Wintu language

Wintu is an extinct Wintuan language which was spoken by the Wintu people of Northern California.
It was the northernmost member of the Wintun family of languages.
The Wintuan family of languages was spoken in the Sacramento River Valley and in adjacent areas up to the Carquinez Strait of San Francisco Bay.
Wintun is a branch of the hypothetical Penutian language phylum or stock of languages of western North America, more closely related to four other families of Penutian languages spoken in California: Maiduan, Miwokan, Yokuts, and Costanoan.
The Wintu were in contact also with adjacent speakers of Hokan languages such as Southeastern, Eastern, and Northeastern Pomo; Athabaskan languages such as Wailaki and Hupa; Yukian languages such as Yuki and Wappo; and other Penutian languages such as Miwok, Maidu, Yokuts, and Saclan.
Besides these contiguous languages surrounding the Wintun area wider contacts with speakers of Russian, Spanish, and English.
As of 2011, Headman Marc Franco of the Winnemem Wintu has been working with the Indigenous Language Institute on revitalization of the Winnemem Wintu language.
Phonology.
Consonants.
Wintu has 28 (to 30) consonants:
Vowels.
Wintu has 10 (or 11) vowels:
Syllable structure.
Segmental phonemes require obligatorily a single onset consonant. The rhyme is usually composed of a vowel nucleus of a long or a short vowel optionally followed by a single consonant. The syllabic canon is
Some examples of a generic syllable structure are:
Consonant clusters result only from conjoined closed syllables. For example, clusters of consonants occur when a syllable ending in a consonant is followed in the same word by another syllable.
Some examples of consonant clusters are:
Vowels may be long, but sequences of vowels do not occur.
Stress.
Syllable stress in Wintu are predictable components of two junctures hyphen/-/ and plus/+/.
There are four phonemic junctures ranked by their magnitude: Plus/+/, hyphen/-/, comma/,/ and period/./.
Syllables are determined by the presence or absence of vowels and semi-vowels. Light syllables contain short vowels. Heavy syllables contain short vowels followed by a semi-vowel. Extra-heavy syllables contain long vowels. The prominent syllable of a phonemic word is always the first, unless the second syllable is heavier, in which case the second syllable is stressed.
In the primary stress the greater is the magnitude of the preceding juncture, the greater is the intensity of the stress.
The secondary stress, on the other hand, occurs when a heavy syllable follows the prominent syllable and varies in intensity.
The weakest stress occurs when a syllable is not stressed and follows immediately after a phonemic juncture.
Like the plus juncture, the hyphen juncture affects the location of higher pitch and stress. But instead of conditioning the location of the syllables like the plus juncture, the hyphen shifts the pitch and the stress. The Hyphen juncture is the juncture with the least magnitude, being the only one occurring within words (for example, following certain prefixes and preceding some auxiliaries and enclitics).
It has two phonetic features: a fully realised pause accompanied or preceded by glottal stricture.
It is the juncture with the greatest magnitude and it has four phonetic features:
Period juncture delimits phonemic sentences.
It consists of very high pitch and particularly heavy stress.
Phonological processes.
A vast number of phonological processes occur in the Wintu language.
For example, /k'/ becomes prevelar before /i/ and /e/ but it is velar before /ʔa/ and it is backed before /u/ and /o/.
In a similar way, the glottalized velar /q'/ is pronounced with more friction at the point of articulation as /q'ˣ/. It is in a frontal position before /i/ and /e/ and becomes backed with all the other vowels.
Morphology.
Wintu possesses a sophisticated morphology with some polysynthetic characteristics. The combination of its morphemes into words involves several processes such as suffixation, prefixation, compounding, reduplication and consonant and vocalic ablaut.
Nevertheless, the most common process is suffixation, which occurs primarily in verbs.
Vowel ablaut.
The Vowel Ablaut is a change in the height (gradation) of the root-syllable vowels and it affects the vowel quantity.
In Wintu, the vowel ablaut occurs only in the mutations of some verb-root vowels (called dissimilation), or in some root-deriving suffixes (assimilation).
Root-vowel dissimilation is conditioned by the height of the vowel in the following syllable, while the suffix vowel assimilation is conditioned by the quantity of the vowel in the preceding syllable.
An example of dissimilation takes place when /e/ and /o/, which occurs only in root syllables, are raised in height when they are preceded by a single consonant and followed by the low vowel /a/ in the next syllable.
Ex. lEla-/lila/ "to transform" and lElu-/lelu/ "transform".
An example of dissimilation takes place when the morphophoneme [V]assimilates completely to the quality of the vowel that precedes in the previous syllable.
Ex.cewVlVlVha=/ceweleleha/ "many to be wide open".
Consonant ablaut.
A small amount of consonant ablaut is also present in Wintu, for example before word juncture /cʼ/ and /b/ change in /p/.
Nouns.
Substantives are marked for aspect and case.
There are two different types of substantives: those formed directly from roots (pronouns, non possessed nouns, kinship terms) and those based on forms of complex derivation from radical and stems (mostly nouns).
Pronouns can be singular, dual, and plural. They have particular suffixes (possessive for instrumental functions and for marking plural humans.) They are also very similar to verbs.
Nouns have a variety of roots, they are an open class, they may show number in rare forms and they do not distinguish possessive from instrumental functions. Nouns can be classified in possessed and non possessed.
The noun is composed of two elements:a stem and a suffix. The stem is usually a root. The suffixes specify numbers, animateness, personification or individuation.
Some nouns have the same stem but have a different generic and particular meaning.
Ex. /tu/ (particular aspect) eye; (generic aspect) face(s).
The suffixes of the nouns can also have different cases: object [um](sedem-coyote), genitive[un](seden), locative [in], instrumental [r], possessive[t], emphatic possessive (reduplication of the last syllable).
Verbs.
Verbs are the wider class of words in Wintu. Also several nouns derivate from verbs. The category of verbs has a very sophisticated morphological structure.
Pitkin (1964) identifies three stem forms: indicative, imperative and nominal.
Syntax.
The basic word order in Wintu is very flexible. A morphological word is the basic syntactical unit. In some cases a morphological word that is phonemically a single word can be syntactically two different words.
A morphological word,can be clitic or non clitic. The clitic word, is always dependent on the non-clitic. The clitic words can be proclitic and postclitic depending on their position. Some morphemic words can be both clitics and full words.
For example: the morphemic word / ʔel/, in, is both a full word in /qewelʔel/, in the house, and a proclitic in /ʔel-qewel/, which have the same meaning.
The largest syntactic unit is the sentence. Sentences are considered a sequences of full words terminated by a period juncture /./. The sentence can be considered a clause if it contains verbs, sentence if it contains nouns. Sentences never contains main verbs.
Clauses can be dependent or independent. This depends on the kind of suffix who forms the verb. Independent verbs take the personal inflectional suffixes while dependent verbs are characterised by the subordinating suffixes{r},{tan},{ʔa], {n},}{so}, and {ta}.
In the sentences the syntactic relationships between full words and clitics are indicated by the word order and by the inflectional and derivational suffixes.
Four types of functions can be distinguished for the sentences: head, attributive, satellite, and conjunction.
The head is usually a noun and it is not dependent on other forms as for example /winthu/Wintu people. The attributive preceded and modify the head as for example in /winthuꞏn qewelin/ in a Wintu house.
On the other hand, the satellite only occurs in clauses. A satellite could be either the subject or the object of a verb. If the satellite is the subject of the verb, it precedes the verb, as for example /poꞏ m yel-hura/land destroyed, but if the satellite is the object and it is in a dependent clause or a noun-phrase containing a genitive attributive, follows.
For example: /sedet ʔelew'kiyemtiꞏn/ coyote never speaks wisely, or /wayda meꞏm hina/ a northern flood of water (will) arrive.