lack of rhymes

[Jan Ullrich]

Thanks to all of you who replied to my e-mail about rhyming verse in Siouan
languages.

I didn't mean to suggest that the "lack of rhyme" or the morphological and
syntactic characteristic of any language is anything defective. And I am
sorry if anyone got that impression. And I do not believe others who
responded to my e-mail meant to suggest anything of that nature either.

As a matter of fact, I was asked and encouraged to search for rhymes by some
of the native teachers that I work with. They would love to use rhymes when
teaching the young students, but don't know any themselves and aren't sure
if there were any in the past. We even tried to create rhymes together but
finding a rhyming word was a very difficult process even doing digital
searches through a lexical database of 36,000 entries.
The replies by other Siouanists confirmed my impression that rhyming is
difficult if not impossible in Lakota. But again, I am not saying this in
any derogatory way. Lakota has its own ways of expressing beauty in speech.

I strongly agree Linda as concerns songs. As a student of a few languages
and a language teacher I experienced many times that students do grasp
vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar rules very easily through song
lyrics, whether they are rhymed or not. So songs, preferably traditional,
are certainly something to use for pedagogical purposes. Unfortunately,
today there seems to be but a few traditional songs that deal with the kind
of vocabulary needed for children at the age of 5-8. Something else to
search for.

Jan


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