Preserving and Enhancing Accessiblility of Gosiute/Shoshoni Materials in the Wick R. Miller Collection

University Of Utah, Salt Lake City UT

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Professors Mauricio J. Mixco and Marianna Di Paolo will head four teams in transcribing and translating materials from the Wick R. Miller Collection (WRMC) at the University of Utah. The teams, which include Shoshoni native-speakers, will will preserve and enhance the accessibility of the 148 tape recordings and associated manuscripts in Great Basin languages now vulnerable to deterioration, including 119 untranscribed and untranslated tapes in the Shoshoni/Gosiute language, a member of the Central Numic branch of Numic, a the Uto-Aztecan language family spoken in the Great Basin regions of Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. With roughly 2,000 to 3,000 native speakers, Shoshoni/Gosiute is highly endangered as most speakers are above 60 years old and it is not being passed on to the youngest generations. The bulk of the recordings and manuscripts at risk contain invaluable linguistic, cultural, and historical data collected over 30 years by the late Numic expert, Wick R. Miller, primarily by and about the Great Basin Shoshoni and Gosiute tribes, whose cultural heritage is contained in Miller's recordings and manuscripts. The original tape recordings will be re-mastered onto archival quality reel-to-reel tapes and DAT tapes to serve as digital masters from which to produce working files for transcription and downloading to more portable compact disk or cassette formats. Linguistics student assistants will scan and/or type into a computer database the Miller notebooks and binders containing field notes from elicitation sessions along with the few existing transcripts of the tapes. This will produce a searchable electronic copy of the notebooks and binders. Tribal members and scholars will have ready access to the materials through the University of Utah Marriott Library and on a website, especially in support of current and future language maintenance and revitalization efforts. A projected reference grammar, dictionary and text collection will also draw on previous studies of Shoshoni/Gosiute sentence structure, supplementing these materials with original analyses of its syntax and semantics to fill in gaps in the earlier research. The proposed reference grammar will cover the structure, meaning, and use of all known Shoshoni/Gosiute simple and complex sentence types and other discourse structures. Entries in the grammar and bilingual Shoshoni-English dictionary will be streamlined, with generalizations stated early and with complications and exceptions added later. A wide range of examples and additional cultural notes that can be ignored by readers seeking a quick overview will be included. The reference grammar, dictionary and text collection will aid community efforts to strengthen the use of Shoshoni/Gosiute and maintain its rich linguistic and literary tradition. They will also be a resource for linguists to test analyses of grammatical phenomena and to further describe how Shoshoni/Gosiute fits into the spectrum of human languages.