Showing posts with label youtube. Show all posts
Showing posts with label youtube. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

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...