Glossary of Athabaskan terms

[Seth Cable]

Hi James,

Another benefit of this would be that it might clarify the semantics  
of certain prefixes and aspectual modes, or at the very least, clarify  
what is actually known about them.  In what sense, for example, is the  
'distributive' distributive?  How does the 'customary' differ from the  
'habitual' or from the 'iterative'?  How does a 'habitual' differ from  
an imperfective interpreted as a generic statement?  I have no idea  
what exists for individual languages on these questions, and often  
wish there was some way of learning this more effectively.

Best,

-- Seth.

====================================
Seth Cable
scable at linguist.umass.edu
Department of Linguistics
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
226 South College
150 Hicks Way
Amherst, MA 01003-9274
United States
413-545-0885
http://people.umass.edu/scable





On Oct 1, 2009, at 11:18 PM, James Crippen wrote:

> Keren Rice at the LSA 2009 Institute this summer handed out a two page
> glossary of Athabaskanist terminology to her class on Athabaskan
> linguistics. This is something I've been thinking about for a while,
> and I think other people have too, besides Keren of course. I chatted
> with her about the idea of a multi-author edited work on Athabaskanist
> linguistic terminology and I've continued to ponder it since.
>
> Here's my idea. The project would start out as an online, freely
> distributed document, with the potential for later publication if any
> publishers seem interested. Contributors would first compile a list of
> specialized vocabulary that seems to be opaque or confusing for
> linguists without experience in Athabaskan languages. We should
> probably avoid vocabulary that is extremely restricted, like for
> example the terminology used by Jetté for Koyukon or the terminology
> used by Morice for Carrier. Instead we would focus on terms that are
> used across the whole family, or which are prominent in a subgroup
> like Pacific Coast languages, Southern/Apachean languages, etc.
> Certain historically attested terminology which has fallen out of
> favor but occurs in early literature could be included, perhaps this
> might include Sapir's "first modal", "second modal", and "third modal"
> elements (qualifiers and the classifer), for example. A few
> non-terminological issues would be relevant too, such as a sketch of
> the typical Athabaskanist transcription/orthography, a couple of
> example phoneme inventories and the current proto-phoneme inventory,
>
> Once a solid list is put together then the fun would begin. Each
> contributor would choose a single term and put together a short, two
> or three page description of the term. This should include examples of
> the grammatical phenomenon in one or two languages, a quotation or two
> from the literature which shows its use in context, and a few
> citations of particularly influential publications where the
> phenomenon is discussed. Ideally the description should include a
> quote taken from the first publication that used the term, thus giving
> an attribution to some particular researcher. Reconstructed
> proto-forms would be included where they exist. The end result should
> be around 100 to 150 pages, depending on how many topics we cover.
>
> After everything is put together, I'd take it upon myself to convert
> the whole thing into a professional-looking, publication-quality
> document. I have lots of experience with (Xe)LaTeX and document layout
> of linguistic materials, as well as several friends who are
> professional publishers. Whether or not a press would accept the work,
> we would still have something of high quality which could be freely
> printed and bound for personal use. I would find some stable location
> to host a PDF and make it available to the public, and then later
> editions could be pondered.
>
> The mechanics of collaboration are easily available online nowadays.
> One solution is Google Docs, which would allow a bunch of people to
> edit the same documents. Discussion would take place on this list.
> Contributors would probably want to recruit people who aren't
> subscribed to the list, particularly those who are recognized as being
> experts on some particular phenomenon in the family.
>
> Please reply to the list with your comments. I'd like to see this go
> forward soon. I don't have the time to write the whole thing myself,
> but I *do* think I can devote the time to organizing and managing the
> project.
>
> James