Coos affixes in Alsea

Summary

Affix function number of borrowed affixes

Description

Mithun (2000) argues that the ergative case marker q- was borrowed from the Coosan languages bu Alsea, from where ist was subsequently also borrowed in Siuslaw. All three were small language families native to the Oregon coast that are now extinct. Mithun’s data comes almost entirely from work by Frachtenberg (1913; 1914; 1917; 1918; 1920; 1922a; 1922b) and Jacobs (1939; 1940). Each of these language families started out marking ergative case in different ways, Coos with the prefix q-, Alsea with the prefix x̣-, and Siuslaw with ablaut. In Mithun’s analysis, Alsea subsequently borrowed the Coosan ergative prefix q-, which was reported to freely alternate with the native Alsean ergative prefix x̣- on native Alsean stems (Frachtenberg 1918:21). Siuslaw later borrowed the Coosan ergative prefix q- from Alsea, which in Siuslaw is only found on kinship nouns and first and second-person pronouns that may themselves be loanwords from Alsea. Non-borrowed nouns and pronouns are marked for ergative using the native ablaut strategy.

1 case prefix

  • q-, ‘ergative marker’, hybrid formations are claimed by Mithun (2000) to be present but no examples are provided. Examples of q- used in Alsea from Frachtenberg (1918) include q-as ergative-article which alternates with x̣-as ergative-article, and qa-tas ergative-proximate, with the caveat that the roots cannot be conclusively shown to be native to Alsea (Frachtenberg 1918:62–65).