Furthermore, even the same speaker would narrate them differently on different occasions.The genres included in the series are: recollections of past memories (from childhood, recent events, or something speakers were told by their ancestors); traditional knowledge, beliefs, and practices; and myths.Most of them are monologues, but some conversations will be included in a later volume.The phonetic transcriptions, morphological analysis, and English translations are far from perfect.There are many parts (words and phrases) that I simply cannot explain.These are marked as such in the footnotes.There is much to be studied in this language, and it is my hope that texts presented in the series will be a source for further research.I have undoubtedly made simple errors, too, and the analysis and translations will never be perfect or even satisfactory to me.However, with my mandatory retirement approaching fast, I feel that I must make these texts available for posterity while I can.When the audio files of the texts become ready, they will be posted on my website at honorewatanabe.com.However, this website is only temporary, since I cannot maintain it indefinitely.I hope they can be hosted at my university's library, but if not, I will look for other archives.In either case, I will label them with tags like 'Sliammon' and 'texts', so that they will be searchable.(This is another reason to keep the term 'Sliammon,' as I discuss in the next section.) About the 'Sliammon' languageWhat to call a language spoken by a group of people is often not a simple matter, but quite a complex issue, and the language in question is no exception.The language used in the narratives is the ancestral language of four presentday groups, which are now referred to as 'First Nations': Tla'amin (Sliammon), Klahoose, Homalco, and Comox.The first three Nations have traditionally lived on the mainland of Canada, while the fourth is on Vancouver Island.(The Homalco Nation moved their housing site to the present-day city of Campbell River on Vancouver Island in the early 1990s.)The traditional language spoken by these four Nations is the same language, but with a clear dialectal division between the first three and the last one, that is, between that of the Mainland and Vancouver Island.Most notably, the Island dialect lacks the consonant θ.Where the Mainland dialect has θ, the Island dialect has s.There are no longer any first language speakers of the Vancouver Island dialect.It is difficult to say whether there are any dialectal differences between Tla'amin, Klahoose, and Homalco, since there was no systematic research on these three First Nations.I have noticed some minute differences that could possibly be dialectal; however, by the time I started my research, the number of speakers was not large enough to determine whether such differences were dialects or idiolects, or perhaps speech traits of different families.degree from Kyoto University.The title of my dissertation was "A Morphological Description of Sliammon, Mainland Comox Salish."During the Japanese academic year of 2002 (April, 2002-March, 2003), I had the opportunity to spend a year abroad, and I chose to spend almost the whole period living in tiyskʷat/Powell River and conducted research at tʼəšusəm.This resulted in the publication of a revised version of my dissertation, A Morphological Description of Sliammon, Mainland Comox Salish, with a Sketch of Syntax, published in 2003.Beginning in 1990, I traveled from Japan to tʼəšusəm every year, usually in the summer but in some years also in winter, until 2020, right before the global pandemic.(The only exception was the summer of 2016, when my son, Ao, was born.
Honoré Watanabe (Tue,) studied this question.