Siouan tongue twisters?

[Wallace Chafe]

I'm sort of a lurker on this list, because I don't have new things to 
say about Caddo. However, I'd like to second enthusiastically two of 
Bob's points. I've also decided that trying to serve two very different 
audiences doesn't work out very well, and that it's better to serve them 
separately. Also, and here I feel enormously guilty, everyone should be 
advised to do as much in the way of documentation as they can while they 
can. I'm trying in my spare time (!) to prepare a Caddo dictionary and 
texts, but I wish I'd devoted much more time to that many years ago. The 
very best speaker died in 1970 (!) and it was impossible to find anyone 
nearly as good after that. However, I probably could have tried harder 
and I was always distracted by the more rewarding situation among the 
Senecas. The beautiful Caddo language deserves better treatment than 
I've given it.

Wally

On 5/12/2013 1:59 PM, Rankin, Robert L. wrote:
> > kóge glelábliⁿ gléblaⁿ húyaⁿ glelábliⁿnaⁿ gléblaⁿ glelábliⁿ aglíⁿ 
> glelábliⁿ."
>
> Dick Carter used to have a couple of Lakota personal names in which a 
> string of gl- and bl- sequences served as a humorous device.  Wish I 
> could remember them: maybe someone else can. One involved the word for 
> 'whirlwind'.
>
> Let me second Jimm's plea to all of you with untranscribed and/or 
> unanalyzed linguistic data, especially from Siouan languages than are 
> now extinct.  Just in my professional lifetime Quapaw, Osage, Kaw, 
> Tutelo, Ioway, and Otoe have gone.  Mandan is very close, and Hochank 
> is not too far behind with Ponca and Omaha in line behind those.  This 
> is not something I expected to see 40 years ago, but it is now all too 
> painfully obvious.
>
> And while I am reiterating Jimm's message, permit me to express a 
> prejudice that I have come to believe in very strongly.  For those of 
> you working on dictionaries and/or grammars, please do not fall into 
> the trap of trying to write a treatment that "will be useful to 
> students and linguists alike."  Such attempts, in my opinion and 
> experience, */always/* fall between two stools, and neither audience 
> is served thereby.  Just go ahead and write two books, one for Native 
> people who wish to learn the language, and another for linguists who 
> deserve a properly unintelligible technical treatment. Nowadays it is 
> not difficult to produce two parallel treatments with a word processor 
> using "find and replace" along with "cut and paste". The extra work 
> will be well worth the effort.  This is what LInda and I are trying to 
> do with Kaw.
>
> When I begain field work with Quapaw in 1972, I discovered I was 
> already a couple of years too late.  When I shifted my attention to 
> Kawin '73, I promised to complete a dictionary and grammar in a few 
> years. I finished the dictionary database in 1985, but it has now been 
> 40 years since I began, and a dictionary for teaching purposes has 
> only just appeared.  The text collection appeared only a couple of 
> years ago with the absolutely indispensable help of Justin and Linda.  
> I am now retired and 74 yrs. old.  I'll be lucky to finish the grammar 
> project, so please do */not/* follow in my footsteps and postpone the 
> writing until it's too late for the language and maybe too late for /you/.
>
> Bob

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