• Source: Cayuse language

Cayuse is an extinct unclassified language once spoken by the Cayuse people (autonym: Liksiyu) of Oregon.




Classification


The first written vocabulary of the Cayuse language was published by Horatio Hale in 1846. As a member of the United States Exploring Expedition, he had visited the Pacific Northwest in 1841. Missionary Marcus Whitman was credited for providing "much valuable information" about the Cayuse people and other natives nearby Waiilatpu. In his Waiilatpuan language family, Hale put Cayuse and the Molala language as the sole members.
In 1910 or 1911, Stephens Savage, a Molala speaker, had told Leo Frachtenberg that the following five words were identical in both Cayuse and Molala:

In 1929 Edward Sapir grouped Cayuse with Molala as part of the Waiilatpuan branch of the Plateau Penutian languages.
Bruce Rigsby reexamined the Cayuse-Molala lexical pairs provided by Hale in 1969 and found only a tenth to be potentially related terms. Whitman was credited as the origin of the Waiilatpuan linguistic family. The words presented by Savage were concluded by Rigsby to likely be loanwords. Upon his review of extant Molala and Cayuse linguistic data, Rigsby concluded "I do not see how the two languages could have possibly been mutually intelligible."




Pronouns


Cayuse pronouns listed by Hale:

Cayuse pronouns listed by McBean:




Verbs


Cayuse verb paradigms documented by Henry W. Henshaw:

'hungry'

'thirsty'




Vocabulary


Limited lexical items in Cayuse have been collected by Rigsby, Melville Jacobs, Verne Ray, and Theodore Stern. Their Cayuse informants had highly limited knowledge of the language and were more fluent in either Sahaptin or Nez Perce.




= Hale

=
A word list of Cayuse with nearby 200 lexical items was documented by Hale. The word list has been reproduced below.



Nouns




Adjectives




Pronouns




Adverbs and others




Numerals




Verbs





References






= Bibliography

=




External links



Cayuse Indian Language (Waiilatpu)
OLAC resources in and about the Cayuse language

Kata Kunci Pencarian:

• Bahasa di Amerika Serikat
• Cayuse language
• Cayuse people
• Cayuse
• Molala language
• Cayuse War
• Marcus Whitman
• List of unclassified languages according to the Ethnologue
• Cayuse horse
• Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Plateau
• Whitman massacre