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gonna faint! I wanted to buy the door!
K: I keep going back to this language thing. You mentioned
early on that you had met one particular Indian lady who
spoke no English at all. Are there many Indians that you
have met that do not speak English at all?
R: Most of the Indian women of my age--I'm fifty-eight--don't.
Mittie Jim doesn't. She smiles at me, a very beautiful
smile--she's got gold teeth--but younger Indians take the
measurements when she makes the shirts. The Indian women
in their fifties--along the Tamiami Trail, anyway, which
is what I really know--in their late fifties, don't speak
any English, or much. And the older ones, none at all.
K: And these are Miccosukees, now?
R: Yes.
K: And so they speak Miccosukee, and probably not Muskogee?
R: Right. The different....
K: OK, we're talking about the....
R: The Miccosukee and the Muskogee languages are quite different.
Betty Mae was telling me Muskogee, which she knew, and Alice
Osceola was telling me Miccosukee. Neither have any written
langauge, and the words have to be spelled phonetically, but
they were really quite different. For example, the English
word "man" in Miccosukee is nognee; in Muskogee, it's woonawa.
"Boy" is, in Miccosukee, nognochee; in Muskogee it's wonowatchee.
How in the world would you call, "Boy, you come home?" "Wono-
watchee, you come home!" "Town," for example, in Miccosukee
is ocoee, the name of a town on the Tamiami Trail, but in
Muskogee, it's talotha. Uh, there is no resemblance between
the words of the two languages.
Oh baby, I don't know how we worked out this dictionary,
but "I want" is one of the things you need. In Miccosukee,
it's sabana; in Muskogee it's chayashuse. There's just no
resemblance, is what I'm trying to tell you.
K: We should say here that we were refreshing your memory by
going back to the newspaper again, in which you did try to
publish a Seminole dictionary so that people could see that