Writing two books

[De Reuse, Willem]

I wholeheartedly agree with Jim and Bob.  There is also a problem with writing two books, however.  We linguists know how to write reference grammars, but (with rare exceptions, you know who you are!) we are simply are not trained to write good pedagogical materials for learners.

Nevertheless, we are being asked to in effect duplicate the Boasian trilogy (more a Haasian one in my opinion.)  Mary Haas' mantra was "grammars, texts, and dictionaries", but now we linguists are being asked to write "grammars, texts, and dictionaries, AND pedagogical grammars, textbooks, and pedagogical dictionaries".  Beginning documentary linguists are confused when they are being asked to to do all this, and when they are told this is the ethical thing to do, both for the scientific community and for the indigenous learners.  It cannot be done; it is simply too much work.

Either we compromise and do a bit of both, at the risk of compromising scientific and/or pedagogical standards, or we have to collaborate with other scholars, who are qualified to write "pedagogical grammars, textbooks, and pedagogical dictionaries".

Obviously, more collaboration is needed to get all this work done.  Collaboration will imply better reciprocal understanding of what the goals are, so we will need more linguists (indigenous or not) who understand what the best pedagogical tools are, and we will need more language learning experts (indigenous or not), who understand what scientific documentation is.
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From: Siouan Linguistics [SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] on behalf of Rankin, Robert L. [rankin at KU.EDU]
Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2013 3:59 PM
To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu
Subject: Re: Siouan tongue twisters?


Let me second Jimm's plea to all of you with untranscribed and/or unanalyzed linguistic data, especially from Siouan languages than are now extinct.  Just in my professional lifetime Quapaw, Osage, Kaw, Tutelo, Ioway, and Otoe have gone.  Mandan is very close, and Hochank is not too far behind with Ponca and Omaha in line behind those.  This is not something I expected to see 40 years ago, but it is now all too painfully obvious.

And while I am reiterating Jimm's message, permit me to express a prejudice that I have come to believe in very strongly.  For those of you working on dictionaries and/or grammars, please do not fall into the trap of trying to write a treatment that "will be useful to students and linguists alike."  Such attempts, in my opinion and experience, always fall between two stools, and neither audience is served thereby.  Just go ahead and write two books, one for Native people who wish to learn the language, and another for linguists who deserve a properly unintelligible technical treatment.  Nowadays it is not difficult to produce two parallel treatments with a word processor using "find and replace" along with "cut and paste".  The extra work will be well worth the effort.  This is what LInda and I are trying to do with Kaw.

When I begain field work with Quapaw in 1972, I discovered I was already a couple of years too late.  When I shifted my attention to Kaw in '73, I promised to complete a dictionary and grammar in a few years.  I finished the dictionary database in 1985, but it has now been 40 years since I began, and a dictionary for teaching purposes has only just appeared.  The text collection appeared only a couple of years ago with the absolutely indispensable help of Justin and Linda.  I am now retired and 74 yrs. old.  I'll be lucky to finish the grammar project, so please do not follow in my footsteps and postpone the writing until it's too late for the language and maybe too late for you.

Bob
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