Siouan tongue twisters?

[De Reuse, Willem]

Greetings, Wally.

Don't feel too bad about this. As Bloomfield famously said, it is almost impossible to document one language in a lifetime, and you have documented two.  Looking forward to the Caddo dictionary and texts.

Best wishes to all.

Willem
________________________________
From: Siouan Linguistics [SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] on behalf of Wallace Chafe [chafe at LINGUISTICS.UCSB.EDU]
Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2013 7:24 PM
To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu
Subject: Re: Siouan tongue twisters?

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 Kaw in '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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