draft manuscript - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

Chapter 3
Text Conventions
This chapter provides information on the conventions employed in our representation of the Old
Omagua ecclesiastical texts. We begin in §3.1 by describing the general multilinear format in
which we present sentences of the texts. In §3.2 we discuss the related issues of the orthographic
choices employed in each text to represent Old Omagua phonemes, and how we deduce phonemic
representations on the basis of the orthographic representations.
3.1 Textual Representation Format
In our analysis and presentation of the Old Omagua ecclesiastical texts, portions of text are given
in a numbered multilinear format. The goal of this format is to allow the reader to follow the entire
process of interpretation and analysis from the original text, through its resegmentation, conversion
to a phonemic representation, its morphological segmentation, and ultimately, its translation. We
feel that this multilinear format is necessary to render this process maximally transparent and open
to verification.
The first issue to address is the segmentation of the original text into portions that bear example
numbers. In general, we divide the original text into sentences for purposes of numbering and
interlinearization. The major exception to this general principle are the catechism texts, which
were organized into question-response pairs in the original documents. For these texts, each example
number corresponds to a question-response pair, where the question and response are distinguished
by lowercase letters, and the lettered format described in (3.1) below corresponds to lowercase
Roman numerals. Returning to the issue of sentence breaks in the non-catechistic texts, it is
important to note that in some cases, the question of where sentence breaks lie is itself an analytical
decision open to question. This is especially the case for the Profession of Faith (Chapter 7), where
the original text is largely devoid of punctuation. In this case we provide the original text, so that
our sentence break decisions can be evaluated. In most other cases, however, sentence breaks in our
representation correspond to sentence breaks in the original text. Whenever this is not the case we
make note of the fact.
Our multilinear format consists of up to eight lines, as exemplified in (3.1), taken from (4.4) in
the Lord’s Prayer (see §4.2).
(3.1) a. Tanu eocmai neyume icume tanu supe
b. tanu eocmai neyume icume tanusupe
c. tanueumai neyume ikume tanusupe.
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