Manhart editing

[Rankin, Robert L]

Sorry if any of my comment was misinterpreted. I completely agree with you that all previous scholarship should be open to thorough criticism and correction.  All I was pointing out was that we linguists hadn't perhaps treated Father Manhart with the proper personal respect when he came to the early conferences.

I remember having this same conversation with Carolyn Quintero multiple times.  She tended to exercise a gentler hand dealing with the problems with Laflesche's Osage Dictionary (1932) than I did.  I felt she should publish a thorough critique of his transcription errors and his inclusion of Omaha vocabulary and grammatical morphemes when he didn't have accurate Osage data.  These are serious problems with the  '32 Osage dict. and the Osages are well-aware of them, although they tend to criticize the errors as being "Ponca" rather than Omaha because of their geographical proximity to the former.

I also did a paper at the Siouan Conference at the Kaw Nation several years back on Dorsey's transcriptions, which were very inconsistent in several important respects.  I guess I need to gussie up that paper and the one from Joplin on vowel length and get them into print.

Bob
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> What I find unreasonable and uncalled for in the way this thread evolved is
that the discussion of the inaccuracies in earlier documentary linguistic
works is interpreted by some as derogatory. Taking a critical look at the
previous works is fundamental to furthering the research on a language.