Glossary of Athabaskan terms

[James Crippen]

Keren Rice at the LSA 2009 Institute this summer handed out a two page
glossary of Athabaskanist terminology to her class on Athabaskan
linguistics. This is something I've been thinking about for a while,
and I think other people have too, besides Keren of course. I chatted
with her about the idea of a multi-author edited work on Athabaskanist
linguistic terminology and I've continued to ponder it since.

Here's my idea. The project would start out as an online, freely
distributed document, with the potential for later publication if any
publishers seem interested. Contributors would first compile a list of
specialized vocabulary that seems to be opaque or confusing for
linguists without experience in Athabaskan languages. We should
probably avoid vocabulary that is extremely restricted, like for
example the terminology used by Jetté for Koyukon or the terminology
used by Morice for Carrier. Instead we would focus on terms that are
used across the whole family, or which are prominent in a subgroup
like Pacific Coast languages, Southern/Apachean languages, etc.
Certain historically attested terminology which has fallen out of
favor but occurs in early literature could be included, perhaps this
might include Sapir's "first modal", "second modal", and "third modal"
elements (qualifiers and the classifer), for example. A few
non-terminological issues would be relevant too, such as a sketch of
the typical Athabaskanist transcription/orthography, a couple of
example phoneme inventories and the current proto-phoneme inventory,

Once a solid list is put together then the fun would begin. Each
contributor would choose a single term and put together a short, two
or three page description of the term. This should include examples of
the grammatical phenomenon in one or two languages, a quotation or two
from the literature which shows its use in context, and a few
citations of particularly influential publications where the
phenomenon is discussed. Ideally the description should include a
quote taken from the first publication that used the term, thus giving
an attribution to some particular researcher. Reconstructed
proto-forms would be included where they exist. The end result should
be around 100 to 150 pages, depending on how many topics we cover.

After everything is put together, I'd take it upon myself to convert
the whole thing into a professional-looking, publication-quality
document. I have lots of experience with (Xe)LaTeX and document layout
of linguistic materials, as well as several friends who are
professional publishers. Whether or not a press would accept the work,
we would still have something of high quality which could be freely
printed and bound for personal use. I would find some stable location
to host a PDF and make it available to the public, and then later
editions could be pondered.

The mechanics of collaboration are easily available online nowadays.
One solution is Google Docs, which would allow a bunch of people to
edit the same documents. Discussion would take place on this list.
Contributors would probably want to recruit people who aren't
subscribed to the list, particularly those who are recognized as being
experts on some particular phenomenon in the family.

Please reply to the list with your comments. I'd like to see this go
forward soon. I don't have the time to write the whole thing myself,
but I *do* think I can devote the time to organizing and managing the
project.

James