Ojibwe Dictionary Online Project

[jess tauber]

The recognized Chilean orthographic standard for Yahgan, based on work with some of the last speakers, contains far fewer graphemes than those used by workers in the past when the language was far more robust. There is the issue of dialect, or dialect mixture to take into consideration, which may account for some of the seeming simplifications, others may be due to obsolescence factors, and phonetic versus phonemic biases.

There have been over 20 different orthographies in use- most slight variants of each other, but others radically different. Even literate Yahgans in the late 19th century had to contend with these, due to unilateral decisions made by the missionary Bridges as he sought to keep printing costs to himself to a minimum. Most of this became moot after the plagues which decimated the population, and literacy largely became a thing of the past.

While the current orthography (roundly rejected by the last speakers and semispeakers) is alright for the most part for helping identify individual lexical roots out of context, so much information is lost on the way up to full text that I can't see that it will ever be of much help in language revitalization. What is being promoted now by the nonlinguistically trained granddaughter of the last speaker isn't much better, but it is what the world is seeing.

The morphological richness of the living language was such that there also were many different ways to say what was on your mind- standardization here would be a mistake as well even for the remaining dialect (now idiolect), but given the situation on the ground, that is highly unlikely to be an issue for the foreseeable future, if ever.

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net