(Commenting on Facebook about a photo of a California quail.)

One of my favorite desert birds! And agreed on Qaxal, which looks so lovely spelled out. Alas, it’s probably just about impossible to pronounce for we English speakers, or for just about any speaker of an Indo-European language. From the sounds alone you can feel the thousands of generations that separate the development of the sounds our mouths use to speak English from the sounds a táxliswet (a Cahuilla person, per Wikipedia) uses to speak the Cahuilla language. Hell, we call the language Cahuilla because we can’t possibly say ʔívil̃uʔat. We call the the tribe Cahuilla because we can’t possibly say ʔívil̃uqaletem. The Spanish called them Cahuilla because the ʔívil̃uʔat word for master sounded something like “cahuilla” to a Spaniard’s ear. That’s right, for master. Amazing the history in a word.

And while we’re not on the subject, Chemehuevi and Cahuilla are about as distant from one another as English is from Hindustani, that is, part of the same language family but each gone it’s own way for many thousands of years since they were the same language. Alas, Chemehuevi (which i seem to remember is actually a Mojave word spelled out in Spanish, I don’t know what their own word for their own language was) is now extinct with no living speakers who learned it as children. It survives in academic circles mostly, or in how to pronounce apps (like the one I heard that pronounces “Chemeheuvi” in a beautifully lilting Castilian accent, Spanish music strumming in the background.) Cahuilla is still spoken by a few dozen native speakers but is unlikely to survive them. It’d be nice if either qaxal or kakara, even mispronounced, survived as a name for these desert birds.

But I digress.

Great post.