Biloxi update

[BARudes at aol.com]

I concur with Bob's statement about Catawba; it is much more divergent from
the other Siouan languages in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon than
they are from one another. Bob has elsewhere compared the divergence of
Catawba  from the Siouan languages to the divergence between Oscan or Umbian and
the  Romance languages, which collectively belong to the Italic family of
languages. I use the term Siouan-Catawban to refer to the ancestor of both the
Siouan and Catawban langauges. The Catawban languages include Woccon, as well as
perhaps other languages spoken in colonial times in the Carolinas, and
Catawba.

There remains an enormous amount of linguistic research to be done on the
Catawba language. Franck Speck published quite a number of Catawba texts  and
there are a few others in the unpublished field notes of other  researchers
(e.g. Albert Gatschet, Truman Michelson, Raven McDavid, Frank  Siebert). I am
working on a grammar and dictionary of the language as time  permits but there is
always room for another linguist to work with the  documentary material, which
is fairly extensive.

Blair
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