FW: Error Condition Re: RE: Chiwere Popular Orthography

Rankin, Robert L rankin at ku.edu
Mon Apr 16 16:05:50 UTC 2001


If you go down far enough, you'll find my message.  Bob

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Subject: Error Condition Re: RE: Chiwere Popular Orthography



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JOIN THE (ALREADY VERY LARGE) CLUB! I SYMPATHIZE AND HAVE THE SAME PROBLEM

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From: "Rankin, Robert L" <rankin at ku.edu>
To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: RE: Chiwere Popular Orthography
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> I am running into real difficulty with coming up with an
> orthography that is
> acceptable to the speaking community. There is an absolute
> resistance to a
> standard orthography.

Join the (already very large) club! I sympathize and have the same problem
with Kaws who desperately want to stick with English spelling conventions.
It is a universal problem and one to which I have no solution. If there are
essentially no native speakers, it probably won't be possible to get people
to agree. Period. No matter what you do, folks will revert to their own
private spellings to "clarify" what you give them.

I happen to be one of those curmudgeonly guys who thinks that "teacher knows
best." And as the author of your materials, you are in a strong position to
be a little insistent. It's obvious that people are going to want to be able
to use Jimm's dictionary, so I think that is the system I'd use myself.
Linguists use X for the velar fricative because the Greeks use it that way,
and when linguists ran out of Roman letters, they went to the Greek alphabet
for more symbols. You can try to get agreement from your users, but I have
to be pessimistic about your chances.

When we are taught Spanish in high school, we don't get a choice about how
to spell [x]. They just tell us we're gonna have to learn that it's spelled
with <j> most of the time and <g> in front of i or e. Sometimes you just
have to try to use your influence to impose a solution.  Good luck!

Bob



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