32 Lexical Suffixes
Basically, lexical suffixes are suffixes that have nounlike meaning. English suffixes like ‘‑s’ in ‘cats’ and ‘‑ed’ in ‘jumped’ have meanings like ‘plural’ and ‘past tense.’ Compare these with the Klallam lexical suffixes ‑éʔqʷ ‘head’ and ‑sən ‘foot,’ which have more substantial, nounlike meanings. Most of the lexical suffixes refer to body parts, but there are many, like ‑iɬč ‘plant,’ that refer to other important categories. There are almost 100 lexical suffixes in Klallam, but only around 50 are regularly used.
Lexical suffixes are unusual in the languages of the world, but the concept is not particularly difficult. Many of the Klallam words, including some you already know, have lexical suffixes built into them. If you make the effort to learn a dozen or so lexical suffixes, your Klallam vocabulary will increase dramatically.
This section introduces a few of the most common and useful Klallam lexical suffixes. For a complete list of the Klallam lexical suffixes, see the Klallam Dictionary.
These are the lexical suffixes that will be used in these sections. You should learn these now:
‑ákʷtxʷ (‑aʔítxʷ) ‘dollar, round object’
‑áw̓txʷ ‘house, building, room’
‑áy (‑áyə, ‑áʔyə) ‘container’
‑ay ‘people’
‑ə́yəs (‑ʔáʔis) ‘eye’
‑éʔqʷ ‘head’
‑ə́qsən (‑əqs) ‘nose’
‑cəs (‑cs, ‑acs, ‑cís, ‑císən) ‘hand’
‑íkʷs (‑íkʷən) ‘body, of a kind’
‑íɬč (‑əɬč, ‑aɬč, ‑ɬč) ‘plant, bush, tree’
‑ínəs (‑íns, ‑éʔnəs) ‘chest’
‑ɬšáʔ ‘multiple of ten’
‑sən (‑šən) ‘foot, shoe’
‑tən (‑ən) ‘instrument, tool’
‑ucən (‑cən, ‑cín, úc) ‘mouth, edge, language’
Many of the lexical suffixes have alternate pronunciations that depend on which vowel in a word has the stress. The alternate pronunciations in the list above are shown in parentheses.
An important thing to be aware of with lexical suffixes is that in some words, the lexical suffix is preceded by a short suffix, like ‑ʔəɬ, ‑a, ‑aw̓, -ay, -əʔ, or ‑əw, that has no meaning and no known function. These probably had meaning at some time in the distant history of the Klallam language, but now they have none. These are called simply stem extenders. You can find a complete list of them in the English-Klallam index of the Klallam Dictionary (page 717). From there, you can look up stem extender and see the words that use them.
There are three main ways that lexical suffixes are used: they can refer to the object of the verb, they can join with a root to form compound words, and they can be used with numbers for counting particular kinds of things.