Choctaw dictionary in FLEx and orthographic choices

My friend Jack is working with Oklahoma Choctaws to produce an audio dictionary that will use their preferred spelling system.   I'm working this morning on a quick review of the entries.  Here is a screenshot:

One big regret of my own work with Choctaw is that I didn't use the traditional orthography enough, which alienates some Choctaw communities who are attached to it.

In my defense I have to say -- the traditional orthography is terrible.  Choctaw has a vowel length distinction not present in the traditional orthography, and the orthography also uses two different symbols for each of the three phonemic vowels /a, i, o/, which are written according to how the 19th century missionaries perceived the vowel quality.  Instances of /a/ that sounded more like schwa were written with the symbol <ʋ>.

But something I understand now that I did not understand as well when I was a grad student is that orthographies don't have to be good to be useful to native speakers.  I would think that my advice to someone starting to work with a community is that if there is any orthography which speakers can use, you should stick with it.

Nominative case and verbs of wanting in Choctaw

I was a little surprised by one aspect of the grammar in this clip.  They are talking about thing that they want, and one person says,

"Nanta yamma-k chi-banna-h?"

 what   that-obl    you-want-tense

'What do you want?"

The second person replies

"Palvska yvt sa banna-h."

Bread-nom  I-want-tense

"I want bread."

I am little surprised that in this interchange, bread appears in the nominative case, rather than in the accusative.  I'd like to know whether this pattern holds up more generally in the language.

A great thing about the internet and cheap webcams is that speakers of endangered languages can post videos  to places like YouTube.  This person goes by the name "Yannash ushi Scott" and he posts Choctaw language videos.

So a question/thought -- is there anyone who has written an easy to understand guide to producing useful language videos?  I think the default video seems to be a person pronouncing a set of words, but maybe there is some better system for language learning video...

 

23rd psalm in Choctaw

Because sheep aren't native to North America, the translation of the 23rd Psalm has always been a little difficult in Native American languages.  Choctaw uses a compound that originally meant 'tame rabbit' as its translation of 'sheep' and a shepherd is one who watches over tame rabbits.  (For modern speakers, of course, 'tame rabbit' is an opaque compound for 'sheep').

The following is the 23rd Psalm in Choctaw with a rough analysis of the first verse.

(I do have a few puzzles about this verse -- the 'because'  suffix is usually -hatoko, rather than yatoko...)