archaic forms

[Monica Macaulay]

David, you raise all sorts of good points.  A few responses:

* I totally agree that it's important to keep the archaic stuff in,  
for precisely the reasons you lay out.  Furthermore, for us - since  
our comprehensive version will be for the community and for scholars  
- we know that the scholarly community would want it all there.   
(Obviously for our beginner's and intermediate versions, and for  
others whose audience is primarily the community, this would need a  
different approach.)

* And, we will definitely put in the original orthography because in  
a lot of cases I have a feeling we're not going to be able to figure  
out what the actual pronunciation was.

And thanks for the ref to Jack's dictionary of Creek - I haven't seen  
it and will track down a copy.

- Monica

On Nov 3, 2005, at 3:10 PM, david costa wrote:

> Monica:
>
> This is very interesting. I'm very glad you guys seem not to be  
> under pressure to leave out archaic words – I've always said that  
> just because a word is archaic now, with the language severely  
> contracted and down to its last handful of speakers, that doesn't  
> mean that community members won't want to know about it anyway when  
> the language is being revitalized. In other words, 20 or 30 years  
> after a language has lost its last native speakers, I doubt any  
> community members will care much whether or not the last speakers  
> found such-and-such a word 'old fashioned'. They'll just want to  
> know all the words.
>
> That said, I can't see the harm in marking the different shadings  
> of obsolescence. It would probably be best if the marking was  
> visually discreet, using some kind of code, rather than actually  
> writing something like 'used to be archaic – still archaic' next to  
> each such entry.
>
> To me, the most important part of all this would be setting your  
> policy on how to mark words that you were not able to re-elicit --  
> that is, words that NO modern speaker knew. For words like that,  
> you have to take it on Bloomfield's or Hoffman's authority as to  
> how the word was pronounced. That fact has to be in there somehow,  
> tho I assume you've already made some provision for that. Words  
> only found in pre-modern sources like Hoffman (how many such words  
> are there?) should probably contain the original transcription  
> somewhere, alongside your best guess as to how the word really was  
> pronounced.
>
> If there are also differences between the pronunciation of words  
> between now and the 1920's, how you indicate archaic pronunciations  
> would have to factor into this as well.
>
> The problem is that there are very few precedents for handling  
> these kinds of problems in dictionaries of American Indian  
> languages. If you haven't already looked at it, Jack Martin's  
> recent Creek dictionary is a splendid example of how to tackle the  
> problem of marking original written sources and archaic words.
>
> best,
> Dave Costa
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Monica Macaulay <mmacaula at WISC.EDU>
> Sent: Nov 3, 2005 10:01 AM
> To: ALGONQDICT at listserv.linguistlist.org
> Subject: archaic forms
>
> Posoh fellow Algonquian dictionary compilers...
>
> As promised, I'm going to throw out a topic for discussion.  This has
> arisen in the context of our Menominee dictionary.  We of course have
> used Bloomfield's Lexicon as a base, and sometimes he marks things as
> "archaic."  We put a checkbox into our database and checked it when
> he made that notation.  However, it dawned on me that there was
> another, similar situation, which was when we asked our speakers
> about a word from the Lexicon, and they didn't know it.  We were
> putting that in our notes field as "not familiar."  So I started
> wondering if we should check "archaic" for those, or have a new
> checkbox, or what.  It seemed important to me to have a record of
> what Bloomfield found to be archaic in the 1920s and to keep that
> distinct from what the speakers today are not familiar with.  I think
> there's a difference between words that were archaic in the 1920s
> when there was still a viable community of speakers, and words which
> are unknown today, when there are very few speakers and the language
> is in a severe state of attrition.  Furthermore, there is definite
> register compression (to use Ives' term), with the elders constantly
> saying "oh, that's that High Menominee, which we didn't learn."  We
> started a project-internal discussion of it and Becky Shields wrote
> this long message laying out a huge list of possibilities (which I'll
> paste in below), and now we're stumped about how much to include.  So
> I thought I'd ask the list, and see if anyone else has considered
> this issue.  Here's Becky's message:
>
> Thanks for the discussion ? I think I see the complexity of the issue
> more clearly now. And I now agree that it would be useful to
> distinguish between various types of ?unknown? words.
>
> Here?s the way I see it now (sorry if I?m repeating a lot of what you
> just said ? just trying to systematize it in a way that makes sense
> to me):
>
> There are at least two different issues:
>
> 1)       there are colloquial and formal registers, and the formal
> register may contain archaic words which (presumably) used to be in
> the colloquial register in the past, but now survive only in prayers,
> storytelling, etc. Speakers familiar with the formal register know
> these words, but do not use them in everyday conversation.
> 2)       there are words that have totally fallen out of use (in all
> registers). These are ?unknown? words.
>
> In addition, the data we are analyzing come from two distinct time
> periods:
> A)     1920?s
> B)      contemporary (1980?s-present, if we include data gathered by
> Tim Guile, etc.?)
>
> In principle, there could be distinct sets of both archaic and
> unknown words at each time period. So there are four possibilities:
> 1A) archaic words in the 1920s ? words LB found in use only in the
> formal register, presumably the ones he calls ?archaic? in the lexicon
> 2A) unknown words in the 1920s ? words from earlier sources (like
> Hoffman?) that LB?s speakers did not know. If LB didn?t do this type
> of elicitation, we may not be aware of any of these.
> 1B) contemporary archaic words ? words that speakers currently know,
> but use only in formal registers like prayers. Lavina and Marie may
> not know this register much at all, but perhaps some male speakers
> (Joe Beaver?) do, or perhaps there are some prayers or stories on the
> pre-2000 tapes. I have definitely heard Marie and Sarah say about
> certain words that they recognized them only from some prayer, so
> this set certainly has some members.
> 2B) contemporary unknown words ? words not in use by contemporary
> speakers. As you point out, we have a very limited set of
> contemporary speakers, even if tapes from the 80s and 90s are
> included. This limits our data set, and in addition contemporary
> speakers probably have a smaller vocabulary than speakers in the 20s,
> due to the moribund status of the language. This is just a fact of
> life though, and I don?t know what we can do about it, other than be
> very very sad! We are certainly obligated to report what we actually
> observe, and not what we wish we had observed. And definitely not try
> to pretend we observed what LB observed. Accurately documenting
> language attrition could also be very useful.
>
> The sets obviously might overlap ? so words in 1A may now be in 1B,
> 2B, or even have become known (although this seems unlikely). So
> actually for any given word there are multiple possibilities. These
> seem the most likely combinations to me:
> -          1A-1B (used to be archaic ? still archaic)
> -          1A-2B (used to be archaic ? now unknown)
> -          2A-2B (used to be unknown ? still unknown)
> -          1B (used to be colloquial ? now archaic)
> -          2B (used to be colloquial ? now unknown)
> -          (and of course the unmarked case ? used to be colloquial ?
> still colloquial)
>
> Maybe that?s more detail than anybody needs or wants, I don?t know. J
> But as you guys pointed out, this info could be useful to historical/
> comparative linguists, and community members interested in bringing
> back older words, and also people studying language death.
>
> -becky
>
> So we would be very interested to hear what y'all have to say on the
> matter.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Monica Macaulay
> Department of Linguistics
> 1168 Van Hise Hall
> 1220 Linden Drive
> Madison, WI  53706
> phone (608) 262-2292
> fax (608) 265-3193
> http://ling.wisc.edu/~macaulay/monica.html
>
>

Department of Linguistics
University of Wisconsin
1168 Van Hise Hall; 1220 Linden Drive
Madison, WI  53706
phone (608) 262-2292; fax (608) 265-3193
http://ling.wisc.edu/~macaulay/monica.html


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