Coyote Ovepowers Sun (Securing Sun Disk)
Dorothy Nicodemus' Coeur d'Alene Narrative as Recorded by Gladys Reichard
Shannon T. Bischoff
University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez
This work presents an interlinear analysis of the Coeur d'Alene narrative Coyote Overpowers Sun (Securing Sun Disk). The narrative was told by Dorothy Nicodemus and recorded by Gladys Reichard in the summer of 1929. It is part of some forty narratives recorded by Reichard but never published in Coeur d'Alene. Further, an analysis has never been published. As Coeur d'Alene is a language no longer learned by children, with fewer than three speakers, it is imperative that these narratives become accessible to the Coeur d'Alene community for their revitalization efforts. Further, that they be made available to the wider linguistic community.
What follows is Reichard's 1947 English translation of the narrative, the narrative recorded in the orthography of the Coeur d'Alene tribe, and the interlinearized text. If a best practices is to be followed, as Simon and Bird (2008) suggest, such works must be made available to community members in their chosen orthographies. The interlinearization follows best practices in that an additional line of analysis is provided under the morpheme by morpheme gloss. As Coeur d'Alene is a polysynthetic language, it is not always transparent, nor necessarily clear, how the English gloss of a word corresponds to the morpheme by morpheme gloss. The hope is that this work will be used in the communities revitalization efforts, and that this format will prove advantages to the learner of Coeur d'Alene.
ISBN 9783895863448. Languages of the World/Text Collections 29.166 pp. 2009.
