Language
Yurok is one of two Algic languages spoken in California, the other being Wiyot. Between twenty and one hundred people speak the Yurok language today. The language is passed on through master-apprentice teams and through singing. Language classes have been offered through Humboldt State University and through annual language immersion camps.
A usual feature of the language is that certain nouns change depending upon whether there is one, two, or three of the object. For instance, one human being would be ko:ra' or ko'r, two human beings would be ni'iyel, and three human beings would be nahkseyt.
Read more about this topic: Yurok People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful booka book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910)
“Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.”
—Thomas Carlyle (17951881)
“English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)