Ofologists take note!

[David Kaufman]

Overall, I do find Native Languages of the Southeastern United States excellent and useful.  I especially like the section on Cherokee which does a good job of summarizing such a complex language.  It is heavily weighted toward the Muskogean languages, which is great for those of us wanting to know more about that family.  It's too bad more of the Southeastern Siouan languages aren't included, but of course that's understandable given the paucity of material available on the languages.  Perhaps, now that I'm working on it, a Biloxi sketch can be included in a future edition.
   
  Dave

David Costa <pankihtamwa at earthlink.net> wrote:
  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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