A near half-century long effort to document a language spoken in and around California's San Joaquin Valley.
The snow-capped Sierra Nevada Mountains and nearby foothills, with California Aster flowers and other native plants.
What started in 1969 with a request by Cecile Silva that I write down her history and language for her and her sisters Mary Friedrichs, Virginia Aguilar and Susie Metcalf became a project that has spanned fifty years. Since there are no known speakers remaining that have the linguistic subtleties that Cecile and Mary had, the dictionary is rich in audio examples of words and example sentences. In addition there are also numerous examples of longer streams of speech where Cecile or Mary tell us some of the classic stories they heard when they were young and give us many ethnographic descriptions about the cultural world in which they grew up. The effort to document the Wikchamni language and culture is finally online for everyone to enjoy.
Importantly, while there are several different accepted spellings of this language in the community, for the purposes of simplicity in these online works (this website and my dictionary) I've promoted the use of one particular spelling, that given to me by Cecile Silva, consistently throughout these pages.
Here is an example MLA formatted citation, to copy and paste when citing this dictionary:
Gamble, Geoffrey. A Wikchamni Dictionary. Fresno State Library, California State University, Fresno, 1 September 2019, wikchamnidictionary.library.csufresno.edu.
Debug Section
The following webpages each represent a debug test for Fresno State University Library's automated evaluation tools. The original evaluation of this site's lexicon failed silently, so these tests attempt to discover that point of failure.
HTML/JS Page Tests
Minimal: copy of lexicon page with few elements, no JS, and no HTML5 features (ex. templates)
No-JS (Buttons): fully-static page with HTML5 templates, but no JS (old design with buttons)
No-JS (Anchors): fully-static page with HTML5 templates, but no JS (new design with anchors)
Static (Buttons): static page with JS, but no dynamic page modification (old buttons design)
Static (Anchors): static page with JS, but no dynamic page modification (new anchors design)
Dynamic (20 elem): dynamic page w/ full database code, but renders only 20/5078 eng entries
Dynamic (500 elem): dynamic page w/ full database code, but renders only 500/5078 eng entries
Expensive JS: dynamic page with few elements which spoofs expensive JS ops and dynamically modifies html
Static Full Eng: large fully-static frozen render of eng database w/ no JS or HTML5 features
Crawler Tests
Unlinked Page: crawler test page that appears in sitemap, but is never linked to by another page
Unmapped Page: crawler test page that is linked to, but not included in sitemap
