turtle

[Henry Zenk]

Dear Linda.  You're giving me entirely too much credit!  Eula was, or had
already been teaching Jargon under a Title IV grant when I began visiting
her around 1979-80.  She often consulted her sisters Velma, Ila, and
Martha, so it can be said that they were reviving the Jargon of their
earlier family life together.  Their father and mother, John B. and Hattie
Hudson, used Jargon as well as English at home, and (together with the
Hudsons' foster son Dellmore Croy) all grew up knowing it.  Eula was the
youngest, but having her father's knack for language was not shy about
speaking.  While Dellmore was known locally for speaking Jargon at the
drop of a hat, the sisters by and large had been neglecting it until Eula
landed that Title IV grant (originally sometime in the 70s I believe, long
before I came on the scene).  They were using the Thomas dictionary, but
Eula always took care to pronounce words as she remembered them rather
than as they were written by Thomas.  She used her own rather
idiosyncratic adaptation of an English dictionary phonetic alphabet to
spell the words as she remembered her parents pronouncing them.

Where I can claim some credit is in teaching Eula to read Jacobs's
phonetic transcription.  She caught on quickly, and had no difficulty
reading the Jargon texts Jacobs had recorded in the 1930s from her father
and from Victoria Howard (whose second husband, Eustace Howard, was John
B. Hudson's first cousin).  That word for turtle, I believe, is from one
of those texts:  the story of a race between mudturtle and rabbit.  I
don't have it with me, but it seems to me the word is 'iLEqwa (stress on
first syllable, although there is somewhere in the story where it is
also iLE'qwa:  variable stress placement characterizes many Jargon words,
the "default" position however usually being on the first syllable).

Another Henry


On Tue, 9 Feb 1999, Linda Fink wrote:

> I'm sorry. It is the dictionary that Eula Petite made of jargon words she
> could remember. Henry Zenk originally got her interested in relearning
> Jargon and asked her to write down words she remembered as they came to her.
> She compiled them into a dictionary that she used when she started teaching
> jargon classes. Periodically she or one of the other elders, during a jargon
> conversation, would pop out with another word that had been hiding in her
> memory somewhere and Eula would say "Oh! I better write that down and tell
> Henry." So I presume she periodically updated her list with Henry.
>
> Turtle is one of those words added later, and now that I look again, I'm not
> altogether sure which syllable is accented. Maybe somebody else on the list
> knows.
>
> Linda Fink
>
> At 01:41 PM 2/8/1999 -0800, you wrote:
> >Well, excuse me if I've missed something, but what is the "Eula"
> >dictionary?
> >
> >Regards,
> >
> >Jeff
> >
> >On Mon, 8 Feb 1999 15:19:04 -0500, you wrote:
> >
> >>According to my "Eula dictionary", turtle is "ethlagwo", accent on second
> >>syllable. I wonder if there are others?
> >>
> >>Linda Fink   linda at fink.com
> >>http://www.fink.com/linda/teenagers/   http://www.fink.com/farm/5.html
> >
> >
> >
>