The owl sacred pack of the Fox Indians / by Truman Michelson.

  • Truman Michelson
Date:
1921
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The owl sacred pack of the Fox Indians / by Truman Michelson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    18/102 page 10
    10 I may add that the works of Watkins and Lacombe on Cree, Ouoq on Algonkin, and Baraga on Chippewa have more than once been of great service to me in working out both the translation and the list of stems, as have also the works of Jones on Fox. The punctuation of the Indian text and the English translation has been made to correspond as closely as possible. The only essen¬ tial point to note is that it has not always been feasible to make the commas correspond. The paragraphing (which is the same in both) has been done largely with a view to English usage. However, it has often been possible to take advantage of the well-known feature of Algonquian lan¬ guages that identity and difference in third persons are kept apart by means of grammatical devices. The text, as stated above, was written out by Alfred Kiyana in the current syllabary, on which see Jones in the Boas Anniversary Vol¬ ume, pages 88-93. It was subsequently dictated a couple of times by Edward Davenport, and thus phonetically restored by me. The second dictation was in order to correct spelling-pronunciations, as the Fox are not accustomed to read letters or other documents writ¬ ten in the current syllabary aloud. When they first attempt it they are very apt to read the syllables with conventionalized values, thus la, le, li, lo as pa, pe, pi, po, irrespective of the fact that these values are likely to be wrong in any given instance, for la, etc., may equally well represent pA, pa, pi, pu, as well as other alternatives. 1 had previously trained Edward Davenport to read nearly correctly; and with the second dictation blemishes arising in this manner have, I think, been practically eliminated. A few visual errors have been corrected by me. There is another source of error which may occur in restoring a text dictated from a manuscript written in the current syllabary, and one difficult to control, namely, owing to the deficient phonetic character of the syllabary homographs may occur; that is, a word in the sylla¬ bary may be capable of two distinct phonetic restorations both equally justifiable but with entirely different meanings; and the wrong word may be dictated. An example is a ya ga te lei, which may be equally well aiya'lcwatagki' “as far as light goes/’ or aiya'gwAtagki' “in a pile.” Fortunately homographs are not very frequent. It may be noted that a second dictation will not always remove blemishes of this nature; the word cited above was twice dictated with the wrong value. A grammatical analysis and the context are the only safe correctives to eliminate defects of this character. If I have spent much space in pointing out errors which are liable to occur in recording texts dictated from manuscripts written in the current syllabary, it is because they have hitherto been ignored. At
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