Talk:Lakota language

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[edit] What if?…

Haun! What a step forward if someone, preferably a native speaker, could roll his sleeves and start a Wiki in Lak'ota! Be it in Oglala or any other "dialect" (please see below). I began to learn this tremendously interesting language — by myself, with the 'help' of a so imperfect book — four years ago, but it is quite uneasy to exchange in Lak'ota in my remote hills of W. Brittany, France… User:Korenyuk

[edit] Nasal vowels in the orthography

The article currently says that nasal vowels are sometimes indicated with a following <Ǝ> (capital reversed E). I think this was supposed to be <ƞ> (small N with long right leg); I'm going to change the article, but if I'm wrong, just change it back. --Whimemsz 18:36, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

Sorry about that; I meant the latter, but I can't see either of them (and can't change the system I'm working on), so I had to do it blindly.--Prosfilaes 13:34, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Lakota is not a dialect

This is arguable, but Lakota is not a dialect of Sioux, anymore than Norwegian is a dialect of Danish. All the links on the page consider Lakota to be a seperate language, and to the best of my knowledge the speakers of Lakota consider it a seperate language. That's the standard usually used to seperate a language from a dialect.--Prosfilaes 06:11, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

yes, it is arguable. generally Lakota is described as a dialect in the linguistic literature. but, we dont have to make a stance: we can simply call it a lect (or a variety). the analogy of Danish & Norwegian is not the same. Norwegian is often said to be a linguistic dialect of Norwegian-Swedish-Danish. however, languages are usually not identified by linguistics, but rather by social conventions (with a little linguistics thrown in). anyway, what needs to be indicated in that Lakota is under a node called Sioux and is sister to Santee-Sisseton and Yankton-Yanktonai and that these 3 sisters are mutually intelligible. peace – ishwar  (speak) 06:32, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
Lect as a word makes my hair stand on end. It's jargon, and shouldn't be used in a general article, (or really anywhere in Wikipedia, IMO); there are better options that won't confuse the general reader. If it means anything larger than dialect, I don't get that from the linked article, and the word strongly brings up associations of dialect, so we are taking a stance. The social conventions here seem to strongly indicate that it is a language. --Prosfilaes 06:39, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
ok. linguistics does have a technical vocabulary like other sciences. of course, lect can be explained. i dont know about the social conventions part: i have heard that Lakotas generally call themselves Sioux. the convention in the linguistics community to call it a dialect. – ishwar  (speak) 07:02, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
I've done some reading in introductory linguistics and I've never heard of lect. Talk:Variety (linguistics) mentions it's not used in a recent introductory textbook nor a recent dictionary. Some technical vocabulary is fine, but an article that the average person would read (as opposed to a technical article that only a linguist would know the title of) needs to keep technical vocabulary to a minimum, preferably stuff findable in the dictionary or at least in an introductory linguistics book.
(Frankly, it sounds like bad slang, but my taste probably won't be the prime rule for use of words on Wikipedia. Yo, man, you like my 'lect?)
All the links on this page lead to pages that consider Lakota a seperate language. The Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 17, considers it a seperate language ("Sketch of Lakhota, a Siouan Language"). Looking up Lakota in my university library catalog (OSU library catalog), shows that the LoC subject headings treat Lakota as a dialect, but that most, but not all of the books, on Lakota treat it as a language.--Prosfilaes 18:15, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
hi.
Re lect: the term lect is used by linguists. maybe you will encounter if you read more specific literature, such as in journals. i really dont know the frequency of its occurrence. in my experience, i think that it most often encounter it in descriptive work where the degree of mutually intelligibility of a particular idiom with respect to related neighboring idioms -- since the linguist author has not investigated this area, the term lect can be used as an ambiguous term that does not indicate this. i think that is a common usage.
the other usage of the term is with a meaning that is essentially equivalent to the term variety, that is the definition of this lect/variety is a something like "a particular idiom of speech/sign that is used by a certain community that may be either an individual or group of persons that share a common feature such as the same social group, the same geographic group, etc." perhaps in this sense, the term variety is more common (?). you would need to do a corpus search and/or ask different linguists/language lovers their experience with this term to say for search. (why not ask some people around here? i can think of user:kwamikagami, user:Mark Dingemanse, user:Angr, user:Mustafaa, and (although rarely here) user:Billposer. you could also send a question to Linguist List: Ask a Linguist).
i just had a look at David Crystal's encyclopedia: you can find the term lect on p. 24 in a discussion including dialect, idiolect, & variety (1st ed. 1987). you can probably find it in other linguistic encyclopedias/dictionaries/lexicons (although i havent looked). about using technical vocab, i agree. however, encyclopedias are for explaining technical topics, so maybe it is not a bad idea to have a better discussion of some technical terms (even though we dont use them generally within Wikipedia articles).
Re Lakota as language/dialect: well, i should say up front that i am not a Siouanist, so i have read basically zero Siouan literature. however, i think i have generally read that Lakota is essentially a mutually intelligible idiom of a larger Sioux complex. i dont know about the details of this, such as how great the variation among Lakota speakers or between Lakota speakers & Yankton speakers, etc. anyway, i really doubt that most books will consider Lakota not to be mutually intelligible with other Sioux idioms. but, i must make clear that not all works will trouble themselves with being as precise as this. as you probably know, the term language is rather fuzzy in the range of things that it refers to. many writers may use this term in different ways (cf. the use of language as it applies to Swedish & Norwegian and the use as it applies to Chinese). i will have a look at the sketch. but, even if it is not precise in its terminology, i do think that the reference i cite (Parks & Rankin 2001) is being precise because they are not concerned with a description of Lakota but rather the relationships between all Siouan languages. if you really want to determine a definitive statement about Lakota genetic relations, you will need to leave sketches and investigate a complete grammar and papers on regional variation within Sioux and perhaps also including Assiniboine and Stoney (since they were considered all dialects of Sioux a while ago).
well, i probably wrote too much. hopefully, i explained my thoughts well. peace – ishwar  (speak) 20:13, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
oh, if you want to investigate (which will be good for the article in so many ways if you summarize your readings), i good place to start is probably Willem de Reuse's thorough bibliography One Hundread Years of Lakota Linguistics (1887-1987). if you want, i can ask Willem himself & tell you what he says (he has done fieldwork on Lakota himself), although you need not take my word for it. – ishwar  (speak) 20:23, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia has articles on technical topics, but I think they should be confined to technical articles, not articles like Lakota langauge. I'm not terribly concerned with the relations of Lakota to other langauges, and I've been exiled to a land without a decent library. But as you say, the word language means a lot of different things, and I think the way the word is used in common parlace has more to do with politics and social choices than mutual understandability, and the speakers of Lakota have chosen to treat it as a seperate language from Sioux, with its own orthography and teaching materials. --Prosfilaes 01:06, 4 November 2005 (UTC)
The dispute over the term "dialect" is rather preposterous and unfruitful. Anyone here should agree, once and for all, on the real meaning of the word (i.e., etymologically "exchanging concepts" etc.) and make it clear that no derogatory, pejorative or denigrating notion should stick to it. As any linguist, I know that in the Greek sense of the term, all languages are dialects I can speak (λέγω [and "lect" is simply "what is said or read"]) to make things known through (δια-) it. There is too often confusion between this simple notion and terms like branches of a group or family on one side, and disparaging words like the French "patois", or even "sabir" and "baragouin" on the other side. User:Korenyuk

[edit] Velar vs. glottal friction

Regarding "...those with velar friction ([pˣ tˣ kˣ]), which occur before /a/, /ã/, /o/, /õ/, /ẽ/, and /ű/...," I'm confused by the mention here of /ẽ/. Could it be that the intended phoneme was /e/ or /ĩ/?

Also, above that, where it now says "three nasal vowels, /ĩ ã ũ/ (phonetically [ɪ̃ ə̃ ʊ̃]", it used to say "three nasal vowels, /ĩ ã ũ/ (phonetically [ɪ̃ ʊ̃ ə̃]" and I changed the places of [ʊ̃] and [ə̃]. Hope that is right; if not, sorry, and please revert it.

Whoops. Those were both mistakes on my part; thanks for catching them! --Whimemsz 18:49, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Lakota in text

Unlike English which has settled into more or less standardized albeit irregular spelling, Lakota has a relatively short history as a written language. Unlike Tsalagi which has its own alphabet and character set, Lakota has been written using various adaptations of the Roman alphabet. To the present time, the only Lakota dictionaries have been bilingual, geared toward assisting non-Lakota-speaking individuals understand Lakota in terms of their own languages. To date, no Lakota dictionary has been published by the Lakota in Lakota for the Lakota. Until the Lakota people themselves make manifest their own standards of spelling and semantics, it is of dubious value and perhaps even a little arrogant for outsiders to try to establish these standards for them by citing a particular work as if it were "The Bible of the Lakota Language". Hotankapi (talk) 02:42, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Check my nasals?

I've added some information on enclitics, including a table with examples from Deloria's Dakota Texts. I didn't have Deloria in front of me, though, so I was working from my notes. I have a tendency to miss nasal vowels as well as glottal consonants, so someone might want to check to see if I made any mistakes. Cnilep (talk) 17:36, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

  • The same goes for the subsections I added under "Grammar." By the way, I didn't cite sources on each subsection, but each is based on Rood & Taylor 1996, Buechel 1983, and/or Deloria 1932. Cnilep (talk) 16:47, 11 June 2008 (UTC)