User:Kmack

Update 2024
I'm back to editing Choctaw. I reconnected with my Choctaw family members (my sister-in-law and nephews) and that really motivated me to get started again.

Looking back at some of my work from years past and I feel like I now have a much better idea of how to incorporate Choctaw on Wiktionary.

The multiple Choctaw orthographies are still a challenge. There's potentially three that are most important:


 * traditional (vowels ʋ, e, u; long consonants rarely doubled)
 * modern traditional (vowels ʋ, e, u; long consonants consistently doubled except digraphs)
 * modern (no vowels ʋ, e, u; long consonants consistently doubled).

The goal will be to create entries for all three inasmuch as an attestation exists. Novel words won't necessarily have traditional forms and archaic words won't necessarily have modern forms.

Main entries should avoid special characters that cannot easily be typed on a standard English keyboard (ʋ, a, i , o , ā, ī, ō). Instead these should be incorporated into the headword.

The goal for now will be to clean up existing entries, create more entries, and add etymology and pronunciation to existing entries.

Down the line, I would also like to update existing possession and declension tables. Possession is the most straightforward. Declension is a little daunting. I'm still contemplating how best to create declension and conjugation tables. On the one hand, it makes sense to me to create tables indicating forms with yʋt, mʋt, pʋt, kʋt, kōsh, hak o, etc. But on the other hand, is this really declension or are these just particles? Even if they're just particles it would still be helpful to present it in a table. The accusative/oblique forms are also used nominatively to contrast subjects.

I also want to incorporate example sentences and more grammatical information in the headword. Nouns and verbs should include their class agreement. The headword for verbs could contain a transitive form (to clarify class agreement), past, future and conditional forms.

Update 2019
I stopped using this account eight years ago. I had kind of hoped that Choctaw would have been much more developed on Wiktionary since then. At the time, I didn't understand Choctaw well enough to contribute much more than adding lemmas I could find from various sources. The Byington/Swanton dictionary is out of copyright and free on Google Books. Its idiosyncratic transcription of Choctaw as well as its archaic and obsolete vocabulary make it a challenging source.

Orthography is one of the most intimidating and confounding aspects of incorporating Choctaw. Native American linguistics in general is extremely bogged down by everyone feeling the need to create their own writing system. You wouldn't begin a grammar of French by inventing your own French orthography. Why do you feel the need to do it with Choctaw? Yes, the spelling systems are defective and ambiguous. But so is English and most other languages.

I'm starting to realize that final apostrophes, final h's and double vowels are strictly restricted to academic writing. (Not to mention superscript n and dot under a.) As far as I can tell, there really are two Choctaw orthographies. One is traditional which is fairly standardized. The other is modern which consistently indicates geminate consonants and replaces vowels e, u, v with i, o, a with long vowels indicated with an acute or a macron.

My ideal would have all lemmas under the modern orthography, with vowel length and pitch indicated in the headword just like nasalization, kind of like how Latin entries don't include macrons in the lemmas.

AS I keep adding Choctaw entries, I'm figuring new and better ways to incorporate and present Choctaw. My goal is to be comprehensive and informative.


 * Broadwell criticizes the editors of the Byington dictionary for something he did himself:


 * This yields an unfortunate situation in which this, the largest dictionary of Choctaw, is written in an orthography which does not match any of the orthographies in general use.

Choctaw headwords
Inalienable nouns mostly use class II possessive prefixes, but they also use class III prefixes. For some reason, references treat the class III inalienable nouns as either first-person (anki "my father") or as non-lexical morphemes (-ki "father"). There is no justification for this distinction. The lemma form of ishki isn't sashki or -shki.

Orthography table
I made a table comparing the various Choctaw orthography standards:

Moved to Appendix:Choctaw orthography

Declension (work in progress
There are at least three distinct paradigms: final consonant, final vowel with glottal stop, final vowel with glottal fricative. Hattak, ofi and koni are representatives of each. One challenge is that the determiners can be stacked, as many as three at a time. I'm not sure it's necessary to include them in a declension table.

Conjugation tables (work in progress)

 * Different paradigms: initial vowel, initial s, initial consonant.
 * Verbs have several grades, modes and aspects. There are also particles. These tables could get HUGE.

Active ditransitive
Oh, boy.