taatą eži ðaace ðąąche hta apa?

Looking at my Osage notes, I saw that I have too glossed as Glycine apios [sic]. This species name appears not to exist, but Apios americana does. It's a native plant (duh!) which produces a big starchy tuber that was important in the diets of Woodland peoples. So why don't we eat it today? Slow growing time and sprawly growing habits, mainly, but apparently there's a team working on that. In Modern Osage (as Quintero calls the language of the samples she collected from the last generation of native speakers), this word only survives in compounds like tooska "Irish potato"(ska means "white"--presumably referring to the colour of the potato, not the colour of the Irish) and tooskue "sweet potato" (skuðe "sweet"). I don't know how I got confused and thought that too was the name of Nelumbo lutea (American lotus, yonkapin, water chinquapin, etc.)--another big starchy tuber eaten by the Osage before we-all stumbled along--but the name for that is actually hcewa.

In general, I've been sadly disappointed by how few terms for native plants are found in Quintero's dictionary, but I guess it just goes to show how little the last surviving speakers talked about such things. What's more disappointing, in a way, is that this makes clear that she hasn't incorporated all of La Flesche's material. In the preface, she offers a sort of apology for not confirming every item he collected with native speakers, making the very reasonable point that eliciting sentences seemed a greater priority (not to mention a more engaging task for the participants) than going over old wordlists. Yet she still includes some unconfirmed items, just not all of them. In my notes, for instance, I have žąąsape (lit. "black trunk") for "redbud" (Cercis canadensis) from La Flesche, but there's no entry for it in Quintero. I can't fathom her reasons for leaving this out but including such words as žeká óhkiche "knee joint" or htachí "muskrat".

I hate to fault such masterful meticulous work in any way, but I was really hoping this would be the One Dictionary To Rule Them All as far as Osage is concerned. There is so little published material on Osage available--basically we're talking La Flesche's BAE publications and J.O. Dorsey's papers--that I'm it couldn't all have been incorporated. Of course, that's easy for me to say, with no idea of the kinds of constraints that Quintero was working under. And, of course, with language revival efforts currently underway, there's always hope for a second edition.