archaic forms
david costa
pankihtamwa at EARTHLINK.NET
Thu Nov 3 21:10:55 UTC 2005
Monica:
This is very interesting. I'm very glad you guys seem not to be under pressure to leave out archaic words I've always said that just because a word is archaic now, with the language severely contracted and down to its last handful of speakers, that doesn't mean that community members won't want to know about it anyway when the language is being revitalized. In other words, 20 or 30 years after a language has lost its last native speakers, I doubt any community members will care much whether or not the last speakers found such-and-such a word 'old fashioned'. They'll just want to know all the words.
That said, I can't see the harm in marking the different shadings of obsolescence. It would probably be best if the marking was visually discreet, using some kind of code, rather than actually writing something like 'used to be archaic still archaic' next to each such entry.
To me, the most important part of all this would be setting your policy on how to mark words that you were not able to re-elicit -- that is, words that NO modern speaker knew. For words like that, you have to take it on Bloomfield's or Hoffman's authority as to how the word was pronounced. That fact has to be in there somehow, tho I assume you've already made some provision for that. Words only found in pre-modern sources like Hoffman (how many such words are there?) should probably contain the original transcription somewhere, alongside your best guess as to how the word really was pronounced.
If there are also differences between the pronunciation of words between now and the 1920's, how you indicate archaic pronunciations would have to factor into this as well.
The problem is that there are very few precedents for handling these kinds of problems in dictionaries of American Indian languages. If you haven't already looked at it, Jack Martin's recent Creek dictionary is a splendid example of how to tackle the problem of marking original written sources and archaic words.
best,
Dave Costa
-----Original Message-----
From: Monica Macaulay <mmacaula at WISC.EDU>
Sent: Nov 3, 2005 10:01 AM
To: ALGONQDICT at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: archaic forms
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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