SENĆOŦEN: A Grammar of the Saanich Language Main Menu Contents Preface Acknowledgments PART 1 Introduction The organization of this grammar The Place of SENĆOŦEN in the Salishan Language Family Basics of the SENĆOŦEN word Useful phrases Consonants Vowels and Diphthongs Notes on Pronunciation PART 3 SENĆOŦEN Grammatical Patterns 1 Transitive and Intransitive Verbs 2 Past and Future Tense 3 Basic Speech Acts 4 Nouns and Articles 5 Possessive Pronouns 6 Adjectives 7 Basic Word Order 8 The Preposition 9 Serial Verbs 10 Auxiliaries 11 Conjunction: ‘And/with’ and ‘but/without’ 12 No and Not 13 Self and Each Other 14 More Negative Words 15 Questions: ‘Who?,’ ‘What?,’ ‘Someone,’ ‘Something’ 16 Questions: ‘Do what?,’ ‘Say what?,’ and ‘Which one?’ 17 Subordinate Subjects in Questions 18 Questions: ‘Whose?’ 19 Every, All, Any, and Some 20 Comparison 21 Questions: ‘When?’ 22 Numbers 23 Time Expressions 24 Time Prefixes 25 Questions: ‘Where?’ 26 Location Expressions 27 Paths 28 Questions: ‘How?’ and ‘How much?’ 29 Adverbial Expressions 30 Conditional Clauses 31 Should, Must, Ought to, Want to 32 Object Pronouns 33 Passive 34 Strong, Weak, and Zero Stems 35 Participant Roles and Middle Voice 36 Recipient, Beneficiary, and Other Participants 37 Lexical Suffixes 38 Questions: ‘Why?’ 39 Because 40 Cause 41 Collective Plural 42 The Actual Aspect 43 State, Result, and Duration 44 Activity Suffixes 45 Reflexive, Inchoative, and Noncontrol Middle 46 Ȼ Clauses 47 Relative Clauses 48 Speech Act Modifiers 49 Possessed Verbs 50 Summary of Particles with Ȼ 51 So Then ... 52 Reporting Verbs and Direct Quotes 53 Indirect Quotes 54 Verbal Prefixes 55 Nominalizing Prefixes 56 Adverbial Prefixes 57 More Demonstrative Articles 58 Objects of Intent and Emotion 59 More Reduplication Patterns 60 Interjections 61 Politeness Expressions 62 Rare Prefixes and Suffixes 63 A Fully Annotated Text 64 Texts to Annotate Appendix A: Technical Description of SENĆOŦEN Sounds Appendix B: SENĆOŦEN Pronouns Appendix C: Demonstrative Articles Appendix D: SENĆOŦEN Kin Terms Appendix E: Index to Technical Linguistic Topics Appendix F: Vocabulary Bibliography SENĆOŦEN Dictionary Basic SENĆOŦEN Dictionary without root and affix indexes

PART 2 The SENĆOŦEN Alphabet and Sounds

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The SENĆOŦEN alphabet was developed in the 1970’s by the late Dave Elliott, Sr., who was a native speaker of SENĆOŦEN from W̱JOȽEȽP. He realized that the language was endangered and that it was urgent that the remaining fluent speakers write down as much as they could, then teach it to the younger generations. His goal was to make a writing system that was logical, easy to learn, and easy to type. He wanted a system where one symbol represented one sound, so there would be no ‘sh’, ‘ch’, or ‘th’ as is used in English and some other Salishan languages. He also wanted a system where there would be no unusual characters like θ, ŋ, or ƛ̕ as in the standard phonetic alphabet used for many native North American languages.

Dave Elliot recognized that all of the W̱SÁNEĆ people of younger generations were growing up speaking English, and they could all read and write English. So, to make it easier for the younger people to learn the writing, he based his alphabet on the English writing system. He taught the alphabet to other SENĆOŦEN speaking elders, who began teaching it to younger generations. The alphabet has been highly successful. It achieves Dave Elliott’s goal of being easy to learn and use. It also mostly achieves his goal of one symbol for one sound. While there are no cases of two symbols for one sound, like ‘th,’ the alphabet does contain cases of one symbol for two sounds. See the section on vowels and diphthongs for details.

This is the SENĆOŦEN alphabetical order:

A Á Ⱥ B C Ć Ȼ D E H I Í J K ₭ Ḵ Ḱ L Ƚ M N Ṉ O P Q S Ś T Ŧ Ⱦ Ṯ U W W̱ X X̱ Y

The following describes the sounds (phonemes) represented by the letters of the alphabet. You can hear all of these example words in this section. These are recordings of W̱SÁNEĆ elders Elsie Claxton, Chris Paul, Ivan Morris, Manson Pelkey, Anne Jimmy, Ray Sam, Mary Jack, Lou Claxton, Lavina Charles, and Helen Jack. See Appendix A for a technical description of the sounds and their International Phonetic Alphabet equivalents.
 

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  1. Consonants
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