Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A member of a Native American people inhabiting Vancouver Island in British Columbia and Cape Flattery in northwest Washington.
- noun The Wakashan language of the Nootka.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- proper noun
Nuu-chah-nulth people, an indigenous people fromVancouver Island , Canada - proper noun
Nuu-chah-nulth language
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a Wakashan language spoken by the Nootka
- noun a member of the Wakashan people living on Vancouver Island and in the Cape Flattery region of northwestern Washington
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word Nootka.
Examples
-
Both countries armed for war, but ultimately the dispute was settled by what became known as the Nootka Sound Convention.
A Country of Vast Designs Robert W. Merry 2009
-
Both countries armed for war, but ultimately the dispute was settled by what became known as the Nootka Sound Convention.
A Country of Vast Designs Robert W. Merry 2009
-
I found one colour that I love, Nootka, which is a Chamois colour and I have used it in the last three houses.
-
He gave the name of King George's Sound to the spot where he had stayed, although it was called Nootka by the natives.
Celebrated Travels and Travellers Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century Jules Verne 1866
-
George's Sound; but I afterward found, that it is called Nootka by the natives.
A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 Robert Kerr 1784
-
On Captain Cook's first arrival in this inlet, he had honoured it with the name of King George's Sound; but he afterward found that it is called Nootka by the natives.
Narrative of the Voyages Round the World, Performed by Captain James Cook : with an Account of His Life During the Previous and Intervening Periods Andrew Kippis 1760
-
On Captain Cook’s first arrival in this inlet, he had honoured it with the name of King George’s Sound; but he afterward found that it is called Nootka by the natives.
Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, Performed by Captain James Cook 2003
-
On Captain Cook’s first arrival in this inlet, he had honoured it with the name of King George’s Sound; but he afterward found that it is called Nootka by the natives.
Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, Performed by Captain James Cook 2003
-
The differences between Chinese, Nootka, Hungarian, and English, for example, are so great as to destroy the possibility of any universal grammar, and hence languages could only be learned by a general intelligence, not by any innate language learning device.
Philip N. Cohen: Good Woman Child Language (Talking Characters in Taiwan) Philip N. Cohen 2010
-
The differences between Chinese, Nootka, Hungarian, and English, for example, are so great as to destroy the possibility of any universal grammar, and hence languages could only be learned by a general intelligence, not by any innate language learning device.
Philip N. Cohen: Good Woman Child Language (Talking Characters in Taiwan) Philip N. Cohen 2010
vendingmachine commented on the word Nootka
Some languages are structured around quite different basic word-categories and relationships. They project very different pictures of the basic nature of reality as a result. The language of the Nootka Indians in the Pacific Northwest, for example, has only one principle word-category; it denotes happenings or events. A verbal form like "eventing" might better describe this word-category, except that such a form doesn't sound right in English, with its emphasis on noun forms. We might think of Nootka as composed entirely of verbs, except that they take no subjects or objects as English verbs do. The Nootka, then, perceive the world as a stream of transient events, rather than as the collection of more or less permanent objects which we see. Even something which we see clearly as a physical object, like a house, the Nootka perceive of as a long-lived temporal event. The literal English translation of the Nootka concept might be something like "housing occurs;" or "it houses."
--Ralph Strauch, "The Reality Illusion".
July 14, 2015
qroqqa commented on the word Nootka
Mr Ralph Strauch appears to be a Feldenkrais practitioner, whatever that may be, and lives in Pacific Palisades in California, which sounds as if it has a good view of the sea, so he's probably the guy you'd go to for the low-down on the morphosyntax of Wakashan languages and general linguistic theory, if you didn't know any linguists.
Nuuchahnulth (formerly known as Nootka, which means "circling about" and isn't a native ethnonym) has verbs, nouns, subjects, and objects, together with markers of tense, person, topic, and a whole lot of other things. It is unusual in that any verb can be used as a noun and vice versa, in almost identical circumstances, so it is unclear whether they are separate classes. It is unclear whether it has a distinct syntactic role of subject, or whether the relations between elements in the sentence should rather be analysed as topic and focus or some such.
It also has incorporation, where objects of verbs are attached as prefixes to the verb; a lot of North American and Siberian languages have this. It also has a rich affixal system where meanings like "in a canoe" are expressed on other words rather than by a separate phrase. Again, it's not alone in this among the local languages. It may have a passive, or this may be analysable in terms of direct and inverse marking, as in some other North American languages.
As an example of the interchangeability of nouns and verbs, take these sentences, which differ in focus rather than outright meaning:
(1) mamukma quʔasʔi
(2) quʔasma mamukʔi
"the man is working"
mamuk "work", quʔas "man", -ma present tense, -ʔi definite. (1) expresses it as a subject/topic quʔasʔi "the man" preceded by the predicate "is working". Version (2) is more like "the one who is working is a man": topic mamukʔi "the working one" and predicate quʔasma "is a man". There doesn't seem to be anything transient, flowing, or even strikingly 'verby' about a predicate consisting of a noun with a verbal attachment. Turkish does it too: adamdır "is a man".
As an example of verbs with subjects, objects, and optional object incorporation, consider these:
(3) ʔuʔaamitʔiš maħt'ii čakup
(4) maħt'aʔamitʔiš čakup
"a man bought a house"
maħt'ii "house", čakup "man" (no I don't know the difference; the only Nuuchahnulth dictionary is not previewed on Google Books), ʔaap "buy" interacting with -mit</i> past tense, -ʔiš 3rd person indicative. The initial element ʔu- in (3) is a dummy marker for the verb to be attached to when the object hasn't been incorporated onto it, as it is in (4).
Examples (1) and (2) from James Hurford, Grammar: A Student's Guide, Cambridge, 1994, p. 143, from material collected by Swadesh, I think.
Examples (3) and (4) from Rachel Wojdak, The Linearization of Affixes: Evidence from Nuu-chah-nulth, Springer, 2008, p. 29.
Yes, I do feel better after this, thank you.
July 14, 2015
vendingmachine commented on the word Nootka
Thank you for your fascinating comment. I love learning about other languages. What is your background, if I may ask?
July 15, 2015