archaic forms
Monica Macaulay
mmacaula at WISC.EDU
Thu Nov 17 13:25:12 UTC 2005
Thanks, Danielle! I like the idea of assigning such words a symbol -
you could use the "dagger" footnote symbol or something.
On Nov 17, 2005, at 3:06 AM, Danielle E. Cyr wrote:
> Evolutionary phonetic laws are, with very few exceptions, pervasive
> in a language. So if we can establish concordances between archaic
> words that are still known or used by contemporary speakers and
> their present pronunciation, then we should be able to predict how
> a now unknown word should be pronounced. However, the question
> will then arise as to what to do with words whose use has not
> continue until present time. Should we assign them a virtual
> contemporary pronunciation or should we just transcribe them in a
> modern orthography that would simply account for their archaic
> pronunciation (plus, of course, consign their archaic orthography
> somewhere as well).
>
> In contemporary Mìgmaq, for many words we still find co-existing
> archaic and contemporary pronunciations for many words. In our
> Metallic Mìgmag-English Reference Dictionary we have chosen to
> enter the two forms as headwords, with the full description,
> meaning, etc. under the headword in the archaic form, and cross-
> reference it with the other other more modern form and vice-vers.
> This was possible because the two forms still co-exist. When they
> don't coexist, I would suggest to simply enter the archaic form
> under its corresponding modern orthography, with a symbol
> indicating that it is no more in use, give its archaic meaning,
> dated source, archaic orthography and leave it as such. The reason
> I recommend that is that it will make it easier for the reader/user
> of the dictionary to search words across time and dialect without
> bothering with various orthographies in the headwords (which would
> also be very unaesthetic and somewhat ackward as well). The Shorter
> OED, among others now uses that strategy and I find it very righ
> and useful.
>
> Best regards to all
> Danielle Cyr
> ______________
>
>
> Danielle E. Cyr, Ph.D.
> Full Professor
> York University
> 4700 Keele Street
> Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3
> Tel. 1-416-736-2100 # 30180
> email dcyr at yorku.ca
>
> Sabbatical address:
>
> 339, Boulevard Perron Ouest
> New Richmond, QC
> Canada G0C 2B0
> Tel. 1-418-392-7271
> email danielle.e.cyr at globetrotter.net
>
> From: Monica Macaulay <mmacaula at WISC.EDU>
> Reply-To: Monica Macaulay <mmacaula at WISC.EDU>
> Date: Mon, 07 Nov 2005 10:38:19 -0600
> To: ALGONQDICT at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
> Subject: Re: archaic forms
>
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
Monica Macaulay
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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