legacy materials

[phil cash cash]

Thanks for your response Bill.  I will post a few more comments and additions
to your discussion shortly. 
Phil
Quoting William J Poser :

> Phil Cash Cash writes:
>
>> I should add that the recent trends in the linguistics field are
>> focused almost exclusively on the creation of legacy materials
>> and less so on current archived materials despite their relatively
>> equal status.
>
> Two comments:
>
> First, there is a very good reason for this: when we're dealing with dying
> languages, it is important to gather data now, while they are still
> alive. Analysis of legacy materials can be done in the future, when
> there are no more native speakers; gathering of new material cannot.
> In a world with infinite resources, we could do both, but in the real
> world, with very limited resources, time spent studying legacy materials
> is time not spent gathering new material.
>
> Indeed, for this reason some of us have made conscious decisions about
> where to place our priorities. In my case, while I am quite interested
> in historical linguistics, some time ago I made the decision not to
> spend very much of my time on it because it is something that someone
> else can do in the future.
>
> Second, generally speaking legacy materials and new material do not
> have "relatively equal status". Of course, the relationship depends
> on exactly what legacy materials are available and what the current
> state of the language is. If the language is still in sufficiently
> good condition to yield copious new data, it is very likely that
> legacy materials will be inferior to new material for reasons
> including the following:
>
> (a) legacy material is often poorly transcribed. Relatively recent
>     material recorded by professional linguists is likely to be accurate,
>     but material recorded by non-professionals, such as missionaries,
>     fur traders, and, often, anthropologists, is often poor. Earlier
>     materials recorded by professional linguists, insofar as there
>     were such things, is often not very good, or, even if the linguist
>     heard well, may be very difficult to interpret due to the lack of
>     a standard notation at the time. (Harrington's work is a major
>     exception - he had an unusually good ear and his transcription
>     was very accurate, though it does pose difficulties of interpretation
>     since he was known to do such things as switch notation in the
>     middle of a page of notes.)
>
> (b) legacy material is often restricted in genre. For example, in
>     one major anthropological tradition, the principal activity
>     was to collect texts, where the texts usually consist primarily
>     if not exclusively of legends and/or oral history. Such texts
>     are often of great cultural and historical interest, and they
>     do yield insight into the language, but they are also quite
>     defective as a source of information. For one thing, such texts
>     are often in a form of the language different from the ordinary
>     spoken variety. In many cultures there are special conventions
>     for telling such stories and the language is often archaic.
>     One misses the language of ordinary conversation, of speeches,
>     of prayer, etc. One may even miss common grammatical forms.
>     For example, narratives may contain few or no 1st and 2nd person
>     forms since everything is told in the third person.
>
> (c) linguists of earlier times tended to focus on lexicon and morphology
>     but to have very little to say about syntax, semantics, and
>     discourse.
>
> On the other hand, if the language is in poor shape, the material
> that can be obtained from the last few speakers may itself be
> limited. The last "fluent" speakers often have a narrower range
> of genres than their parents or grandparents and may also have
> a narrower range of vocabulary due to the decreasing range of
> circumstances in which they use the language. Their language
> may even be "degenerate" (no moral judgment intended here) in
> exhibiting such effects of language death as simplification of
> morphology and loss of phonological distinctions.
>
> In sum, where the language is still in sufficiently good shape
> as to provide good data, it generally  makes sense to devote
> limited resources to gathering new material at the expense of
> analyzing legacy material.
>
> Bill

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