relative roots

[Wayne Leman]

I am quite sure that X would not work as part of English losses for relative roots for Cheyennes. They have enough difficulty with the other technical terms I have put in their dictionary, including obviative, oblique, exclusive, inclusive, conjunct, etc. If I had it to do all over again (I'm in the waning (pun intended) years of some of my work on Cheyenne, I would make a much greater effort to work with Cheyennes to come up with grammatical terms which Cheyennes would appreciate and understand. I did some of that. I refer in my literacy classes to the building "blocks" of Cheyenne words, rather than "morphemes."

We need to listen again to some of the pleas for better local community involvement in all aspects of language work and publication (for the people themselves, pleas which have been expressed well in the recent Univ. of Calif. anthology on making dictionaries for Nat. Am. languages.

I think that there are quite reasonable, commonly used English words which can work well for glosses of Alg. relative roots. We linguists may have to give up some of our Alg. terminology, at least for indigenous audiences, but that may not be such a bad idea--including when writing for the linguistic community.

Wayne
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Wayne Leman
Cheyenne website: http://www.geocities.com/cheyenne_language
  Yeah, that's exactly the point - I just don't  think 'thus' is user-friendly except for linguists who are used to these bizarre definitions (a good 'hither' one for Menominee is the preverb defined as 'in the hither course of time' - anybody got a good translation for that one?!?).


  One of the students working as a PA on the project had the following to say (Becky, I hope you don't mind that I'm forwarding it!):


  Hi Monica - I can't remember if I mentioned this when we talked about it before, but I personally like to gloss relative roots with an X. So aeN- would be 'in X manner', other relative roots would be 'X fast', 'X long', 'X many times', etc. This indicates clearly to me that the relative root denotes a variable that needs to be filled in by an expression elsewhere in the sentence. Not sure if that works for all audiences, but anyway it's another option to consider. I think both 'thus' and 'in that way' are very misleading glosses.


  I also totally agree with David Costa's comments about not expecting a dictionary to explain the grammer to people.


  -becky


  My first reaction was that using the X would be way too mathmatical-looking, but it does get across the fact that something needs to be filled.  Has anyone considered this or done it?  I think it's something I would definitely need to get speaker/learner input on before doing!


  - Monica
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