If you read my last article on Conlangs and the Art of Nomenclature, you know I’m an amateur linguist. Part of that comes from having a (very difficult to learn) tribal language, Muscogee, the official language of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.
A lot of times people ask me for examples of Creek words, or, for example, a simple question like “What’s the name of your clan?” If I’m talking, I have an easy answer:
The Sweet Potato Clan
But then, sometimes, people ask me “What’s the word in Creek for that?”
Easy, if I’m saying it out loud:
Ahalakaalki
What if I’m not speaking out loud, though? Maybe someone has asked me that by email. Well, I can use the transliteration above … but that’s not how it’s spelled in Creek.
This is the Sweet Potato clan using traditional spelling, the one you find in Muscogee dictionaries:
Vhvlvkvlke
To many, that looks … incomprehensible. Unpronounceable. All because the people who developed the tribal alphabet chose the character V to represent /ə/, the schwa sound.
In my opinion? The odd spelling conventions in Muscogee can be a huge barrier to learning the language.
Let’s see how we got into this mess in the first place.
Note: the Name of the Language
As you’d imagine, there are a number of spellings and transliterations for the name of the language itself: Muscogee, Muskogee, Maskoke, Mvskoke. It’s also called Creek. (Though a closely related language is Seminole, so close as to be more like dialects of each other.) I’ll use either Muscogee or Creek below.
All About V
V is an ancient letter, which of course makes sense given it’s part of “Roman numerals“, where V = 5. But you might also have seen it in old Roman inscriptions, such as the name of that famous fellow C. IVLIVS CÆSAR (Gaius Julius Caesar).
A lot of people who see unfamiliar Latin words read V as the English /v/, and pronounce the traditional greeting VALE like “valley.”
Nope. In truth, the Romans read V as /u/, so this would be more like “uale” or wallay.
I’m bringing this up as I think it’s important to the story of how V came to be used in Creek, but more on that later. Meanwhile, as one of the oldest letters, it has … diversified over time. Here are a few examples:
- V of course is /v/ in English (and French).
- V is the same a B in Spanish, /b/ at the beginning of words, /β/ in other places.
- V is /f/ (most of the time) in German. The letter used to get the /v/ sound is W.
So Why is V the Schwa?
I think this was the reasoning, but to fully get into the mindset, we have to go back to the year 1853 when the Muscogee National Alphabet was first adopted. (This was after our forced relocation from Georgia / Alabama to Oklahoma during the Trail of Tears, 1836 – 1837.) Back in the 1800s, most students in colleges and universities learned Latin and Classical Greek, at least if they wanted to appear “educated.”
In Creek (as in German) vowels have different lengths, and these lengths are important.* How to write down a vowel with the following two forms?
* There are different length consonants in Creek as well.
- Short /ə/, like the a in “about”, the e in “item”, the i in “pencil”, the o in “cannon”, or the u in “support.” (This sound can also be said to sound like the u in “but”, /ʌ/ – It depends on which book you’re using or what your instructor says.)
- A longer version that occurs in stressed syllables that sounds more like Spanish A /a/. (Not English a as in “bat.”) Just to add to the confusion—most of the time this is written as A in words! But other times they let it sneak by as a surprise, like in the name of the Sweet Potato clan above.
One’s first guess would be to use the letter U. However, that letter is already assigned to the sound /ʊ/. (Like u in “put” or oo in “book”).
So … since there’s no /v/ sound in Creek, why not take a tip from Latin and use V as an alternative to the letter U?
Sweet Potato Clan, part 2
Let’s try that name again:
Vhvlvkvlke
Now read it again, but this time, try to pronounce each V as “uh.”
You almost got it right! There’s a stress on the second-to-the-last syllable. The correct pronunciation would be /ə.hə.lə.ˈkal.ki/, which I transliterated to:
Ahalakaalki
above.
How “Cosa” became “McCosar”
I mentioned My Family Name in my bio. One unanswered question:
If my ancestor’s name was Cosa … how did “Mac” Cosa become “McCosar”?
The mystery gets worse when you realize Muscogee doesn’t have an R sound at all! (The letter R = /ɬ/, like the Welsh LL, usually transliterated as thl, or hl.)
The answer, as you can guess, is all in the schwa. My ancestor’s name was cosv, which in standard Creek would be /koːsə/. But we were NOT one, unified people, but a confederation of related tribal towns. All of them had individual dialects.*
* Some Muscogee are even from other, smaller tribes that were merged in with us on the Trail of Tears, for example the Yuchi Creek.
Apparently, in the Eufaula branch (where my ancestors came from), V can be /ɐ/, the “lowered” version of /ə/. German readers may appreciate this as the sound you hear at the end of aber, oper, and Berliner.
That’s right: it’s an allophone of /ər/, and as such, it’s possible to see how someone might have written down /koːsɐ/ as “Cosar.”
Creek Joke You Won’t Get
I once asked Dad which clan I’m from, and he said Hokse.
I’m not translating that.
(Language) References
Innes, Pamela Joan, et al. Beginning Creek. University of Oklahoma Press, 2004.
Martin, Jack B. A Dictionary of Creek/Muskogee. University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
That’s It! And Disclaimers
Am I an expert in Creek? NO. I have tried to learn it for years, but it is … contentious, at times. For example, my father tried to relearn it (he knew it as a child) and all he got from other people in the tribe was criticism for not “speaking it right.” (One person told him he was speaking “white people Creek”, which has to be the strangest thing I’ve ever heard.) I also live far away from places where I could take classes. Therefore it remains … an aspiration.
At the end of these articles I usually point out that this blog is ad-free and respects the reader by not flapping up a javascript when you’re trying to read. (That’s the number one reason I went ad-free and don’t require people to sign up for email lists or subscriptions … I myself hate it, so why would I force it on someone else?)
But here’s what I do ask. If you liked this article, consider a donation to one of the following charities, chosen for relevance to this article:
- The Native American Rights Fund.
- The National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.
- I was going to suggest the National Museum of the American Indian, because they certainly need help trying to prevent erasure of the past … BUT their site has too many popups and grabbers for my liking, making it hard for me to navigate. You can Google them, of course, and if you donate, make sure to specify “make your web pages easier to read.”