The Wind River Shoshone are the Eastern Shoshone of the large Wind River reservation in Wyoming. Their language belongs to the Numic group of Uto-Aztecan. Dick Washakie, the first Indian signer in the Fort Browning film about Plains Sign Language, belonged to this group. Fort Washakie, the largest town on the reservation, is named after his father. Sacajawea (or Sacagawea) was also Shoshone, although from further west (in Idaho). The Wind River Reservation is also the home of Northern Arapaho speakers. A New York Times article discusses their efforts to preserve their language; it includes an audio slideshow. There is an online dictionary of Northern Arapaho, with audio of some words. The variety of Arapaho here is not identical to that described by Goddard (and used in the homework); for example, "dog" is listed as heθ rather than éθ. In this transcription system, 3 c ' = [θ č ʔ]. |
The following Ghost Dance song was dreamt by the shaman Frank Perry.
The following observations hold:
Click to see examples of Japanese haiku by Buson and Kyōshi. |
Dmitri B. Shimkin, Wind River Shoshone Literary Forms:
An Introduction. Dell Hymes (ed),
Language
in Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguistics and Anthropology, pp.
344–355.
The Maidu language of northern California has sometimes been classified as Penutian, but otherwise belongs only to the small Maiduan family. A man named Hanc’ibyjim, said to be the last great traditional Maidu storyteller, was the source of a body of texts written down in 1902–1903. Linguist Bill Shipley, who had studied Maidu for decades, in 1991 published a new translation of the original texts. The result illustrates a translation by someone with deep knowledge of the language and an interest in achieving a literary result. I'll illustrate Shipley's procedure (following his introductory remarks) with the first sentence of the creation myth. |
The first task was to use better knowledge of the language to correct and update the phonetic transcriptions.
Some changes are notational, such as the glide j and the vowel y (=/ɨ/), but others are more significant: the original transcriber missed the glottalization found on many consonants. Otherwise, however, it is rather accurate. |
Next, as part of the working process, morpheme-by-morpheme glosses were created.
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Then a literal translation was made.
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Finally, a more natural and expressive form was sought, while still faithful to the original. This is shown for several sentences.
Notice that the quotative evidential "they say" is only mentioned once at the beginning, since it is not automatic in English as in Maidu. In the last sentence, the two subparts are reversed in the literary version. |
The Alsea moon eclipse story that we examined in the homework on deictics was published some years ago in the anthology Shaking the Pumpkin, using a very loose adaptation. Here's the first half of it, keeping the layout and typography as published.
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This adaptation skips the first part of the recorded story (lines 1–7), but here is a more literal version I wrote of the lines where the adaptation begins.
The elements about buckets and yellow water are borrowed from a related story about a sun eclipse, but do not occur in this text. |
You can consider the path from the original documentation of the Alsea story to the loose translation, versus one more faithful to the linguistic structure of the language.
There is an art to the reinterpretation, but there is little attempt to remain faithful to the linguistic structure of the original text, or even a rough sentence-by-sentence correspondence. Quite a bit of the adapter's own preferences have been imposed on the story. Essentially, it is a re-imagining of the old English translation, without reference to the Alsea original. Such an adaptation does not tell the reader much about Alsea narrative structure or literary values. |
This narrative by Essie Parrish from 1958 is told rather slowly so it's easier to follow along with the transcription. She describes what she has heard about the first time the Kashaya saw sailing ships in the Pacific. As a sample of a brief complete story, the following links relate to a story about Crow in Kashaya, told by Bun Lucas in 1989. |