Ofologists take note!

[David Costa]

NLSUS had a very good coverage of languages, all things considered. The
problem with expanding the coverage would have been that most of the
remaining languages of the Southeast either have very small corpuses (Ofo,
Tutelo, Atakapa, Apalachee, Karankawa), or there's no one currently working
on them who's an expert (Tunica, Chitimacha, Timucua). The remaining
languages of the southeast all seem to still be in the process of being
actively studied right now (Mikasuki, Catawba, Yuchi, Biloxi), so nothing
was/is ready to publish on them.

The fact that such chronically neglected languages as Quapaw, Natchez, and
Caddo all made it in is pretty impressive.

Dave



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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