Non-Dakotan Siouan speech online

[Justin McBride]

Message----- Original Message ----- 
From: Rankin, Robert L 
> I have not yet checked the Kaw Nation language program website,
> but if the voice is a woman's, then it is Mrs. Maude Rowe, one of the
> last fluent speakers of Kaw and the person with whom I did the vast
> majority of my recording in the mid 1970s.  If the recording is of a
> man speaking, I'm afraid it is probably me.  Sooner or later there will
> be recorded material from speakers on the website.

Oh, it's far worse than that, I'm afraid.  It's me!  The former Kanza Language Teacher and I made this series of recordings as part of a langauge class for adults from a few years back.  I recorded about half and the Language Teacher did the most of the others.  A few recordings may have even come from one or more of the students.  At that time we were working on several simultaneous projects using the same list of about 800 words, so we just decided to attach the recordings to the word list text and post the whole thing online.  It didn't work out nearly as well as I'd hoped.  But maybe that's okay, as it's not the greatest quality product to begin with.  We used a pair of upturned headphones instead of a microphone, and recorded very long sections of text without breaking.  In some of the recordings there's probably much more noisy breathing than intelligible speeech.  And with numerous errors in the text and a couple of missing sound files, all I can say is that it was never intended to be the final product.  But, like so many things, it just got placed on the backburner.  NEVER FEAR... as Dr. Rankin said, we are planning a full-scale revision of the tribe's language website.  When it's all done (give us a coupla years on this one), it will be a fantastic Siouan resource, combining a vast amount of native speaker material with full-function web accesibility... or so we hope!  We'll keep you posted.

Justin McBride
Language Coordinator & Acting Webdesigner
Kaw Nation of Oklahoma
Drawer 50
Kaw City, OK  74641
PH (580) 269-2552 ext 241
FX (580) 269-2204 attn Language/Web Dev
jmcbride at kawnation.com
http://www.kawnation.com/langhome.html
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