"Odd" sentences in grammars

[BSantaMaria]

Dagot'ee (How are things going?) to all:

This discussion brings to mind our Athabaskan family languages including
Navajo, and my own, White Mountain Apache, with their complexities in verb
morphology, etc. and an example of a non-Apache speaker contacting me
requesting info on why our Apache place names can't be "shortened" to the
way English is.  An example was the term, Dischii'bik'oh, or the name of a
community here. It's a descriptive term as many Apache words are that are
difficult to translate specifically into English correctly. Sometimes there
are no English words that are equal in meaning. Though I'm fluent in both,
I find it hard to translate but is something like, "Streak of red among
rocks down below a cliff (or in the valley). Or why cant we just say more
simply was his question. I found it difficult to respond accurately since
I'm not a trained linguist aware of correct terms or theories, all I am
aware of is that we cannot simplify terms easily. I also gave a couple of
examples in an article I wrote years ago in one of the publications from
SIL conference  in Flagstaff in my work with a linguistics professor. I do
agree that context is the essence of our language and the social status and
gender of the speaker.


Berni Santamaria


On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 7:35 AM, Claire Bowern <clairebowern at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> I've heard fairly frequent complaints of language speakers reading
> reference grammars written by outsiders that some of the example sentences
> are either ungrammatical or sound strange (that is, not wrong exactly, but
> not something that a speaker of the language would ever say). Has anyone
> written about this? I'm looking for published discussion in particular (I
> want to refer to it in an article) but examples from languages you know
> would also be ok.
> Thanks in advance!
> Claire
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ilat/attachments/20130823/dfa3cb56/attachment.htm>