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Jimm, Thank you so much for this generous-spirited & thoughtful reply! Your note of caution to me is obviously well-considered, and straightforwardly made, and I appreciate that. <div>I did realize that I was addressing a group of trained linguistic analysts & professional Siouanists, rather than an audience of literary aesthetes, and yet, in a way, you are exactly the people I've long been wanting to talk to about this, and to learn more from! I wish to subject my intuitions to the disciplined & rational light of linguistic science.</div><div> May I explain myself a little further? : As I say, I am acutely conscious of a pronounced emotive component in my enthusiasm for the rich Lakhota style of Emil AFH, but I wish to counterbalance & critique that possible bias with as rigorous a linguistic analysis of AFH's Lakhota vocabulary & syntax, as his texts can possibly bear. It is about much more, for me, than merely confirming my private prejudices & inevitable biasses. I'd like to ascertain whether, (as I'm now strongly inclined to believe) this man Emil AFH. is a significant & remarkable, </div><div>indeed "sui generis", Lakhotaiyapi author. My personal "discovery" of his quality occurred sometime after I'd begun to seriously & systematically apply myself to the study of Lakhota & Dakota, about 5 -6 years back, using B&D (1941), Buechel's 1939 Gr. (1939), Bruce Ingham's 2001 "Lakota" monograph, Rood & Taylor's CULP material & Sketch, MA & PhD theses such as those by Willem DeReuse & Berthold Simons, Internet sites such Jan Ullrich's invaluable one, and various journal papers from IJAL by many scholars here. </div><div> Having also read with close attention by then, a great deal of of Buechel's Lakhota Bible History stories(1924), all of Ella C. Deloria's (1932) Dakota Tales, and as much of the Bushotter corpus as I could manage, I next acquired a copy of "Watakpeya Tanka" ("The Great Crusader"), his 1925 translation of an English version by an American Jesuit Fr. Bernard Wildenhues S.J. of a German language abridgement (1922) of Fr. George Schurhammer S.J.'s voluminous biography of the Roman-Catholic Missionary Saint of the Far East, St. Francis Xavier. I have read & studied all three of those texts now, and am in the process of a close reading & rereading of every one of those Lakhota language BIA readers, translated by E. AFH. I was utterly astonished to find, in the first few chapters of "WT", evocative Lakhota language descriptions of intimidatingly majestic Mediaeval castles on mountain tops in the Basque country of NE Spain, (Xavier's stamping ground, as you will no doubt know). I think it was then that I realized that I'd stumbled across something quite extraordinary. E. AFH's Lakhota style seemed so difficult, &, in some ways, unlike any of the Lakhota I was already familiar with, both in subject matter, vocab. and to a certain extent syntactically. That encounter so fired my imagination & stimulated the intellect, that I became determined to learn more about him, and analyse his fascinatingly difficult Lakhota. </div><div> I'd like to tell you a little more about my personal background, to enable you & other members here to form a clear picture of "where I'm coming from", as they say. I realize that excessive & gratuitous personal revelations are not encouraged on what must remain a list for scholars, but perhaps just this once, it may be necessary & relevant for me to clarify matters, & tell a little of what I'm on about? I dare say that, as one might reasonably expect in a professional community, most of you on the list would be well acquainted, through conferences, shared professional experiences, etc., over many years. I would like to introduce myself a little, & to get to know you all somewhat better.</div><div> I am not (obviously) a professional linguist, & do not presume to be your equals in depth of knowledge & sophistication in that particular discipline. However, I have been fortunate enough to have been on the 'receiving-end' of some excellent training, under the 'old' (60's & 70's), quite exacting, university régime/dispensation in the field of Classics (Ancient/Mod.Greek & Latin), esp. in Classical Philology and textual criticism. I was privileged to have been trained, by lecturers & senior academics who had earned their "wings" at Ox-bridge or the U.S. 'Ivy League', to take a classical text 'apart', parsing each word precisely, and by constantly analysing the syntactic contruction of its clauses & long "periods" minutely, as one goes through it. We also had to learn composition/translation in those languages, an art which has mostly now become a thing of the past, practically everywhere, nowadays. To me, its linguistic value alone in taking one "inside" the language, so to speak, made it well worth the effort! So I am very at home with getting my philological "teeth", so to speak, into more or less demanding & complex texts such as Homer's "Iliad/Odyssey", Pindar's "Odes", Aeschylus' "Oresteia", Sophocles' "Oedipus Tyrannus", Horace's "Odes', or Virgil's "Aeneid" - masterpieces to which , naturally, it is difficult, (not to say impossible!), not to have a frequently earth-shattering emotional reaction, as well as sheer intellectual pleasure! I have also studied Italian at tertiary level to the point of reading Leopardi, & Dante's Inferno, and have been studying many languages of diverse families for some decades, at least since I was a brow-beaten Catholic altar boy, tremblingly repeating the Latin responses during the old Mass from about 1958 onwards! </div><div> Basically, I want to learn to apply those analytical skills, to these texts in Lakhota/Dakota/Nakota/Nakoda, in particular, and eventually to learn as much as possible, about the other languages belonging to this fascinating family! I have learned to be on guard against possible Eurocentric linguistic "blinkers", having studied a few non-Indo E. languages such as Finnish, Turkish in some depth, & a measure of Georgian & Classical Arabic as well.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>It seems to me that these 1940's BIA reader's translated by E. AFH are a potential "well of (Lakhotaiyapi) undefiled", as Dryden said about the Middle English (mutatis mutandis) of Chaucer's CanterburyTales (I think). So many of the words in Afraid-Of-Hawk, EITHER do not occur at all in Buechel-Manhart -- I do understand that Rigg's works & B-Md. was a groundbreaking, pioneering work, and would not wish to be thought of as belittling Fr. Buech.'s fine achievement -- OR else one has to hunt them up, & do some (hopefully) educated guesswork on the evidence of any cognate roots, using such knowledge as one may have acquired of the laws of Lakhota Word-building (esp. gratia B&D). I find the "discovery" entailed by this process continually fascinating, and sometimes even exhilarating! I haven't derived such intellectual & emotional pleasure from a text, since grappling with the rigours of Thucydidean speeches, which any Classicist will tell you can be horrendously difficult, even for very experienced scholars!</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>I would submit that there is a treasure house of new vocabulary, & perhaps new light shed on some aspects of lakhota syntax, to be gained from close study of E. AFH's texts.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>For instance only last night, I found the word : "woguonazeye" /wog^uonazeye/ (presumably with accent on initial syllable (?). E.A. Kennard did not transcribe word accents ) used for "COFFE-POT" [Brave Ag.The Enemy" 1944, p.163]. I had already learned, thanks to Bruce's estimable efforts, the word "wíkhalye". Emil AFH's word is not to be found in B-Md., or Riggs, but "og^ú" : 'scraps; dregs; coffee grounds' is! Nor does the item "onazeye" occur there, but, sure enough, 'nazéyA' 'to filter' is there, so with some pondering on the functions & nuances of those locative prefixes, again by the grace of Buechel, B&D, Riggs and Ingham, it is not too difficult to work out how the word came to be used with that meaning.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Two further examples : the reflexive verb 'wicalaic'iyA' <'wicala/ in the sense of 'induce oneself believe/persuade oneself--->admit/confess to oneself (a home truth)' occurs in the 4th para. of that extended excerpt I posted from BAtE [p.19] the other day, but is nowhere in Buechel, or Riggs.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>In the 2nd, paragraph, [Ibid. same page] : "waNwichaglagyeh^ci" which appears to have an adverbial sense something like "under his very eyes", or perhaps better : "under their owner's very gaze" (his herds died away). Clearly, from "WaNyaNkA". Could it be here a truncated or "frozen" Possessive-Dative verb-form, used ADVERBIALLY (adverb-equivalent? of accompanying circumstance? a 'Participle' as Buechel would have it) to qualify that principal clause verb? ["...(ptegleshka optaye waN).....saNp conala AYAPI"]. [=under their owner's very (-h^ci") gaze, a buffalo herd dwindled way.]</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Lastly, I would like to say that any Lakhota writer who is capable of opening a novella, as Emil AFH does in BAtE [p.5], with a dramatically vivid scene of a car screeching to a halt in a cloud of dust, as a teenage boy leaps athletically from the moving vehicle before it arrives, in florid Lakhota, has won me over for life! ;D I think he must have had a truly remarkable mind! An artist with words, in my opinion, whose life, given his elderly status in the early '40's, must encompassed profound traditional knowledge, in addition to substantial experience of the modern world of the early to mid XXc.!</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>The whole concept of Native American writers producing their own literature in their own language, e.g. poetry (as with the wonderful Lucie Tapahonso, or Rex Lee Jim for Navajo, mingled with English) using the native tongue, or biographies, or novellas (even in translation) like Emil AFH, really excites me. Yet I suppose from a publisher's mundane angle, they wouldn't exactly 'leap off the shelf', as they say? If only Emil had written an Autobiography (à la Bushotter), or a Lakhota novel! His long life must have been so interesting. </div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>To answer your last inquiry Jimm, I do not know exactly when Emil AFH died, but I think that he may have been the same Emil who is mentioned in "Fools Crow" by Th.Mails, as the father in law in Chief Frank. If that is he, then he was possibly born around 1855, which is also remarkable because if so, he must have been in his 80's when translating those readers, and had truly, by then, been a denizen of two cultural universes! Perhaps that may explain the difficulty & richness of much of his (old fashioned?) vocabulary? I have acquired all of his BIA texts, as well as two seemingly relatively unremarkable articles in English by him from the old "Indian Sentinel" from 1932, and 1943 respectively. I wrote to the Archivist at the Oglala Lakota College, last year, but received no reply. Perhaps they thought I must be what we Aussies call a "ratbag" ("crack-pot" in American, I understand)! Not to worry. ;)</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>As for Ann NOLAN CLARK, here is a Wiki article for you :</div><div> </div></body></html>