Timbisha (''Tümpisa'') or Panamint (also called Koso) is the language of the Native American people who have inhabited the region in and around

Death Valley Death Valley is a desert valley in Eastern California, in the northern Mojave Desert, bordering the Great Basin Desert. During summer, it is the hottest place on Earth. Death Valley's Badwater Basin is the point of lowest elevation in North Am ...

, California, and the southern

Owens Valley Owens Valley (Numic: ''Payahǖǖnadǖ'', meaning "place of flowing water") is an arid valley of the Owens River in eastern California in the United States. It is located to the east of the Sierra Nevada, west of the White Mountains and Inyo Mo ...

since late prehistoric times. There are a few elderly individuals who can speak the language in

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...

and

Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a state in the Western region of the United States. It is bordered by Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. Nevada is the 7th-most extensive, ...

, but none is monolingual, and all use English regularly in their daily lives. Until the late 20th century, the people called themselves and their language "Shoshone." The tribe then achieved federal recognition under the name Death Valley Timbisha Shoshone Band of California. This is an Anglicized spelling of the native name of

, ''tümpisa'', pronounced , which means "rock paint" and refers to the rich sources of

red ochre Ochre ( ; , ), or ocher in American English, is a natural clay earth pigment, a mixture of ferric oxide and varying amounts of clay and sand. It ranges in colour from yellow to deep orange or brown. It is also the name of the colours produce ...

in the valley. Timbisha is also the language of the so-called "Shoshone" groups at

Bishop A bishop is an ordained clergy member who is entrusted with a position of authority and oversight in a religious institution. In Christianity, bishops are normally responsible for the governance of dioceses. The role or office of bishop is ...

, Big Pine,

Darwin Darwin may refer to: Common meanings * Charles Darwin (1809–1882), English naturalist and writer, best known as the originator of the theory of biological evolution by natural selection * Darwin, Northern Territory, a territorial capital city i ...

Independence Independence is a condition of a person, nation, country, or state in which residents and population, or some portion thereof, exercise self-government, and usually sovereignty, over its territory. The opposite of independence is the s ...

, and Lone Pine communities in California and the Beatty community in Nevada. It was also the language spoken at the former Indian Ranch reservation in Panamint Valley.

Classification

Timbisha is one of the

Central Numic Numic is a branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It includes seven languages spoken by Native American peoples traditionally living in the Great Basin, Colorado River basin, Snake River basin, and southern Great Plains. The word Numic com ...

languages of the Numic branch of

Uto-Aztecan Uto-Aztecan, Uto-Aztekan or (rarely in English) Uto-Nahuatl is a family of indigenous languages of the Americas, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The na ...

. It is most closely related to

Shoshoni The Shoshone or Shoshoni ( or ) are a Native American tribe with four large cultural/linguistic divisions: * Eastern Shoshone: Wyoming * Northern Shoshone: southern Idaho * Western Shoshone: Nevada, northern Utah * Goshute: western Utah, e ...

and Comanche.

Geographic distribution

Timbisha was formerly spoken in the region between the

Sierra Nevada The Sierra Nevada () is a mountain range in the Western United States, between the Central Valley of California and the Great Basin. The vast majority of the range lies in the state of California, although the Carson Range spur lies primari ...

mountains of eastern

and the region just to the east of

. Principal valleys where villages were located were (from west to east)

, Indian Wells Valley,

Saline Valley Saline Valley is a large, deep, and arid graben, about in length, in the northern Mojave Desert of California, a narrow, northwest–southeast-trending tectonic sink defined by fault-block mountains. Most of it became a part of Death Valley Nati ...

, Panamint Valley, and

. In addition, there were villages along the southern slopes of the

Kawich Range The Kawich Range is a mountain range in Nye County in southern Nevada in the United States, just south of the Hot Creek Range. The southern part of the range lies on the Nellis Air Force Range. The mountains cover an area of about and contain Kaw ...

in Nevada.

Dialects

Each valley had its own variety of Timbisha with mostly lexical differences between them. There was, however, a general loss of ' as one moved west across Timbisha territory with ' virtually gone in

varieties. McLaughlin's grammar is based on the far eastern variety from

Beatty, Nevada Beatty ( ) is an unincorporated town along the Amargosa River in Nye County in the U.S. state of Nevada. U.S. Route 95 runs through the town, which lies between Tonopah, about to the north and Las Vegas, about to the southeast. State Rou ...

, while Dayley's is based on a central variety from

Phonology

Vowels

Timbisha also has a typical Numic

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (l ...

inventory of five vowels. In addition, there is the common

diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech ...

', which varies rather freely with ', although certain

morphemes A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone are ...

always contain ' and others always contain '. (The official orthography is shown in parentheses.)

Consonants

Timbisha has a typical Numic consonant inventory. (The official orthography is shown in parentheses.):

Phonotactics

Timbisha stops (including the affricate) and nasals are voiced and lenited between vowels, are voiced in nasal-stop clusters, and are lenited (but not voiced) following '.

Voiceless vowel In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies v ...

s are less common in Timbisha than in

and Comanche.

Writing system

Timbisha spelling is based on Dayley and uses the Roman alphabet. ''Ü'' is used for and ''ng'' for .

Grammar

Study of Timbisha has been carried on by Jon Dayley and John McLaughlin, both of whom wrote grammatical descriptions. Dayley has published a dictionary.

Word order and case marking

Timbisha

word order In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...

is usually SOV as in: The

accusative case The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘the ...

and

possessive case A possessive or ktetic form (abbreviated or ; from la, possessivus; grc, κτητικός, translit=ktētikós) is a word or grammatical construction used to indicate a relationship of possession in a broad sense. This can include strict owne ...

are marked with

suffixes In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry gr ...

. Adverbial relationships are marked with

postpositions Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...

on nouns as well as with true

adverbs An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering q ...

. For example: Adjectives are usually prefixed to the nouns they modify, unless the relationship is temporary when they are independent words with special suffixes. Compare ''tosa-kapayu'', 'white-horse', "palomino or other pale-colored breed" and ''tosapihtü kapayu'', 'white/pale horse', "white or pale horse" (who happens to be white or pale, but whose siblings may be any color).

Verbs

Verbs are marked for

grammatical aspect In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, as denoted by a verb, extends over time. Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded Boundedness or bounded may refe ...

with

Valence Valence or valency may refer to: Science * Valence (chemistry), a measure of an element's combining power with other atoms * Degree (graph theory), also called the valency of a vertex in graph theory * Valency (linguistics), aspect of verbs rel ...

is marked with both

prefixes A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix ''un-'' is added to the word ''happy'', it creates the word ''unhappy''. Particula ...

and

. Some common intransitive verbs have

suppletive In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even ...

forms for singular or plural subjects and some common transitive verbs have

forms for singular or plural objects. Otherwise, there is no

grammatical agreement In linguistics, agreement or concord ( abbreviated ) occurs when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates. It is an instance of inflection, and usually involves making the value of some grammatical category (such as ...

marked by the verb.

References

External links

Panamint language
overview at the

Survey of California and Other Indian Languages The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (originally the Survey of California Indian Languages) at the University of California at Berkeley documents, catalogs, and archives the indigenous languages of the Americas. The survey also hosts ...

Linguist List map of Panamint

How to count in Timbisha

OLAC resources in and about the Panamint language
Timbisha Agglutinative languages Numic languages Indigenous languages of California Indigenous languages of the Southwestern United States Indigenous languages of the North American Southwest Indigenous languages of the North American Great Basin Subject–object–verb languages {{Languages of California