Lexicographers get no respect
This week's News of the Weird contains an implied insult to language researchers everywhere.
Recent Obsessions in the News: Stanley Jollymore, 90, was written up in Toronto's National Post for the "ball" he made out of 139,620 metallic wrappers from cigarette packages from his 70 years of smoking (February). And Gary Duschi, 52, was written up in the Virginian- Pilot (Hampton Roads, Va.) for his 8-mile-long chain of chewing gum wrappers (38-year habit, a million wrappers) (March). And Carl Masthay, 62, was written up in Riverfront Times (St. Louis) for compiling (over the last 12 years), and self- publishing, an exhaustive, 757- page dictionary for translating between French and the Illinois Indian Kaskaskian dialect (a language no one has spoken for hundreds of years).Carl Masthay is a PhD linguist and a legitimate language researcher; Google turns up a number of references to his work, and there's a website for his Kaskaskia Illinois-to-French Dictionary. The page explains the motivation behind his scholarship, in part as follows:
Use of a dictionary for an extinct Central Algonquian language in itself would be restricted to Amerindian scholars and linguists, but it represents a view, almost like that of a traveler back 300 years in time, of cultural patterns some quite surprising for an Indian group that was brought over to Christian values by Jesuits. Dogs were made to wear deer hoofs (498); jokesters pulled seats away (280); slaves carried feathered sticks (572-573); a "horse" can't go through the eye of a needle (67, 485); and many others. About 80 superstitions are specified, about 32 biblical allusions are incorporated, and there are words for natural items--plants, birds, beasts, insects. The "maledicta" may interest some but repel others.This reminds me of when Frances Karttunen first published her Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl. She proudly posted on her office door an article from the National Enquirer decrying the publication of a dictionary for a "dead" language, complete with a cartoon showing cobweb-draped skeletons using her book. I wonder whether the Enquirer cartoonist secretly knew how culturally appropriate that cartoon really was?
