California Language Archive

Tras el rastro de la lluvia: 'mixtec' en el Archivo de Lenguas de California

2026-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

En español / In English

Como mencionó Andrew Garrett en la primerísima entrada de este blog: «cada elemento archivado en el Survey of California and Other Indian Languages cuenta una historia». En esta serie de entradas, quiero compartir con ustedes un poco sobre las historias de las distintas colecciones bajo el nombre de Mixtec en el catálogo del Archivo de Lenguas de California (California Language Archive).

El mixteco o Tu’un Savi pertenece a la familia lingüística otomangue y su territorio histórico-cultural se encuentra en los estados de Oaxaca, Puebla y Guerrero. En lugar de ser una sola lengua uniforme, el mixteco es famoso entre los lingüistas por su diversidad interna (Mak & Longacre, 1960; Arana, 1960; Holland, 1959; Jiménez Moreno, 1962). Para poner en perspectiva la diversidad interna del mixteco, las investigaciones de Kathryn Josserand (1983) señalan doce áreas dialectales mutuamente ininteligibles entre sí. Hoy en día, incluso con más de medio millón de hablantes de mixteco residiendo en territorio mexicano, el alcance del idioma se extiende más allá de las fronteras mexicanas. Impulsados por la necesidad económica, el pueblo mixteco y otras comunidades indígenas comenzaron a migrar hacia el norte en la década de 1940, estableciendo finalmente redes de diáspora a lo largo de California (Fox & Rivera-Salgado, 2004; Varese & Escárcega, 2004). A medida que crecían estas conexiones entre Oaxaca y el Área de la Bahía, Luciano Cortés Nicolás, hablante de mixteco de Chalcatongo, emprendió su propio viaje llegando a la Universidad de California en Berkeley. Durante los trimestres de invierno y primavera de 1981, se desempeñó como el consultor lingüístico clave para el curso de Métodos de Campo impartido por Leanne Hinton, dando inicio a una colaboración histórica en la documentación del mixteco.

En esta entrada nos enfocaremos en dos colecciones:

Berkeley Field Methods: Chalcatongo de Hidalgo Mixtec
Leanne Hinton and Monica Macaulay Collection of Mixtec Sound Recordings

Cartografía lingüística de la región de Chalcatongo de Hidalgo

Ubicado dentro del Distrito de Tlaxiaco, en Oaxaca (México), el municipio de Chalcatongo de Hidalgo constituye un nodo significativo para la investigación etnolingüística y dialectológica regional. En mixteco, la comunidad recibe el nombre de Ñuu Ndaya («Lugar de los muertos»). Este endónimo refleja la importancia histórica y cultural del municipio como un sitio de veneración ancestral y prácticas mortuorias sagradas. En términos de genealogía lingüística y subagrupamiento, la variante local de mixteco hablada en Chalcatongo se clasifica dentro del área dialectal del mixteco alto occidental, siguiendo la clasificación estructural establecida por Josserand (1983). Comprender la dinámica microrregional del mixteco alto occidental requiere examinar sus zonas de contacto inmediatas. Chalcatongo comparte fronteras geográficas y lingüísticas directas con varios municipios clave de la Mixteca Alta:

San Miguel El Grande (inmediatamente adyacente)
Santa Catarina Ticuá
San Pablo Tijaltepec
Santiago Yosondúa
San Esteban Atatlahuca

Para visualizar estos límites territoriales y la distribución espacial de las variedades lingüísticas vecinas, consulte los mapas regionales elaborados por Leanne Hinton a continuación en la Figura 1.

Figura 1. Mapa 1 y 2. Próximo a publicarse.

Colección 1: Berkeley Field Methods: Chalcatongo de Hidalgo Mixtec

Esta colección consta de materiales producidos por estudiantes en un curso de métodos de campo de nivel posgrado durante los trimestres de invierno y primavera de 1981. Según los registros del cuaderno de campo de la entonces estudiante de posgrado Monica Macaulay, la clase se reunía los jueves y viernes de 3:30 a 5:30 PM. Un curso de métodos de campo difiere significativamente de las clases teóricas tradicionales al funcionar como una práctica de investigación de primera mano. Funge como un laboratorio: los estudiantes trabajan directamente con un hablante nativo, por lo general de una lengua poco estudiada o en peligro de extinción, para comenzar con la descripción de una lengua desde cero. Algunas de las actividades son el análisis de la estructura de las oraciones y la formación de palabras, para eso se graba y transcriben textos para documentar sistemáticamente la gramática y el uso de la lengua. La gran riqueza de cuadernos, grabaciones, notas de campo y listas de palabras producidos durante esas sesiones en UC Berkeley se conserva en el Archivo de Lenguas de California (California Language Archive) para garantizar que permanezcan accesibles para las futuras generaciones, investigadores y miembros de la comunidad por igual.

(¿Te da curiosidad ver otro ejemplo de una colección de archivo de una clase de métodos de campo? Consulta nuestra publicación anterior: The Lakota Language.)

Una clase de métodos de campo a menudo alberga los comienzos de importantes obras descriptivas. Esta colección comienza con el cuaderno de campo de Monica Macaulay, quien más tarde aprovecharía el impulso de esta clase para publicar una gramática integral del mixteco de Chalcatongo. Junto a estas notas de campo, la colección de archivo alberga trabajos de otros estudiantes, notas de clase y borradores analíticos. Entre estos fondos, destacan dos manuscritos tempranos por su contribución a la lingüística mesoamericana y su disponibilidad dentro del catálogo del California Language Archive:

Preliminaries to Tonemic and Tonomechanical Analysis for the Chalcatongo Dialect of Mixtec (June 1981)

Investigador: Nicholas Faraclas
Clave de Identificación: 2020-16.002.001
Descripción: Texto escrito a máquina
Historial de Publicación: Publicado posteriormente en Studies in Mesoamerican Linguistics (Report 4), Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (1983)

The Use of Body-Part Terms as Locatives in Chalcatongo Mixtec (June 21, 1982)

Investigadora: Claudia Brugman
Clave de identificación: 2020-16.002.015
Descripción: Trabajo para la clase Linguistics 299. Segundo borrador
Historial de Publicación: Publicado posteriormente en Studies in Mesoamerican Linguistics (Report 4), Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (1983)

Publicación del Reporte #4 de Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (1983) y el manuscrito con clave de identificación: 2020-16.002.001.

Colección 2: Leanne Hinton and Monica Macaulay Collection of Mixtec Sound Recordings

Aprovechando el impulso de la clase de métodos de campo de 1981–1982, la profesora Leanne Hinton y la estudiante Monica Macaulay (actualmente profesora de la Universidad de Wisconsin-Madison) viajaron juntas a Chalcatongo en el verano de 1985. Esta colección conserva un total de 103 grabaciones de audio de su trabajo de campo conjunto. Los materiales abarcan desde la elicitación dirigida de vocabulario básico —centrada en sustantivos, paradigmas verbales, saludos y términos de parentesco— hasta el habla natural, incluyendo interacciones en el mercado y presentaciones personales. Las grabaciones capturan las reflexiones de los hablantes nativos sobre la cultura local, la historia geográfica y la comparación dialectológica entre comunidades. Al inicio de este repositorio, la primera grabación de archivo presenta un relato de profunda importancia comunitaria: Crescenciano Ruiz Ramírez narra en mixteco la historia fundacional de Chalcatongo. Un fragmento del inicio de este audio está disponible a continuación:

California Language Archive · Crescenciano Ruiz Ramírez narra en mixteco la historia de Chalcatongo (1985)

Consulta la grabación completa en: LA177.001 y la grabación con la traducción en español: LA177.002.

En última instancia, los datos recopilados en estas colecciones contribuyeron a un trabajo académico más amplio, incluyendo el artículo de actas «Sound Change on Purpose: A Study of Highland Mixtec» («Cambio fónico intencional: Un estudio del mixteco alto», presentado en el congreso NWAV-XV en 1987) La propuesta de este trabajo es que la diferenciación dialectal no es un mero accidente resultante de la separación parcial o la disminución del contacto, sino un proceso impulsado en parte por la elección de los propios hablantes, quienes perciben distinciones sutiles en el habla como marcadores sociales y pueden optar por acentuar dichas diferencias. Una de las listas de los cognados que aparecen en dicho artículo se pueden observar en la Figura 3 a continuación.

Figura 3. Lista de cognados de los diferentes pueblos. Próximo a publicarse.

En nuestra próxima entrada, exploraremos las colecciones de Monica Macaulay: los cuadernos y grabaciones de audio que documentan su estudio del mixteco de Chalcatongo entre 1981 y 1992 a lo largo de Berkeley y Oaxaca (México). Estos cuadernos contienen un registro exhaustivo de las sesiones de elicitación, incluyendo notas de campo y transcripciones detalladas de textos orales que capturan estructuras gramaticales, léxicas y discursivas.

In English

As Andrew Garrett mentioned in the very first entry of this blog:every item archived in the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages tells a story.In this series of entries, I want to share with you a little bit of the stories of the different collections under the name of Mixtec in the California Language Archive catalogue.

Mixtec or Tu’un Savi belongs to the Otomanguean language family with roots across Oaxaca, Puebla, and Guerrero. Rather than a single uniform language, Mixtec is famous among linguists for its internal diversity (Mak & Longacre, 1960; Arana, 1960; Holland, 1959; Jiménez Moreno, 1962). To put the internal diversity of Mixtec into perspective, research by Kathryn Josserand (1983) outlines twelve mutually unintelligible dialect areas. Today, even with more than half a million Mixtec speakers residing in Mexican territory, the language’s reach extends well across international borders. Driven by economic necessity, Mixtec people and other Indigenous communities began migrating northward in the 1940s, eventually establishing diaspora networks throughout California (Fox & Rivera-Salgado, 2004; Varese & Escárcega, 2004). As these connections grew between Oaxaca and the Bay Area, Luciano Cortés Nicolás—a speaker of Chalcatongo Mixtec—made his own journey arriving at UC Berkeley. During winter and spring quarters of 1981, he served as the key language consultant for the Field Methods course taught by Leanne Hinton, beginning a historic partnership in Mixtec documentation.

In this entry, we focus on two collections:

Berkeley Field Methods: Chalcatongo de Hidalgo Mixtec
Leanne Hinton and Monica Macaulay Collection of Mixtec Sound Recordings

Mapping Chalcatongo de Hidalgo region

Located within the Tlaxiaco District of Oaxaca, Mexico, the municipality of Chalcatongo de Hidalgo constitutes a significant node for regional ethnolinguistic and dialectological research. In Mixtec, the community is designated as Ñuu Ndaya (“Place of the Dead”). This endonym reflects the municipality’s historical and cultural standing as a site of ancestral veneration and sacred mortuary practices. In terms of linguistic genealogy and sub-grouping, the local Mixtec variety spoken in Chalcatongo is categorized under the Western Alta Mixtec dialectal area, following the structural classification established by Josserand (1983). Understanding the micro-regional dynamics of Western Alta Mixtec requires examining its immediate contact zones. Chalcatongo shares immediate geographic and linguistic borders with several key municipalities in the Mixteca Alta:

San Miguel El Grande (immediately adjacent)
Santa Catarina Ticuá
San Pablo Tijaltepec
Santiago Yosondúa
San Esteban Atatlahuca

To visualize these spatial boundaries and the spatial distribution of neighboring speech varieties, refer to this regional maps compiled by Leanne Hinton below in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Maps 1 and 2. Item identifier: Forthcoming.

Collection 1: Berkeley Field Methods: Chalcatongo de Hidalgo Mixtec

This collection consists of materials produced by students in a graduate-level field methods course during the winter and spring quarters of 1981. According to the field notebook records of then-graduate student Monica Macaulay, the class convened on Thursdays and Fridays from 3:30 to 5:30 PM. A field methods course differs significantly from traditional lecture-based classes by serving as a hands-on research practice. It acts as a laboratory: students work directly with a native speaker, usually of a lesser-studied or endangered language, to build a description of a language from scratch: analyzing sentence structure and word formation, recording and transcribing texts to systematically document the language’s grammar and usage. The wealth of notebooks, recordings, fieldnotes and wordlists produced during those sessions at UC Berkeley are preserved in the California Language Archive to ensure they remain accessible for future generations, researchers, and community members alike.

(Curious to see another example of an archival collection of a field methods class? Check out our previous post on Field Methods: The Lakota Language.)

A field methods class often holds the beginnings of major descriptive works. This collection begins with the field notebook of Monica Macaulay, who would later leverage this early research to publish a comprehensive grammar of Chalcatongo Mixtec. Alongside these field notes, the broader archival collection houses student papers, class meeting notes, and analytical drafts. Among these holdings, two early manuscripts stand out for their contribution to Mesoamerican linguistics and their availability within the California Language Archive:

Preliminaries to Tonemic and Tonomechanical Analysis for the Chalcatongo Dialect of Mixtec (June 1981)

Researcher: Nicholas Faraclas
Item identifier: 2020-16.002.001
Description: Handwritten and typed originals
Publication History: Later published in Studies in Mesoamerican Linguistics (Report 4), Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (1983)

The Use of Body-Part Terms as Locatives in Chalcatongo Mixtec (June 21, 1982)

Researcher: Claudia Brugman
Item identifier: 2020-16.002.015
Description: Class paper for Linguistics 299 (photocopy of typed original, second draft)
Publication History: Later published in Studies in Mesoamerican Linguistics (Report 4), Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (1983)

Publication of Report #4 of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (1983) and the manuscript item identifier: 2020-16.002.001.

Collection 2: Leanne Hinton and Monica Macaulay Collection of Mixtec Sound Recordings

Following the momentum of that 1981–1982 field methods class, professor Leanne Hinton and the graduate student, Monica Macaulay (currently professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), traveled together to Chalcatongo in the summer of 1985. This collection preserves a total of 103 audio recordings of their joint fieldwork. The materials range from targeted elicitations of core vocabulary—focusing on nouns, verb paradigms, greetings, and kinship terms—to naturalistic discourse, including market interactions and personal introductions. The recordings capture native-speaker reflections on local culture, geographic history, and comparative dialectology. Starting this repository, the initial archival recording features a story of deep communal importance: Crescenciano Ruiz Ramírez recounting the foundational history of Chalcatongo in Mixtec. An excerpt from the opening of this audio recording is available below:

California Language Archive · Crescenciano Ruiz Ramírez narra en mixteco la historia de Chalcatongo (1985)

Check the full recording: LA177.001 and the Spanish version recording: LA177.002.

Ultimately, the data gathered from these collections contributed to broader scholarly work, including the proceedings paper “Sound Change on Purpose: A Study of Highland Mixtec” (presented at NWAV-XV in 1987; see the cognate forms in Figure 3 below). The proposal of this paper is that dialect differentiation is not merely an accident resulting from partial separation and lessened contact, but instead is a process driven partly by choice, by speakers who perceive subtle speech distinctions as social markers and who can choose to enhance those distinctions.

Figure 3. Cognate forms of different villages. Item identifier: Forthcoming.

In our next entry, we will explore Monica Macaulay collections: notebooks and audio recordings documenting her study of Chalcatongo Mixtec between 1981 and 1992 across Berkeley and Oaxaca, Mexico. These notebooks contain extensive record-keeping from elicitation sessions, including rich field notes and detailed transcriptions of oral texts that capture foundational grammatical, lexical, and discourse structures.

References

Arana, E. (1960). Relaciones internas del mixteco-trique. Anales del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 12, 219–273.
Fox, J., & Rivera-Salgado, G. (2004). Building civil society among Indigenous migrants. In J. Fox & G. Rivera-Salgado (Eds.), Indigenous Mexican migrants in the United States (pp. 1–65). UC San Diego, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies/Center for US-Mexican Studies.
Holland, W. R. (1959). Dialect variations of the Mixtec and Cuicatec areas of Oaxaca, Mexico. Anthropological Linguistics, 1(8), 25–31.
Jimenez Moreno, W. (1962). Estudios mixtecos. In F. A. Alvarado (Ed.), Vocabulario en lengua mixteca por Fray Francisco de Alvarado. Reproduction Facsimiles con un Estudio de Wigberto Jimenez Moreno y un Apéndice con un Vocabulario Sacado del Arte en Lengua Mixteca de Fray Antonio de los Reyes (pp. 9–105). Ciudad de México, Mexico: Instituto Nacional Indigenista e Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia S. E. P.
Josserand, K. (1983). Mixtec dialect history: Proto-Mixtec and modern Mixtec text (Tesis de doctorado). Tulane University, Nueva Orleans, EUA.
Mak, C., & Longacre, R. (1960). Proto-Mixtec Phonology. International Journal of American Linguistics (IJAL), 26(1), 23–40.
Stephen, L. (2007). Transborder lives: Indigenous Mexicans in Mexico, California, and Oregon. Duke University Press.
Varese, S., & Escárcega, S. (2004). La ruta mixteca: el impacto etnopolítico de la migración transnacional en los pueblos indígenas de México. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Field Methods: The Lakota Language

2025-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

The Lakota language is a Siouan language predominantly spoken in and around the Great Plains region of the United States and Canada, particularly in present-day North Dakota and South Dakota. It is one of three dialects of the Sioux language, alongside Dakota and Nakoda. Lakota has a rich oral tradition and continues to play a central role in cultural practices, ceremonies, and storytelling.

Like many Indigenous languages, Lakota has faced dramatic decline due to the effects of colonization, forced assimilation, and the residential boarding school system. Today, only a few thousand fluent speakers remain, most of whom are elders. However, revitalization efforts led by community members, educators, and linguists have helped reinvigorate interest in learning and speaking Lakota.

A linguistic field methods class is a type of course offered in many university linguistics programs. These classes provide students with hands-on experience working with a speaker of a lesser-studied or endangered language, often an Indigenous or minority language. The goal is to document the structure and use of the language, typically with the help of a fluent speaker who serves as a language consultant.

Students in field methods classes learn how to:

Ask questions about pronunciation, grammar, and meaning
Build a phonetic inventory (the sounds of the language)
Understand sentence structure and word formation
Collect texts and stories
Transcribe and analyze real language data

These classes emphasize respectful collaboration and ethical practices, especially when working with Indigenous communities. The knowledge gathered can support revitalization efforts, especially when it is shared back with the community in the form of dictionaries, lesson plans, or recordings.

In the California Language Archive’s collections of Lakota materials from Berkeley graduate field methods courses (here, here, and here), all the speakers are from a reservation in South Dakota called the Oglala Sioux Tribe or the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The map below highlights in red the territory.

Stevens, Brent. (2014, September 3). About Pine Ridge Reservation. Faces of the Litte Bighorn: The David Humphreys Miller Collection.

These field methods classes were held at different times, in 1964-1965, 1974-1975, and 1980. Though the exact recruitment method is unknown, the speakers likely lived in or around the Bay Area.

Eva Martin Brown, Pine Ridge, SD (1980)
Mary Afraid of Enemy McDaniel, Pine Ridge, SD (1980)
Ruby LaPointe Swift Bird, Pine Ridge, SD (1964-1965, 1974-1975)
Stella Red Star, Pine Ridge, SD (1964-1965)

Knud Lambrecht’s field notes from the 1980 class include wordlists of various topics (kinship, animals, etc.) as well as sentences and grammatical analysis. Topics across all the fields methods classes include phonology, morphology, syntax, and miscellaneous wordlists and transcripts of the language. Some contents in the notebook include topics on question particles, tense, and gendered command differences.

Questions

Lakota questions tend to end in “he.” It always signals that the sentence is a question. For instance, “Le igmu kin hecha he?” which is “Is this a cat?” Lambrecht’s notebook has this on page 57 with “Do you eat?” being “Yata he?”

Future Tense

Lakota has a future tense particle “kte.” It changes to “kta” when it follows a question, for instance, a sentence that might translate to “Will you do X?” Here is an example of both being used in a sentence, also on page 57: “Unyake lowanpi kta he?” translating as “Will you sing for us?”

Page 57 of Knud Lambrecht's notes on Lakota from the 1980 Berkeley graduate field methods (CLA 2023-06.001)

Commands

There are different endings on commands based on the gender of the speaker. These arise in usually just two variants of the same word.

On page 90, there is “wayatkan ye!” in which “ye” is commonly stated to be a more feminine ending. This means “drink!”

On page 91, there is “ayupta yo!” in which “yo” is commonly stated to be a more masculine ending. This means “answer/reply!”

As of 2025, the Lakota language is critically endangered, with a few thousand Native speakers. The study of Lakota through field methods classes is not just about academic research — it is about healing, empowerment, and cultural survival. By combining linguistic tools with community knowledge, we can support the preservation and revitalization of languages that hold centuries of wisdom and resilience.

Whether you’re a student of linguistics, a language learner, or someone interested in Indigenous issues, methods used in a field methods class are a good toolkit to understanding the structure and meaning (as well as culture) of Lakota language.

And in the sense of cultural continuity, there is a lot to consider when discussing language revitalization. When discussing the ethics of language revitalization, a lot of time and effort must be devoted to ethical considerations on who benefits from what materials in the research process.

Gilbert Natches's Northern Paiute documentation

2022-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

Every item archived in the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages tells a story. One that especially moves me, weaving together language and history, concerns the documentation created by Gilbert Natches for the Northern Paiute language, a Uto-Aztecan language spoken across a wide area in eastern California, Nevada, Idaho, and Oregon. Born in the 1880s, Natches (or Natchez) was a member of a prominent Paiute family in Nevada and a landscape painter who exhibited in Reno and San Francisco. (One of his landscapes is online here.)

Natches got involved in language documentation through his relationship with the Berkeley anthropologist and linguist Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960). Kroeber himself had a correspondence with W. L. Marsden, a doctor in Burns, Oregon who had learned to speak Northern Paiute well, was writing a grammar, and had assembled a collection of texts. When Marsden died in 1913, his widow Clara sent his manuscripts to Kroeber, who expressed an interest in seeing them published. But as he put it in a letter to her, this would mean “getting a Paiute Indian to come down here” to help check the spellings in the texts.

That help came from Gilbert Natches. It is not clear how Kroeber and Natches first met, but in 1913 and 1914, Natches came to San Francisco to work on the Marsden material. As it turned out, Natches was unable to do the planned work; instead, he created a significant documentary corpus of linguistic information, spoken texts, and song. This corpus contains 69 recordings; a rich notebook filled with text and song transcriptions, sentences, and vocabulary; and other materials archived at Berkeley (indexed in the California Language Archive here). One of these texts was recently published (in an edition prepared by Tim Thornes, online here), others are unpublished, including a story about tabu’u ‘cottontail.’ Presented here are the beginning of Natches’s transcript, followed by the recording (in his own voice) that he was transcribing:

Northern Paiute story about tabu'u 'cottontail' recorded and then transcribed by Gilbert Natches, Marsden.015. This is from the first page; ink additions are Alfred Kroeber's annotations.

California Language Archive · Excerpt of "Story of Cottontail" in Northern Paiute, by Gilbert Natches (1914)

One outcome of the collaboration was an article by Natches, edited by Kroeber (accessible online here). This includes several short texts and songs as well as a long list of verbs, verbal morphological elements, and nouns derived from verbs. Other nouns are mainly omitted. But Natches’s notebook from which the article was drawn has four pages of “Indian New Words for New Things,” which are almost all nouns borrowed from English. Natches’s notes include some illustrations, as in the very first word he transcribes:

Northern Paiute “Indian New Words for New Things” (mostly English loans), transcribed by Gilbert Natches, Marsden.015 (from the first of four pages). 'E' stands for a high central vowel; capitalized vowel symbols are devoiced.

At the time, in the early twentieth century, linguists often ignored loanwords and non-“traditional” vocabulary in language documentation. But the world was changing for everyone, and people’s practices and language everywhere changed with it. Natches’s “New Words” are interesting not only culturally but even in their phonology. They show many striking regularities in how English words were adapted to Northern Paiute sound patterns. For example, Northern Paiute has no consonant clusters, so English words beginning with clusters were adapted by the insertion of a vowel. The vowel is predictable based on the context: the default is o (e.g. podawa and tonookɨ for ‘flower’ and ‘trunk’); but if the English cluster is followed by u then u is used (e.g. pudumɨ for ‘broom’), and if the English cluster has an s then ɨ is used (e.g. sɨtoa and sɨtimɨ for ‘store’ and ‘steam’). In other word positions, too, Natches’s word list shows quite regular patterns of vowel insertion.

English and Northern Paiute stress patterns also differ: the position of stress is predictable in Northern Paiute, but not in English. English stress is salient enough that it led to adaptations in vowel length, so that Northern Paiute phonology would put stress on the same syllable that was stressed in English. Many one-syllable English words were adapted with lengthening (e.g. aakɨsɨ and waatsi for ‘axe’ and ‘watch’), to ensure that the first syllable would be stressed in Northern Paiute. But in one-syllable words beginning with consonant clusters, like the ones above, there was no lengthening — again, resulting in Northern Paiute stress on the same syllable as the English stress.

These adaptations would not have been conscious efforts by Natches. His native knowledge of Northern Paiute let him adapt English words according to systematic patterns that reflect Paiute phonology. If he had not chosen to write down a set of “New Words” that he judged important, later generations would not have this glimpse into the structure of the language.

Two decades after Natches’s Berkeley work, the anthropologist Saul Riesenberg met and became friendly with him. Riesenberg was a Berkeley graduate student who supported himself in a job with the Railway Post Office that took him regularly to Lovelock, Nevada. There, in 1940, he filled a notebook with English-language Paiute stories Natches shared. (The notebook is in the National Anthropological Archives in Washington, D.C., and is accessible online here.) Riesenberg reports an anecdote about the collaboration between Kroeber and Natches:

One day he startled me by saying, “You know, I wrote a paper with Alfred Kroeber on Northern Paiute verbs, and I've lost my last copy; can you get me one?” Only half-believing him I went to see Kroeber when I got back from that trip …. Kroeber gave me a reprint, and I brought it to Gilbert the next trip, and found myself unable to do any work with him for the next hour, because Gilbert sat there oblivious of me, holding that paper about an inch from his nearly blind eyes, while the most beatific smile hovered over his lips the whole time.

Gilbert Natches died in 1942 at the hospital of the Stewart Indian School in Carson City. His legacy of Northern Paiute language documentation is profound.

(This post is adapted from part of a chapter of a book, The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Iconoclasm, to be published by MIT Press in 2023.)