Glossary of Athabaskan terms

[De Reuse, Willem]

I agree with James and everyone else that this is a great idea.  I remember Michael Silverstein suggesting something like this to me at the LSA Institute in Santa Barbara in 2001.

I have been working on Harry Hoijer's San Carlos Apache paradigm cards this last month, and immersing oneself in that reveals the inadequacy of our terminology.

My 2 cents.  It is important to distinguish between two sorts of difficult terminology.  (1)  Misleading terms which apply pretty much to the same sort of thing across the Athabascanist literature, the classic example being the famous "classifier".  Classifiers do a good but trivial job at classifying every verb in one of four "classes"; (2) Other terms which are not misleading, but which in practice are not always easy to define or justify regarding a particular language.  In view of my experience with Apache, I have come to the conclusion that its qualifiers, thematic prefixes, and conjugation markers do a rather poor job of qualifying, indicating a theme, or marking a conjugation, respectively.  What qualifiers, thematic prefixes and conjugation markers have in a common in Apache is the pesky habit of disappearing in certain modes, or in certain subject persons, or certain subject numbers, or combinations thereof, and there is no way all this can be explained by some sort of phonological process of deletion.  I am not suggesting, of course, that we drop our beloved terminology regarding qualifiers, thematic prefixes, and conjugation markers, but rather that for some of this more difficult terminology, we develop something like a Peterson's Fieldguide to terminology, telling people how to look at verbs in order to recognize a particular sort of prefix in a particular language, and what to call it.

Regarding little used terminology, the amount of terminology used in the Young and Morgan dictionaries is much larger than Keren's list, which are the most used terms.  I think we should discuss and evaluate all of Young and Morgan's  terminology even though some of it is rarely used, because of the influence of the Young and Morgan dictionaries in our field.  For example, what is the relationship, exactly, between the progressive mode and the cursive aspect?  Also, regarding Navajo it would be good if someone took upon himself/herself a full discussion of the terminology used in Reichard's Navaho Grammar.   There is also an extensive terminology in there, which only partially overlaps with that of Young and Morgan. We would all benefit from a systematic comparison between Young and Morgan's and Reichard's terminology.  There is plenty of perceptive stuff in Reichard and I have the feeling that her grammar is not sufficiently read, (among other reasons) because of her terminology.

Willem de Reuse
________________________________________
From: ATHAPBASCKAN-L [ATHAPBASCKAN-L at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG] on behalf of James Crippen [jcrippen at GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Thursday, October 01, 2009 10:18 PM
To: ATHAPBASCKAN-L at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Subject: Glossary of Athabaskan terms

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