french grammar

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 25 Feb 2004, Pat Warren wrote:
> Has anyone ever seen the french lakota grammar by Slim Batteux?

Never heard of Batteux or the grammar.  But it looks like he's a jazz
musician living in France, presumably of Dakota origin.

> La langue Sioux se compose de trois dialectes : le Dakota, le Lakota et
> le Nakota. Le Lakota est le plus répandu. C'est la deuxième langue
> amérindienne après le Navajo.
> (The Sioux language is composed of three dialects: the Dakota, Lakota, and
> Nakota. The Lakota is the most widespread. It's the second american indian
> language after Navajo.)

I believe the implicit statistics are still correct.  The Dakota Dialect
Survey actually concluded that the three-way "dln" division over
simplified the actual picture and that were more like five major dialects,
Santee-Sisseton, Yankton-Yanktonais, Teton, Assiniboine, and Stoney.  The
first two are "d dialects" and the last two "n dialects," in traditional
terms, but all five are about equally different.  Well, Stoney is a little
moreso, though Allan Taylor has a paper, published in a long ago Siouan
Archives Newsletter if I recall correctly, that shows that Stoney in the
1700s was rather more like modern Assiniboine.

There's a nice report on the Dakota Dialect Survey in "Sioux, Assiniboine,
and Stoney dialects:  a classification."  Anthropological Linguistics
(1992) 34:233-255.

So, the main finding of the DDS is that lumping all d-using or n-using
dialects together is a bit like lumping all r-less English dialects
together.

The other way in which the DDS classification differs from the historical
depiction of Dakotan dialectology is in classifying Yanktonais with
Yankton.  Traditionally Yankton is lumped with Santee-Sisseston, and
Yanktonais is lumped with Assiniboine and Stoney.  I've sometimes wondered
if the historical basis for the old approach was just that Yanktonais has
-na in the name.  David Rood once pointed to a bunch of us that -na(N) is
the regular allomorph of the =daN DIMINUTIVE in Santee if the preceding
vowel is nasalized.  The Teton dialect has invariant =la.  I don't recall
the forms in Assiniboine or Stoney, but I think they were a bit more
complex than just =na(N).  However, this fine speculation aside, I think
the Yankton vs. Yanktonais distinction is depicted in the sources as
traditional, and presumably the Santee speakers who provided the
traditional analysis of Dakotan divisions and dialects were well aware of
the allomorphy of =daN in Santee.  So there must be some other reason for
the traditional distinction, perhaps reflecting political factors.

> L'alphabet Sioux est le même que le nôtre. Il ne manque que 6 lettres :
> d,f,q,r,v et x. Ils utilisent des petits signes supplémentaires au-dessus
> de certaines lettres. Cela change le son. Les phrases sont composées à
> l'envers. Par exemple, si vous dites:'Chaque jour, cette femme va à la
> ville' en lakota, ça donne : 'Jour chaque, femme la cette ville vers va'
>
> (The Sioux alphabet is the same as ours. There are only six letters
> missing: d,f,q,r,v, and x. They use extra little symbols above certain
> letters. That changes their sound. Sentences are put together backwards.
> For example, if you say "every day this woman goes to town" in lakota, you
> get "day every woman the this town to goes.")

An alphabet-oriented assessment of a language is usually a sure sign of a
certain lack of linguistic sophistication, which might influence other
aspects of the treatment.  And, if the alphabet lacks d we can probably
assume that M. Batteux is a Lakota speaker, though the author speaks of
himself as French or English or European - a user of the full basic Latin
alphabet.  Maybe English, since French uses extra little symbols above
certaines lettres, too.

On the other hand, the observations on word order are pretty much in line
with a certain amount of linguistic introspection.  Notice that the
distribution of articles changes to accord with Dakotan usage.  Omaha
speakers I dealt with during field work put it in much the same way,
without going as far as examples.  They felt that Omaha word order (SOV)
was backwards of English (SVO) and vice versa.  It's not quite as backward
of English as it would be of Irish (VSO), but the characterization is
close enough.

> I'm also curious about the comment that "The Sioux have French blood in
> their veins". That seems like a very...complex...thing to say.

It's a somewhat traditional way of speaking (in English and French) and
thinking about a concept like mixed ancestry and French-Indian metis
status.  Having just thought about paraphrasing this in terms more
anthropologically and physiologically sound I can attest that it's not
easy to do without sounding like a politically correct weasel.  I figure
M. Batteux or his editor was writing for the target audience, which does
not appear to be linguists.

It is my understanding that there is something of a market for Dakota
lessons in France.  I have known of people - Dakota speakers and
linguists, too - who were invited over to conduct lessons on a commercial
basis.  I don't know if anyone could get rich conducting anthro-tours and
offering language lessons to interested Europeans (and (Euro-)Americans
and Japanese), but it seems to me that there's a living there for a few
Dakota-speakers with the right combination of showmanship and business
acumen.  I must be a long way from being the first person to think of
that, and on reflection I can think of examples going as far back as the
late 1800s, and not just Dakotas.