french grammar

[bi1 at soas.ac.uk]

I haven't read his grammar though I have had email contact with him.
He seems a reasonable person and gave me the email address of
another person in France interested in Lakotya.
Bruce
On 25 Feb 2004 at 17:41, Koontz John E wrote:

Date sent:      	Wed, 25 Feb 2004 17:41:58 -0700 (MST)
Send reply to:  	siouan at lists.colorado.edu
From:           	Koontz John E <John.Koontz at colorado.edu>
To:             	Siouan List <siouan at lists.colorado.edu>
Subject:        	Re: french grammar

> 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.
>
>
>