archaic forms

[Monica Macaulay]

Posoh fellow Algonquian dictionary compilers...

As promised, I'm going to throw out a topic for discussion.  This has  
arisen in the context of our Menominee dictionary.  We of course have  
used Bloomfield's Lexicon as a base, and sometimes he marks things as  
"archaic."  We put a checkbox into our database and checked it when  
he made that notation.  However, it dawned on me that there was  
another, similar situation, which was when we asked our speakers  
about a word from the Lexicon, and they didn't know it.  We were  
putting that in our notes field as "not familiar."  So I started  
wondering if we should check "archaic" for those, or have a new  
checkbox, or what.  It seemed important to me to have a record of  
what Bloomfield found to be archaic in the 1920s and to keep that  
distinct from what the speakers today are not familiar with.  I think  
there's a difference between words that were archaic in the 1920s  
when there was still a viable community of speakers, and words which  
are unknown today, when there are very few speakers and the language  
is in a severe state of attrition.  Furthermore, there is definite  
register compression (to use Ives' term), with the elders constantly  
saying "oh, that's that High Menominee, which we didn't learn."  We  
started a project-internal discussion of it and Becky Shields wrote  
this long message laying out a huge list of possibilities (which I'll  
paste in below), and now we're stumped about how much to include.  So  
I thought I'd ask the list, and see if anyone else has considered  
this issue.  Here's Becky's message:

Thanks for the discussion – I think I see the complexity of the issue  
more clearly now. And I now agree that it would be useful to  
distinguish between various types of “unknown” words.

Here’s the way I see it now (sorry if I’m repeating a lot of what you  
just said – just trying to systematize it in a way that makes sense  
to me):

There are at least two different issues:

1)       there are colloquial and formal registers, and the formal  
register may contain archaic words which (presumably) used to be in  
the colloquial register in the past, but now survive only in prayers,  
storytelling, etc. Speakers familiar with the formal register know  
these words, but do not use them in everyday conversation.
2)       there are words that have totally fallen out of use (in all  
registers). These are “unknown” words.

In addition, the data we are analyzing come from two distinct time  
periods:
A)     1920’s
B)      contemporary (1980’s-present, if we include data gathered by  
Tim Guile, etc.?)

In principle, there could be distinct sets of both archaic and  
unknown words at each time period. So there are four possibilities:
1A) archaic words in the 1920s – words LB found in use only in the  
formal register, presumably the ones he calls “archaic” in the lexicon
2A) unknown words in the 1920s – words from earlier sources (like  
Hoffman?) that LB’s speakers did not know. If LB didn’t do this type  
of elicitation, we may not be aware of any of these.
1B) contemporary archaic words – words that speakers currently know,  
but use only in formal registers like prayers. Lavina and Marie may  
not know this register much at all, but perhaps some male speakers  
(Joe Beaver?) do, or perhaps there are some prayers or stories on the  
pre-2000 tapes. I have definitely heard Marie and Sarah say about  
certain words that they recognized them only from some prayer, so  
this set certainly has some members.
2B) contemporary unknown words – words not in use by contemporary  
speakers. As you point out, we have a very limited set of  
contemporary speakers, even if tapes from the 80s and 90s are  
included. This limits our data set, and in addition contemporary  
speakers probably have a smaller vocabulary than speakers in the 20s,  
due to the moribund status of the language. This is just a fact of  
life though, and I don’t know what we can do about it, other than be  
very very sad! We are certainly obligated to report what we actually  
observe, and not what we wish we had observed. And definitely not try  
to pretend we observed what LB observed. Accurately documenting  
language attrition could also be very useful.

The sets obviously might overlap – so words in 1A may now be in 1B,  
2B, or even have become known (although this seems unlikely). So  
actually for any given word there are multiple possibilities. These  
seem the most likely combinations to me:
-          1A-1B (used to be archaic – still archaic)
-          1A-2B (used to be archaic – now unknown)
-          2A-2B (used to be unknown – still unknown)
-          1B (used to be colloquial – now archaic)
-          2B (used to be colloquial – now unknown)
-          (and of course the unmarked case – used to be colloquial –  
still colloquial)

Maybe that’s more detail than anybody needs or wants, I don’t know. J  
But as you guys pointed out, this info could be useful to historical/ 
comparative linguists, and community members interested in bringing  
back older words, and also people studying language death.

-becky

So we would be very interested to hear what y'all have to say on the  
matter.

Thanks!

Monica Macaulay
Department of Linguistics
1168 Van Hise Hall
1220 Linden Drive
Madison, WI  53706
phone (608) 262-2292
fax (608) 265-3193
http://ling.wisc.edu/~macaulay/monica.html

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