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Takelma Family Learning Lessons

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Family Members

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Family Members

In this book, we will discuss how to use family terms to talk about our family members. There are a few things in Takelma that are different than in English, so pay close attention to what exactly the words mean. Make sure to learn the words that apply to your family situation first so you can apply them in real life situations!

To start, we need to understand a couple things about possession. Let's look at the word for mother as an example.

Here are some of the different forms of the English word for mother.
In order to talk about relatives, we need to know who the relative belongs to, or who possesses them. We will explore that on the next page.

In English, we use words like "my," "your," and "their" to show possession, or who someone belongs to.
In Takelma, the indicator for possession is attached to the word.

In English, we could say "My mother (is tall.)" as a sentence. To replace the word with Takelma, we could say "Wihín (is tall.)"

The word níxa can mean "the mother," "his mother," "her mother," "their mother," and "a mother"!

Use the word hintée when addressing your mother. Instead of "Hey mom!" try saying "Hey hintée!"

Family Tree

We are going to introduce a number of vocabulary words with many different forms throughout this book. On the next few pages, we include an sample family tree to clarify the information. To make these words easier to learn, I encourage you to create your own family tree with people from your family to help practice these words.

Let's look at some examples!

This is an sample family tree. In this case, all the Takelma words are in the "his/her/their" form. We will use this as our example family to explain some relations.