Ch.Orthography/ Word for "Chief", "Family"

[Lance Foster]

Thanks John.. It bears much thought.. but if Cree and Cherokee can use a syllabary
and the community get used to it, why not linguistic symbols? The problem comes in
because almost all IO today learned to speak/write English before IO (or at the
same time). And if you ask four IO to spell Baxoje, you will get six different
answers!

The reason I am asking this is that I am working on a coloring book with no
English, just the Chiwere word and the line drawing for little kids in my family
beginning to learn a VERY basic vocabulary of culturally important terms (nouns,
adjectives, location, verbs). Just an experiment right now.

This reminds me: wasn't there a list of the most common/necessary terms (100?
200?) that a linguist developed when learning any language? (like run, hot, eat,
etc)

A couple of other questions:

There seem to be two Chiwere words/variants for "chief."

1. Kihega/Gaxige/Kahegi etc (Ioway names that translate as 'chief'; I also think
it relates to some other Siouan names for 'chief' -in Osage for example?)
2. Wangegihi etc (fr. Wange 'man' + gi 'towards something' + hi 'to cause' =
'Causes a person to go [do? something]', relating to the authority of a  chief

Also there seem to be different words for 'family'

1. Gratogre (really 'relatives' - gra 'to be related/loved'+togre 'together')
2. Chuyu (could this be 'household'? fr. Chi 'house' + uyu 'to live in')
3. And of course wodi/wori, 'relative/relations'

And finally, when we are talking about kinship, for IO we usually use 'hina' for
'mother' (the word you use to address 'mom').. but there is also 'ihun' for
'his/her mother' etc. (the word used to refer to a 'mother')
And for father, 'hinka' but his/her is either anje/nanje.

If I was doing an illustration of 'mother' or 'father' which should I pick?

Lance



Koontz John E wrote:

> 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

--
Lance Michael Foster
Email: ioway at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~ioway
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