Things Lakota/Dakota/Sioux. And copyright.
November 14th, 2006I spent a few hours tonight poking around in the American University library tonight, and as usual I headed for the “P” section… “PM,” as it happened.
That would be languages… Hyperborean, Indian and artificial languages, according to the ever-aleatoric Library of Congress classification. (Ugh, Shirky was right; ontology is overrated.)
The one I ended up reading was Dakota Grammar: With Texts and Ethnography. I didn’t dig too deeply but it looked like a nice, competent, descriptive piece of work. There a text of a related language (Omaha) at Project Gutenberg with the interlinear text and everything, from an edition recorded by the same anthropologist: Illustration Of The Method Of Recording Indian Languages by James Owen Dorsey.
Now, here’s an honest question, one to which I don’t know the answer: that book is listed as having been published in 2004. But it was actually first published by the Government Printing Office in 1893. Now, doesn’t that mean that the book is in the public domain? Could I go and scan the whole thing and put it on the web, or would that be (by some reasoning unbeknownst to me) a violation of the Minnesota Historical Society edition?
Also interesting: Tampa, Follow the Stories: Lakota Dictionary
It’s public domain. In fact any copyrightable work produced by a federal employee as a consequence of their employmenet by the federal government, is, by law, in the public domain as soon as it is created.
- don hosek @ 14 November 2006