Vincent University [MSVU],Halifax,Nova Scotia,Canada. She is known for her descriptive work on the Nisga'a language,a member of the Tsimshianic language family, [1] [2] and for her proof of the affiliation of the Tsimshianic languages to the Penutian language group. [3]
Marie-Lucie Tarpent was born on November 9,1941,in Tonnerre,France. [2] Tarpent graduated with a licence ès lettres (bachelor's) degree in English and German from University of Paris,Sorbonne in 1963. [4] The following year,she attended the University of Vermont before earning a master's degree in linguistics in 1965 from Cornell University. [2] From 1967–1970 and 1974–1977,Tarpent attended Simon Fraser University. [2] [5] She was on a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council doctoral fellowship in from 1981–1983. [2] In 1983,Tarpent was a part-time instructor at Northwest Community College (now called "Coast Mountain College"). [4] She completed her Doctorate in Linguistics at the University of Victoria in 1989. [4]
In addition to her work on the Nisga'a language,in the 1990s she contributed to the expansion of Harlan I. Smith's early work:Ethnobotany of the Gitksan Indians of British Columbia with details of the Gitksan language. The expanded version was published in 1997. [6] [7] While at the University of Victoria,she published an analysis of the counting systems of the Nishga and Gitskan languages. [8]
In 1998,Tarpent,with linguist Daythal Kendall,presented a paper on the lack of evidence for a close relationship between the Oregon Penutian languages Takelma and Kalapuyan,and therefore for the previously hypothesized "Takelman". [9] [10] In 1999,Tarpent authored a chapter titled ""On the eve of a new paradigm:The current challenges to comparative linguisitics in a Kuhnian perspective." [11] She has contributed significantly to the knowledge on Nisga'a and Southern Tsimshianic languages at Kitasoo/Xaixais First Nation,particularly in regard to the importance of morphemes. [12]
Starting in September 2007,Tarpent was one of ten senior scholars in the field of linguistics to participate in the International Polar Year project "Documenting Alaskan and Neighboring Languages." [4] [13]
A language isolate is a language that has no demonstrable genetic relationship with another language. Basque in Europe, Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, Haida and Zuni in North America, Kanoê in South America, and Tiwi in Australia are all examples of language isolates. The exact number of language isolates is yet unknown due to insufficient data on several languages.
The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas before the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples. Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, while many more are now extinct. The Indigenous languages of the Americas are not all related to each other, instead they are classified into a hundred or so language families, as well as a number of extinct languages that are unclassified due to the lack of information on them.
Athabaskan is a large family of indigenous languages of North America, located in western North America in three areal language groups: Northern, Pacific Coast and Southern. Kari and Potter (2010:10) place the total territory of the 53 Athabaskan languages at 4,022,000 square kilometres (1,553,000 sq mi).
Penutian is a proposed grouping of language families that includes many Native American languages of western North America, predominantly spoken at one time in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California. The existence of a Penutian stock or phylum has been the subject of debate among specialists. Even the unity of some of its component families has been disputed. Some of the problems in the comparative study of languages within the phylum are the result of their early extinction and limited documentation.
The Tsimshian are an Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Their communities are mostly in coastal British Columbia in Terrace and Prince Rupert, and Metlakatla, Alaska on Annette Island, the only reservation in Alaska.
The Kalapuya are a Native American people, which had eight independent groups speaking three mutually intelligible dialects. The Kalapuya tribes' traditional homelands were the Willamette Valley of present-day western Oregon in the United States, an area bounded by the Cascade Range to the east, the Oregon Coast Range at the west, the Columbia River at the north, to the Calapooya Mountains of the Umpqua River at the south.
This is a list of different language classification proposals developed for the Indigenous languages of the Americas. The article is divided into North, Central, and South America sections; however, the classifications do not correspond to these divisions.
Alsea or Alsean was two closely related speech varieties spoken along the central Oregon coast until the early 1950s. They are sometimes taken to be different languages, but it is difficult to be sure given the poor state of attestation; Mithun believes they were probably dialects of a single language.
Charles Marius Barbeau,, also known as C. Marius Barbeau, or more commonly simply Marius Barbeau, was a Canadian ethnographer and folklorist who is today considered a founder of Canadian anthropology. A Rhodes Scholar, he is best known for an early championing of Québecois folk culture, and for his exhaustive cataloguing of the social organization, narrative and musical traditions, and plastic arts of the Tsimshianic-speaking peoples in British Columbia, and other Northwest Coast peoples. He developed unconventional theories about the peopling of the Americas.
Kalapuyan is a small extinct language family that was spoken in the Willamette Valley of Western Oregon, United States. It consists of three languages.
The Tsimshianic languages are a family of languages spoken in northwestern British Columbia and in Southeast Alaska on Annette Island and Ketchikan. All Tsimshianic languages are endangered, some with only around 400 speakers. Only around 2,170 people of the ethnic Tsimshian population in Canada still speak a Tsimshian language; about 50 of the 1,300 Tsimshian people living in Alaska still speak Coast Tsimshian. Tsimshianic languages are considered by most linguists to be an independent language family, with four main languages: Coast Tsimshian, Southern Tsimshian, Nisg̱a’a, and Gitksan.
Takelma is the name of the language that was spoken by the Latgawa and Takelma peoples and the Cow Creek band of Upper Umpqua, in Oregon, USA. The language was extensively described by the German-American linguist Edward Sapir in his graduate thesis, The Takelma Language of Southwestern Oregon (1912). Sapir’s grammar together with his Takelma Texts (1909) are the main sources of information on the language. Both are based on work carried out in 1906 with language consultant Frances Johnson, who lived on to become the last surviving fluent speaker. In 1934, with her death at the age of 99, the language became extinct. An English-Takelma dictionary is currently being created on the basis of printed sources with the aim of reviving the language.
The Gitxsan language, or Gitxsanimaax, is an endangered Tsimshianic language of northwestern British Columbia, closely related to the neighboring Nisga’a language. The two groups are, however, politically separate and prefer to refer to Gitxsan and Nisga'a as distinct languages. According to the Report on the status of B.C First Nations Languages there are 523 fluent speakers, 639 that understand or somewhat speak and 344 learning speakers.
The Laxsgiik is the name for the Eagle "clan" (phratry) in the language of the Tsimshian nation of British Columbia, Canada, and southeast Alaska. It is considered analogous or identical to identically named groups among the neighboring Gitksan and Nisga'a nations and also to lineages in the Haida nation.
Gitxsan are an Indigenous people in Canada whose home territory comprises most of the area known as the Skeena Country in English. Gitksan territory encompasses approximately 35,000 km2 (14,000 sq mi) of land, from the basin of the upper Skeena River from about Legate Creek to the Skeena's headwaters and its surrounding tributaries. Part of the Tsimshianic language group, their culture is considered to be part of the civilization of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, although their territory lies in the Interior rather than on the Coast. They were at one time also known as the Interior Tsimshian, a term which also included the Nisga'a, the Gitxsan's neighbours to the north. Their neighbours to the west are the Tsimshian while to the east the Wetʼsuwetʼen, an Athapaskan people, with whom they have a long and deep relationship and shared political and cultural community.
Lejac Residential School was a Canadian residential school in British Columbia that operated from 1922 to 1976 by the Roman Catholic Church under contract with the Government of Canada.
William Beynon (1888–1958) was a Canadian hereditary chief of the Tsimshian Nation and an oral historian; he served as ethnographer, translator, and linguistic consultant to many anthropologists who studied his people.
John Asher Dunn was an American linguist who created the first academic dictionary and grammar of the Tsimshian language, an American Indian language of northwestern British Columbia and southeast Alaska.
The following is an alphabetical list of topics related to Indigenous peoples in Canada, comprising the First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples.
The Takelma–Kalapuyan languages are a proposed small language family that comprises the Kalapuyan languages and Takelma, which were formerly spoken in the Willamette Valley and the Rogue Valley in Oregon.