?u sisi?ab [O honourable ones]

Certainly here in the vicinity of the Whulge (x^welĉ) [aka Puget Sound, as the latecomers call it] English is an interloper (and a considerably more recent one than it is in Cymru). On the theory that when one moves to a new country one really ought to learn the language, I am working on learning Lushootseed 47 years after I was born of second-generation invaders in the land where Lushootseed ought by rights to be the majority tongue but is instead spoken fluently by only two or three hundred mostly older folk.

Incidentally, my main instructor in the language, who heads the language programs of the Muckleshoot Tribe, is not himself of Puget Sound ancestry, but rather is half Afghan, half Nakota (Sioux); he learned his first Lushootseed from his Puyallup stepfather.

lilend