Re: Miapimoquitch cat's cradle
| From: | Dirk Elzinga <dirk_elzinga@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, April 9, 2002, 22:10 |
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At 10:24 PM +0200 04/09/02, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>En réponse à Dirk Elzinga <Dirk_Elzinga@...>:
>
>> Hey.
>>
>> I was feeling a little harried at work today, so I pulled down my
>> copy of _Kwakiutl String Figures_ and spent half an hour destressing.
>
>Kwakiutl? Someone said Kwakiutl?!!! Wouldn't you have that article in
>electronic form by chance?!!!! <hungry look> A language that marks word
>function by suffixes on the *previous* word can only interst me!!! Funny
>enough, I mentioned this language to czHANG in private email just a few days
>ago! :)))
It's actually a book; here's the bibliographic data:
Averkieva, Julia and Mark Sherman. 1992. _Kwakiutl String Figures_.
New York: American Museum of Natural History.
Julia Averkieva was a Soviet ethnologist who accompanied Franz Boas
on his 1930 visit to Vancouver Island. Her string figure notes were
left with Boas, but were never published. Mark Sherman is the current
president of the International String Figures Association; he got
access to her notes (in the American Museum of Natural History) and
put them into publishable form. He also added some commentary about
the origin, distribution, and cultural implications of string
figures. It's a very nice book and worth owning. It's not even very
expensive, and proceeds of its sale go to the Kwakiutl Indians.
> > The construction is a complex predicate. The first part _pate_ hosts
>> the proclitic string; it is an adverbial which lends the aspectual
>> notion of continuative to the construction, but it is not strictly
>> speaking an aspect marker. The second part _luke_ is inflected for
>> number and phase as appropriate. The suffix _-mpi_ refers to activity
>> done with or on the hand. So to say something like "I'm making the
>> Sage Hen" you'd have
>>
>> wapate lukkempi atipukan ["waBaD1 "lukkem%bi: a"tSiBu%ka:~]
>> wa= pate lukke -mpi a= tipukan
>> 1= continuously weave:U -with the hand DET= sage.hen
>>
>> with _luke_ unbound in phase to show action viewed at a moment
>> instead of in its totality.
>>
>
>Looks nice. Do you have other affixes than -mpi? What would they be?
There's a whole boatload of them, and I'm making more. It's the same
basic idea as the Salish lexical suffixes (also found in Wakashan
languages like Kwakiutl). They encode adverbial, locative, and
nominal notions without being adverbs, postpositions, or nouns. They
also don't usually coincide phonologically with other roots; that is,
the suffix for 'hand' doesn't necessarily look like the root (_maa_
in Miapimoquitch).
> > (The Sage Hen is a string figure I adapted from an Inuit original
>> "The Ptarmigan" -- see
http://www.isfa.org/arctic/93.htm for
>> instructions on how to make the Inuit figure, which is the last of a
>> series; my adaptation removes all of the intermediate figures, and
>> has slightly different crossings in its final extension. I'll be
>> happy to send instructions (in English!) privately.)
>>
>
>Nice site! I put it in my favorites :)) . I used to do that when I was a
>child...