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14. Ofelia Zepeda - A Papago Grammar
Mar. 10th, 2011 07:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pauraqueThis is a teaching grammar of the language which is now more properly called Tohono O'odham. (It appears that later editions of the book are indeed called A Tohono O'odham Grammar. The edition I have is from 1997.) It's the language of the Tohono O'odham people, of what is now Arizona and northern Mexico. As of the year 2000 the language was fairly robust, with 10,000 speakers, 13% of them children, which is great. (Languages die quickly when children no longer learn them.)
Ofelia Zepeda is a native speaker and a linguist. She wrote this book to be used in the classroom, both for O'odham who lack full fluency, and for interested outsiders. The material is in the form of lessons, with discussion of the grammar, vocabulary lists, dialogues, and exercises. There are special advanced exercises for native speakers, challenging them to analyze their own speech and describe why certain constructions sound right and others do not, which is a cool addition and really drives home that the intended audience is the O'odham community itself.
The presentation is linguistically informed, but technical terms are largely avoided; there is nothing more exotic than the sorts of words you'd find in a high school language class. For me this made the book harder to read, not easier, but that's because linguistics is My Thing. I think the book does a good job of being accessible to people for whom linguistics is not Their Thing, while not being excessively dumbed-down.
The only potential snag is that the book doesn't stand on its own as a Teach-Yourself; it's obviously supposed to be a textbook for a class. The answers to the exercises are not provided. The phonology section is extremely sparse and vague, which is fine if you have people to hear and talk to, but not if you're trying to learn alone. Many of the finer points are under-explained (if you don't already know the difference between perfective and imperfective, I don't think you'll really know after reading this book either), and they're the kind of things your teacher would go over with you.
While I wouldn't rely on this book to teach you the language, it does cover quite a bit of ground for not being very long, so if you're the kind of person (like me) who reads about a language not because you're planning to speak it but simply because languages are awesome, it may well appeal to you. American Indian grammars written by native speakers aren't exactly a dime a dozen, so I was pleased to get my hands on this one.
tags: a: Zepeda Ofelia, Tohono O'odham, genre: non-fiction, subject: linguistics
Ofelia Zepeda is a native speaker and a linguist. She wrote this book to be used in the classroom, both for O'odham who lack full fluency, and for interested outsiders. The material is in the form of lessons, with discussion of the grammar, vocabulary lists, dialogues, and exercises. There are special advanced exercises for native speakers, challenging them to analyze their own speech and describe why certain constructions sound right and others do not, which is a cool addition and really drives home that the intended audience is the O'odham community itself.
The presentation is linguistically informed, but technical terms are largely avoided; there is nothing more exotic than the sorts of words you'd find in a high school language class. For me this made the book harder to read, not easier, but that's because linguistics is My Thing. I think the book does a good job of being accessible to people for whom linguistics is not Their Thing, while not being excessively dumbed-down.
The only potential snag is that the book doesn't stand on its own as a Teach-Yourself; it's obviously supposed to be a textbook for a class. The answers to the exercises are not provided. The phonology section is extremely sparse and vague, which is fine if you have people to hear and talk to, but not if you're trying to learn alone. Many of the finer points are under-explained (if you don't already know the difference between perfective and imperfective, I don't think you'll really know after reading this book either), and they're the kind of things your teacher would go over with you.
While I wouldn't rely on this book to teach you the language, it does cover quite a bit of ground for not being very long, so if you're the kind of person (like me) who reads about a language not because you're planning to speak it but simply because languages are awesome, it may well appeal to you. American Indian grammars written by native speakers aren't exactly a dime a dozen, so I was pleased to get my hands on this one.
tags: a: Zepeda Ofelia, Tohono O'odham, genre: non-fiction, subject: linguistics
