00:06 [Sahaptin] ‘September’. [Sahaptin] ‘1993’. [Sahaptin] This is September 1993, and uh, the material that I’m recording here today is uh, a new exercise that you might be able to use with some of the vocabulary that you have accumulated. I know I have handed out an awful lot of vocabulary and I had instructed my students to take good care of those handouts that they get and to protect it and not get too careless because it’s your personal property. I have lost a lot of material when people borrow things from me and they never bring it back and when you put in a lot of work on something and someone just walks off with it and never returns with it, and this is why I’m beginning to keep copies of everything I do, which is a good idea if somebody wants to borrow something from you, make a copy for them, don’t give them your material because you may not get it back. So you keep your original copy that’s your own and give them a copy. And make sure they are using it for a good purpose because  a lot of times they are asking you maybe for somebody else and if this person doesn’t have enough respect for you to come and ask you themselves then don’t give it away. Because it is your own property, it’s just like your shirt, your sweater, your jacket, you don’t give that away unless you have a good reason like somebody might be really cold and you feel sorry for them you might give them your coat. That’s the way I do it. I feel like my students really need this material, if they are my students. But I don’t go around handing it out to everyone around the reservation, a lot of times they reject this information they don’t want to see it written down, and I respect that. I respect the fact that if they know how to speak Indian, they know their culture, they know their religion, and they are teaching it to their children themselves, at home they are training them, then they don’t want anyone to come in and tell them that it should be written down if they are doing it themselves on their own way, I respect that. i never force anyone to write things down. If they volunteer to do something, I really appreciate it and I do the same thing. Unfortunately I’ve been asked by other tribes to go to their reservation to revive and develop a writing system for their language. Unfortunately, when a person is unable to leave their home and just go over to another reservation and work there for heaven knows how many years, you know, sometimes the linguists can spend at least five years in one area, developing this kind of system for an Indian language. Like Dr. Bruce Rigsby, probably spent more than five years. He didn’t live here but he kept coming back in the summer and any free time he had he would come here and work with Alex Saluskin going around the valley talking to elders who volunteered some of their knowledge to put together this practical Indian language alphabet that we have. And they never had time to really actually complete it. Dr Rigsby moved to Australia and Mr. Saluskin got sick, but he knew that I already knew how to read and write the language, the Yakima language. So he asked me to go back to college, and get a degree in anthropology so that I could complete his work, well not his work, well his part of his work and go around to talk to elders around here to accumulate all those words. Although Alex Saluskin was trilingual he could speak Sailish, he could speak all of the Yakima dialects, because he used to be our tribal translator/interpreter like I am today. But he still felt like they should have input form as many tribal people on this reservation as possible so that they felt comfortable that it was accurate, and some of the words that you see in the list, you might say are inadequate, let’s see he was a native speaker and Dr. Rigsby could speak and understand and the people who gave the words or even if Alex developed them himself or when as person volunteered a word, they knew the language.

8:27 – That’s why the explanations are so sketchy. However Dr. Rigsby tried to define them by saying whether they were transitives or verb intransitives or if they were nouns he wanted to make sure they were a various kind of a species, and I think he tried his best to make it as clear as possible, but when you go over it and you’re not a speaker, I imagine you have a lot of questions. So that’s why this class is taking each individual word and clarifying it for you as much as possible. And I think the reason I’m so inclined to writing is I want you to use those verbs, use those nouns and pronouns, use those adjectives, use the adverbs so that you know what they are when you look at them in the dictionary, and if you have problems with spelling you can look it up and that’s what the dictionary is for, is to help you to spell and find out where the accent marks, how you say the syllables and things like that. But they are just a list of words, what you need to learn how to do is how to put these words together so that they make sense. Put them into little short sentences, then work into more paragraphs.

10:20 – I know that when I was teaching at the Wapato high school, my junior and senior high school students were learning how to develop sentences and they learned how to identify the parts of speech and structure of the language with a new method I developed for teaching by using symbols but we haven’t gotten to that point yet. What I’ve put together here, is to help you put these single words together with a verb and an adjective. So what I’m going to do right now is read a list. I’m not going to read the english word for it. Well I guess I better, since you folks are all beginners. I will read the vocabulary list for. Number one is [Sahaptin] , that means ‘man’. [Sahaptin] is ‘boy’. [Sahaptin] you know what [Sahaptin]  is, [Sahaptin]  is ‘paper’ and [Sahaptin]  makes it into a noun and that means a ‘postman’ or a ‘postwoman’. You know the person that takes care of your mail. Number four is [Sahaptin], everybody knows what [Sahaptin] is. Number five is [Sahaptin], a [Sahaptin] is a ‘child’, [Sahaptin] is an ‘infant’. Number six, [Sahaptin], that means something that’s ‘large’ or ‘big’. Number seven is [Sahaptin], you have your instructor repeat these words for you. [Sahaptin] That means something that’s ‘small’. Number eight is [Sahaptin], that means ‘fat’, it is the condition of being ‘fat’ or ‘obese’. Nine, number nine is [Sahaptin]. Now don’t confuse this with ‘longhouse’, in this particular case, [Sahaptin] would mean ‘tall’. It’s used both ways, it’s used length ways and upward. [Sahaptin]. ‘Neat, tall house’, [Sahaptin] ‘tall man’. Number ten. [Sahaptin] That’s your “hard back K”. You have to feel that sound way down deep in your throat and your Adams apple should be vibrating. Put your hand over your Adams apple and say [Sahaptin].  Now you should have felt that way back in your throat. That’s the condition of being ‘skinny’. Alright. There’s another word that’s supposed to be [Sahaptin]  but it’s not in here. [Sahaptin]  that’s “I” “W” “A”, a singular present tense verb, ‘to be’. That’s is. [Sahaptin]  ‘is’. [Sahaptin] That’s a negative, ‘is not’’. [Sahaptin] Is a past tense, ‘was’. [Sahaptin] Don’t forget to pronounce that “I”. [Sahaptin], is ‘happening’. Now these are little root verbs that I want you to work with. Now on the working problem, under noun you have [Sahaptin], under verbs you have [Sahaptin] , on your adjectives side, [Sahaptin]. Now in your first lesson, select a noun in your noun list and then use the verb, present tense singular verb. [Sahaptin]  You’re talking about only one person so you use this present tense singular verb and select and adjective on the right side and develop a sentence. Now here’s an example, I selected [Sahaptin]  ‘postman’, [Sahaptin]  ‘is’, [Sahaptin]  ‘tall’, ‘the postman is tall’. Develop five sentences with the same pattern until you have used up all of the nouns, using the same singular present tense verb [Sahaptin]  and different adjectives until they are all used up. Now, practice writing these sentences, reading them and pronouncing those hard and soft letters. Now the next step, your second lesson is to select the verb [Sahaptin]  and do the same thing and develop more sentences. For your fourth lesson, select [Sahaptin]. If you were to say [Sahaptin], ‘the woman is happening to become fat’, you know? [Sahaptin]  The [Sahaptin]  is happening to become short for some reason. That might be rather awkward but I want you, by the time you get to [Sahaptin] I’ll be back. So concentrate on [Sahaptin], maybe ought to just disregard [Sahaptin] , because I have a few things I wanted to say about that. By this time you’ll have learned to develop sentences in the present, negative, past tense using simple noun, verbs, and how to combine the adjectives to describe then noun. The structure is the same as it is in English, the important lesson will be how to say words and how to develop sentences.