Ofologists take note!

[David Costa]

By 'omission of Ofo' do we mean omitted from the index, or the fact that Ofo
doesn't have a sketch in Native Languages of the Southeastern United States?
If it's the fact that it doesn't have a sketch, that certainly seems
excusable, since there's such a skimpy corpus on the language.

I'd actually like to say some words in favor of NLSUS -- I think it's a
great book. It has EIGHT language sketches in it (plus two pieces on
Proto-Muskogean). How many books these days have that many language sketches
in them? It has a sketch of every branch of Muskogean except Mikasuki (which
I do wish had been included). And, as an Americanist philologist, I have to
say that Kimball's sketch of long-extinct Natchez (taken entirely from
Haas's old fieldnotes) is brilliant.

The reason why Catawba wasn't included in the book reminds me of the story
of why there are no sketches of any Southeastern languages in the Language
volume of HNAI. The story as I heard it was that the southeastern language
in the book was supposed to be a Creek sketch by Mary Haas. However, by the
time Mary was assigned that essay, she was essentially retired and not
really doing linguistics anymore, and so the sketch never got written. By
the time it became obvious that it wasn't going to happen, it was too late
to reassign it to anyone else, hence the rather conspicuous gap in the
volume's geographic coverage.

Dave

 

The omission of Ofo and various other languages of the Southeast is only one
of several weaknesses in Native Languages of the Southeastern United States
that I note in a forthcoming review in Anthropological Linguistics. Heather
and Janine tried their best to be inclusive of all of the languages of the
Southeast, but for a variety reasons individuals who were asked to
contribute sketches of other languages did not produce. I am guilty, for
example, of not producing a sketch of Catawba for the book. I passed on
their request to Frank Siebert who was unable to pull himself away from his
Penobscot research often enough to complete the sketch.

  
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