Borrowing / exonyms (was...Re: Oregon/Washington Excerpts of Swanton now in HTML)

[Jeffrey Kopp]

Hi, Dave.  Well, I am now about one-third of the way through proofing and correcting that, so there are still some "OCR hits" (typos) in there (e's for c's are particularly pesky ones).  (I don't think word processors really referred to "OCR hits"; in my Coast Guard days, a stray or garbled Teletype character received over the radio was called a "hit," and I just went on calling them that.  But I digress...)

It's rigged with inward links (eventually the page will have a navigation bar scheme similar to the online dictionaries), so you can link to a specific tribe by appending the name to the URL with a #, such as:

http://home.attbi.com/~chinookjargon/swantonwashoreg.htm#Multnomah

I've just added links like these to the cross-references within the text.  I'll let the list know when I've gotten through my first proof of it, so anyone interested can give it a more thorough going-over (or reprint any pages they might have already printed from the initial version).

I'm also learning a lot by proofing Swanton.  The numerousness, diversity and wide distribution of the early contact-era native population really stands out (I am amazed at the detailed specificity of locations he cites), as does the dramatic decline in their number during the 19th century.  However, considering the number of natives among us here today, I wonder if there may have been a severe under-count in the mid- to late 1800s ethnographic surveys and 1910 census--which could probably be explained by the tremendous dislocations which occurred during the previous century.  As tribes were classed by language and/or location, and things were shifting pretty rapidly in those days (it seems a lot of families/tribes got merged as well as moved), I wonder if some significant chunks fell through the statistical cracks, so to speak.

(I haven't forgotten Gibbs and Shaw, I'm just cleaning up Swanton in my spare time "to relax"--it's relatively easy for a former word processor to do; when I get my desk cleared of some more urgent personal stuff, I will return to getting the dictionaries ready for printing.)

Regards,

Jeff

On Wed, 31 Jul 2002 21:13:12 -0400, "David D. Robertson" <ddr11 at COLUMBIA.EDU> wrote:

>Jeff,
>
>Thanks for putting Swanton on the web.  It's been quite a while since I
>last looked at his encyclopedic listings of Northwest peoples, and now what
>stands out is how tribal names were sometimes borrowed by other ethnic
>groups.  Here, briefly, are examples -- got to get away from the computer
>and do some chores --