Wind River Shoshone

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].

Phonological parallelism

The following Ghost Dance song was dreamt by the shaman Frank Perry.

The following observations hold:

• Lines a and d contain 5 moras (≈vowels) each; lines b and c contain 7.
  • This is similar to Japanese haiku, with 5-7-5 moras.
• In each line the first stress falls on the second mora.
• In lines c and d the second stress falls on the fifth mora.
• Usually in Shoshone the adjective precedes the noun, but here ‘water’ is uniformly first.
• Normally the suffix -aʔyu (line b) is short and unaccented.
  • But here it has a long vowel, to match the moraic template.
• Underlying /m/ normally becomes [w̃] between vowels, but doesn’t in line d.

Click to see examples of Japanese haiku by Buson and Kyōshi.

Syntactic parallelism

In the following story, Weasel’s adoptive grandparents are towing his boat.

This text illustrates the following observation: "Parallel development is ubiquitous; the main form in which it occurs is the description of a series of actions in time. The Shoshone language makes such temporal seriation particularly tempting by offering the narrator his choice of many slightly differing suffixes of tense and aspect. Consequently, constancy in the stems used and variation in the suffixes easily and concisely create parallelisms."

Translation of Maidu

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.

Maidu – transcriptions

The first task was to use better knowledge of the language to correct and update the phonetic transcriptions.

original	ko'doyapem	kan	uniñ	ko'do	momim'	opitmöni	hintsetoyetsoiam
modified	k’ódojapem	k’an,	’uním	k’ódo	momím	’opítmyni,	hínc’etojec’oj’am.

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.

Maidu – glosses

Next, as part of the working process, morpheme-by-morpheme glosses were created.

morphemes	k’ódo-ja-pe-m	k’an,
glosses	earth-make-ADJ-SUBJ	and

morphemes	’uní-m	k’ódo	mom-ím	’opít-myni,
glosses	this-ATTRIB	earth, land	water-SUBJ	fill-when

morphemes	hín-c’e-toje-c’oj-’a-m.
glosses	float-see-all.around-QUOT-PAST-3rd

Maidu – literal translation

Then a literal translation was made.

morphemes	k’ódo-ja-pe-m	k’an,
glosses	earth-make-ADJ-SUBJ	and
literal	and earthmaking [being],

morphemes	’uní-m	k’ódo	mom-ím	’opít-myni,
glosses	this-ATTRIB	earth, land	water-SUBJ	fill-when
literal	when water filled this earth,

morphemes	hín-c’e-toje-c’oj-’a-m.
glosses	float-see-all.around-QUOT-PAST-3rd
literal	floated, looking all around, it is said.

Maidu – literary translation

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.

Alsea – loose adaptation

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.

come out come out come out the moon has been killed
who kills the moon? crow who often kills the moon? eagle who usually kills the moon? chicken hawk who also kills the moon? owl in their numbers they assemble for moonkilling
come out, throw sticks at your houses come out, turn your buckets over spill out all the water don't let it turn bloody yellow from the wounding and death of the moon

Alsea – more literal

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.

"come out, all you inside come out, all you inside the moon has been killed"
and it is said that crow usually kills the moon and also eagle and also chicken hawk and also owl in large numbers all the birds would assemble whenever they killed the moon
then all the inhabitants would come out it would be looked at then a person's speech would sound "pour out all your water" thus a person's speech would sound and indeed it would be done then the houses would be hit with sticks to all the houses it would be done

The elements about buckets and yellow water are borrowed from a related story about a sun eclipse, but do not occur in this text.

Alsea – comparison

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.

• Frachtenberg 1920: facing transcription and translation, two pages
• Frachtenberg 1920: facing transcription and translation, edited to single page
• Frachtenberg 1920: Interlinear glosses
• Frachtenberg 1920: English translation
• Rothenberg 1993: loose reinterpretation

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.

Kashaya examples

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.

• Recording in Kashaya: mp3
• Transcription and translation: pdf

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.

• Recording of Kashaya story: mp3
• Recording of English re-telling: mp3
• Transcripts of both recordings: pdf