Conjugation Of A Sentence in Tutelo-Saponi

[Rankin, Robert L.]

I'm not trying simply to contradict everything that others say about Tutelo, and I'm sure Giulia made some mistakes in her analysis just like we all do.  Meuse apparently wanted to "simplify" Giulia's and other linguists' presentation.  That is laudable, but he went about it in a naive fashion.  The most accurate way to standardize all the different sources of Tutelo vocabulary is to follow the principles Oliverio used.  Sure, you can substitute "ch" for "c" with the wedge over it and "an" for nasal "a" with the rightward hook beneath, but to just reproduce all the confusing 19th century spellings only makes things worse.  If you want to learn Greek, the first thing you do is learn the Greek alphabet.  Same for Russian, Japanese or Cherokee, etc.  And if a person wants to learn Tutelo, the place to start is with Oliverio's phonemic spellings, not all the variable usages from the 1880s.

Giulia's grammatical discussions are indeed written for professional linguists, but her dictionary is much more accessible.

> "-i, articulate state marker, article (definite or indefinite), “a, an, the”.---Meuse, Yesnechi, pg. 18.  Also see Oliverio, pg. 202 for -i and i- usages.The word "the" is a definite article correct?

Notice among your words for 'grass' the number of times a term ends in "-gi" or "-ki".  These are two spellings for earlier "-ki" and should be standardized as such.  This matches the definite article in several Dakotan languages and in Sapir's Tutelo.  That is your best bet for an article, and it will always follow the noun it modifies.  The word "oto:" could only mean 'grass' in the sense of 'greenery'.  It does not literally mean 'grass', just 'something green' (or blue!).

 > Oliverio, pg.323 the word love as yato-ste:kE
> Meuse, pg 71, the word love as Yandosteka

They're both right, Meuse just doesn't know how to standardize the pronunciation.  It's clear that in Tutelo it simply didn't matter whether you said "p" or "b", "t" or "d", "k" or "g".  The voiceless pronunciation, as "p, t, k" was older and more conservative.  The real distinction in Tutelo was whether "p, t, k" had an "h" sound after them or not.

> Here is one link that has some information on sweetgrass ranges: http://www.ecoseeds.com/sweetgrassinfo.html#anchor504328

Right.  But in translating it into Tutelo, note that 'sweetgrass' is not the same as 'sweet grass', even in English, and certainly not in Dakota, the same as 'blackbird' is not the same as 'black bird'.  Not every black bird is a blackbird.  Not every sweet grass is sweetgrass.

> However, I do not have a source that tells me one way or the other that the Tutelo, Saponi or Occaneechi utilized it or not. I know that I use it at present. Also sense there are other herbs used as sweetgrass or called sweetgrass I'm sure there was a usage at some piont in the past, but at what level I don't know. I'm not sure any ethnobotanical work has been done in the past that gathered that sort of detail. If there was I would love to read it.

Gilmore's ethnobotany or the one by my colleague, Kelly Kindscher, are good sources, but neither one really covers the eastern Piedmont.  I'm sure you are more expert in Tutelo cultural matters than I am.

> Grass is a word found in Meuse pg. 70, "Grass – Sunktagi"   Grass in Oliverio, pg 319, " grass  mukta:ki, oto:, sokta:ki "

Right.  And notice the suffix.

>  I don't think I'm translating from English into Tutelo-Saponi exactly word for word, but I am trying to get as close as possible so that I can have a good translation of what I'm wishing to say in the language

I understand what you're trying to do, and somewhere there's a "happy medium" between direct and cultural translation.

>. I'm definitely not a linguist or an English major so alot of help is needed in order to try and utilize my people's language. I use all the availble to me sources/dictionaries on Tutelo-Saponi because none of the individual dictionaries is complete. Some have words the others left out or were unaware of at the time they published. I do rely heavily on Oliverio's dictionary as well as this list here in order to try and get word formations that aren't in any of the dictionaries; based on the way this list says Siouan languages form their words.  Of this I am very greatful, for without it I would be constantly hitting brickwalls in attempting to utilize the language.

I hear you.  It's a real challenge.

> The usages of -ki also seem to be variant and have various meanings; (see Oliverio, pg.214 for -ki usages). It gets confusing.

I'm sure.  The notion "definite article" is very different in nearly every language, even closely related ones.  There's a story of a Polish linguist who gave a professional lecture at the Univ. of Pennsylvania entitled "English language requires use of definite article", in which he didn't get a single one right.

> My wish is that someone would do a more comprehensive work on Tutelo-Saponi and a work that would be accessable to people like myself as well being a teaching tool for learning the language. The only extensive interaction I get on the language is here on this list. Not that I haven't tried to get others to join in the discussions on our langauge elsewhere.

Yep.  Oliverio needs to be "translated" from Linguistics into instructional English.  There is no way to write a single grammar that will inform linguists and speakers/learners equally.




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