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

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 16 Apr 2001, Lance Foster wrote:
> 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 two syllabaries have had the sociological advantage of being
propagated among native speakers by native speakers as native systems.
Of course, (a) the Cree syllabary isn't really of native origin, though
exclusively used in such contexts, and (b) syllaries are much more
inconvenient than any alphabetic system.

> 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!

Very true, though learning English orthography is not equivalent to
learning other orthographies and it also teaches some bad practices due to
the peculiar inadequacies of English orthography.  If an English speaker
sets out to learn Spanish they have to learn the Spanish orthgraphy, like
it or not.  If they tackle Dakotan they have to learn at least one,
probably several, systems for the Dakotan dialect they decide on.  They
may even have to learn a bit about several dialects, since the important
references have in several different dialects.

> 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.

I tend to agree with Bob.  You'll have to pronounce the words for the kids
anyway.  If anyone complains about the x's and what not, you should just
tell them it's not English and some broadening of the mind may be
required.  A colleague used to tell users "getting the answer to that
requires an out-of-net experience."  This requires an out-of-English
experience.

> 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)

Not really.  There's a supposedly 'Basic" vocabulary list for English, but
it's very peculiar to English.  There are Swadesh's 100 word and 200 word
lists, but these are intended to be stable or basic vocabulary for
historical comparisons, not a bare minimum for conversation.  In these
lists there are a fair number of egregious Indo-European or European
dependencies in the vocabulary as well as Western European dependencies in
the implicit assumptions about the grammar.  I have also seen a
specialized South East Asian version of this list (CALMSEA), but it has
its own dependencies and is again intended to support comparisons, not
conversation.

JEK