Chiwere Popular Orthography

[Koontz John E]

On Sat, 14 Apr 2001, Lance Foster wrote:
> I am running into real difficulty with coming up with an orthography that is
> acceptable to the speaking community. There is an absolute resistance to a
> standard orthography.

I may be wrong, but I think Lance means standard in the sense of using
standard choices of graphs, rather than representing a language in a
consistent way.  The former meaning (typical choice of letters) can be a
more stringent version of the latter (same choice of letter for a given
sound in all writing), though the latter is usually what linguists mean by
a standard orthography

> ... The community hates the use of the x. They totally cannot abide
> such things as eths and thetas.
>
> So what ideas do you have? For popular use? Jimm and Lila had a nice system,
> but the community hated such things as using "x" for the "ach" sound.

>>From a linguistic point of view, if the x sound were consistently written
with some other letter or letter combination than x, e.g., ch, as in
German, that would be OK, as long as ch wasn't also being used for the
sound of - well, ch - as in the word for buffalo.  Another alternative
sometimes used, for example, in transcribing Russian, is kh.  Russian
proper, of course, uses a Cyrillic letter that is recognizably an x.

There is a certain tradition in favor of x for this sound, and I suspect
that most opposition to this would stem from a feeling that English use of
x for "ks" is uniquely "right" and other uses of x are "wrong."

> should it be the old "th" vs "dh" thing? but of course that gets back to the
> "one symbol for one sound" thing. I'm just flumboozled, and several of us are
> trying to figure this out. Bob? John? Jimm? Louanna?

I think this refers to whether th represents the theta sound or an
aspirated t.  This can be a problem even in languages where there isn't
any theta (or edh) sound, again because of interference from English
usage.

I can understand people feeling uncomfortable with what for them would be
a novel orthographic tradition.  They're always a bit of a wrench.
However, English spelling is truely inadequate for representing a Siouan
language, and some concessions have to be made.  And, I've experienced
this wrench so often myself that I tend to have a "get over it" attitude
to it.  The real issues are representing the sounds of the language with
sufficient insight to permit working with it at all, and doing so in a way
that isn't too impossible to write or key.  When I consider writing sh for
s^ (s-hacek) I do so because I suspect s^ isn't conveniently available in
people's fonts, not because I think sh is better or easier to remember. In
fact, there are Siouan languages where h occurs after s, so that sh for s^
simply doesn't work.  I think Ioway-Otoe-Missouria is not one of these
languages, anyway!

John