F.Y.I. Re: Pawnee Language Program

[Koontz John E]

I'll start out with the positive.  It sounded like the real goal here was
to memorize and recite some Pawnee.  A lot of concerned and idealistic
people seem to be involved and they're doing things like skipping their
lunch hour to further the project.  In the end they aren't really thinking
much about writing - just speaking.  For a few days early on they are
shown how to make Pawnee look more like friendly English on paper, and
they'll make some signs to boost awareness of the project.  And then
they'll go on with the oral part of the class, where they no longer worry
what it looks like, but hopefully only about how it sounds.  This project
is thinking about getting so far with Pawnee that they start to think in
it.  As usual there may be no clear idea how one might reach that state,
but it's a good goal.

But ...

On Wed, 31 May 2006, ROOD DAVID S wrote:
> This is such an incredible leap backwards, completely without any
> justification from language learning research, that I want to cry.

I had the same sad reaction, even without any real technical grasp of
Caddoan.

I'm sure that the people doing this are very well intentioned, but if
they'd spent a few minutes learning the old system or figuring out how to
teach it, it would have been much better.  The "old" forms - Doug Parks's
I
think? - made sense.  Some de-scholarization might have been desirable,
e.g., replacing c with ts or writing some allophones of r as d.  Mayber
even write long vowels with a macron.  The "new"
forms, however, are not a simple substitution code for the old system.
They are more like a reversion to using English orthography to
write something it didn't fit very well and they seem to go as far as
hearing
Pawnee with "English ears."  Thus it looked to me as if some things had
been
outright omitted, like the initial k in kskitiiks 'four' represented as
"skee tiks."  English speakers can't hear it or say it, so you can't have
it either?  (Is it actually silent?  I've always assumed not!)

Why replace r with <?  It appears that r has various allophones, but so do
most English segments.  T is a doozy.  If the intent is to make things
seems less strange, or even more English like, then < is no help.  The
same applies to replacing ts (c) or ch with ].  It can't look any stranger
with c than ].  And what if you need a bracket?  How does one spell
something like ckatus or tskatus?  Or was one of those vowels long?  Is it
]kah toos or do we omit ] here?  What if one of the vowels actually is
long?

The whole thing reminds me of what I've called "the Lewis & Clark Phonetic
Alphabet."  I appeal to it to explain how Siouan words are pronounced to
people who can't be bothered to understand the alphabets actually used or
how they apply to the languages, but it takes endless special
qualification to make it work.  One or two footnotes per word.  In the end
the results are to the Siouan language in question as typical high school
Spanish is to Spanish.  English spelling is a very broken tool for
constructing phonological representations.  Most of the time it doesn't
work all that well for English.

It seems to me that when people say that they are making things easier to
understand and more familiar looking, and then substitute a non-functional
system that leaves things out that are there, what they are really saying
is "I don't care to understand this because my real goal here is to put my
own mark on this by providing my own system."  If that system actually
adds things that are even more unusual looking than the original, it tends
to underline this impression.

This is a sad story that has been repeated more than once in Native
American language programs.