Analysis and Documentation of Cahto Language (ktw) Texts

FAIN: FN-266279-19

Sally R. Anderson
Unaffiliated Independent Scholar (Bothell, WA 98012-6739)

Analyzing and digitizing a variety of texts (folktales and other stories, prayers, song lyrics) in Cahto, a Native American language from Northern California.

The goal of Analysis and Documentation of Cahto Language (ktw) Texts is to morphologically and syntactically analyze legacy texts in the Cahto language of Mendocino County, California (Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit family). This work will make the texts available to scholars and to the Tribe, and also provide a basis for the future creation of a reference grammar of Cahto. The twelve-month period of the fellowship will allow for analysis of at least fifteen of the Bill Ray/Pliny Earle Goddard longer texts of stories, folktales, description of folk characters and practices, and one full-length prayer (Goddard, 1909; Goddard, 1902, 1906). The applicant will also analyze a number of one- or two-line texts (song lyrics, short prayers, etc.) recorded by other researchers, primarily E. M. Loeb (1932). The applicant will systematically phonemicize the texts into the practical orthography used by the Cahto Tribe and represented in the Applicant's 2018 NEH-funded Cahto Dictionary (DEL #FN-255579-17). The text analysis will be done using the same linguistic database software (SIL's FLex/FieldWorks) that produced the Dictionary, allowing easy interlinking between dictionary entries and text examples. FLex database software is a standard platform among linguists for lexical and text documentation. Fieldwork supported by this Fellowship will link the texts, collected over a century ago, with contemporary knowledge in the community. The Applicant is already aware of versions of the stories still told in English, as well as traditional lifeways and technologies reflected in the texts that are still practiced and passed down. Documenting these connections represents a significant secondary goal of the project.

Associated Products

Cahto Analyzed Texts Volume 1 - Cultural Texts (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Cahto Analyzed Texts Volume 1 - Cultural Texts
Author: Sally R. Anderson
Abstract: This first volume of two comprises the texts as texts, whether full stories, short songs, cultural phrases and prayers. The major sources for such texts are Pliny E. Goddard (1909, 1906; working with Bill Ray), Edwin M. Loeb (1932; working with Lucy (Cooke) Ray, Martina (Ray) Bell, and Gill Ray) and John P. Harrington (1942; working with Martina (Ray) Bell and Gill Ray). The Cahto words are transcribed into the Community's standard writing system, then in the second line broken into major word parts, then glossed according to the breakdown, and then with a whole word gloss below, and finally grammatical category. After this there follows a somewhat modernized translation, the original author's translation, and the original author's word for word translation (if provided). Then finally the original author's transcription of the line(s). In the case of many of the Goddard texts there are two original transcription lines, one from the published text collection (1909) and one from the field notebooks (1906).
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.webonary.org/cahto/files/CahtoAnalyzedTexts_v1_2021.pdf
Primary URL Description: link to directly download the pdf document from the author's Cahto site on SIL's Webonary
Secondary URL: http://www.turtlenodes.com/calath/CahtoAnalyzedTexts_v1_2021.pdf
Secondary URL Description: link to directly download the pdf document from the author's own website
Access Model: open access

Cahto Analyzed Texts Volume 2 - Wordlists with Micro-texts (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Cahto Analyzed Texts Volume 2 - Wordlists with Micro-texts
Author: Sally R. Anderson
Abstract: This second volume of two presents data from three sources that are primarily wordlist-like in nature, but include a reasonable number of paradigmatic examples and short sentences. The sources are Goddard's field notebooks (Goddard 1906, working with Bill Ray and Rose Ray), Merriam's Kato vocabulary list (Merriam 1850-1974), and Sapir's brief work with Bill Ray and Goddard (Goddard & Sapir 1907-1908). The Cahto words are transcribed into the Community's standard writing system, then in the second line broken into major word parts, then glossed according to the breakdown, and then with a whole word gloss below, and finally grammatical category. After this there follows a somewhat modernized translation, the original author's translation, and the original author's word for word translation (if provided). Then finally the original author's transcription of the line(s).
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.webonary.org/cahto/files/CahtoAnalyzedTexts_v2_2021.pdf
Primary URL Description: link to directly download the pdf document from the author's Cahto site on SIL's Webonary
Secondary URL: http://www.turtlenodes.com/calath/CahtoAnalyzedTexts_v2_2021.pdf
Secondary URL Description: link to directly download the pdf document from the author's own website
Access Model: open access

Cahto Dictionary - 2021 Web Edition (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Cahto Dictionary - 2021 Web Edition
Author: Sally R. Anderson
Abstract: The Cahto (also spelled "Kato") language is a California Athabaskan language of the Eel River group in northern Mendocino county, California. This dictionary is the result of the author's twenty-one years' evening and weekend research on the language, and a final year finishing the dictionary full-time, thanks to NEH funding (see Acknowledgements). This stands as the first dictionary for Cahto, and only the second dictionary for any California Athabaskan language, the first being Golla's Hupa Language Dictionary. The dictionary is comprised of over 4,600 main Cahto headwords and 3,100 variants (mostly inflected forms), extracted from nearly 11,000 forms documented by scholars between the 1850's and the 2000's, but most prolifically in the first decades of the 20th century by Pliny Earle Goddard, J. P. Harrington, Edward Sapir, C. Hart Merriam, Edward Curtis, and others. This 2021 updated edition results from another NEH-funded project analyzing Cahto texts, which has resulted in finding several hundred more forms and variants, and the linking of text examples into a significant percentage of main entries.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.webonary.org/cahto/files/CahtoDictionary_2021WebEdition.pdf
Primary URL Description: direct link to download the pdf
Access Model: open access

Cahto Webonary Online Dictionary (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Cahto Webonary Online Dictionary
Author: Sally R. Anderson
Abstract: This is an online interface to the author's Cahto dictionary database, providing search capability, and serving the data themselves. Interfaces are available in Cahto to English or English to Cahto browsing, Semantic category browsing, and searching. In addition the site serves as a location for serving the full Dictionary and other products to be downloadable. The interface itself is a product of Summer Institute of Linguistics, who are the creators of the linguistic database software used for this project, FLex/FieldWorks. The dictionary has been updated in 2021 as a result of the NEH-funded Cahto Texts project, including several hundred more forms and examples.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.webonary.org/cahto/browse/
Primary URL Description: This is the url to access the dictionary for browsing
Access Model: open access

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