Establishing Connections to Place: Identifying O'odham Place Names in Early Spanish Documents

In the following discussion of this effort, I use the orthography developed by Alvarez and Hale (1970),1 which is the official O'odham writing system chosen by the Tohono O'odham Nation to be used for all educational purposes.2 The following list of approximate English sounds, taken from Ofelia Zepeda's ( 1983) A Tohono O'odham Grammar, will assist in distinguishing the letter-to-sound correlation of the Alvarez/ Hale writing system. /a/ like the a in father /b/ like the b in biß /c/ like the ch in chip /d/ like the th in this /d/ like the t in but /e/ like the u in hum /g/ like the ß in ßo /h/ like the h in hat /i/ like the i in machine /]/ like the j in job /k/ like the k in kiss /l/ no similar sound in English-closest is the dd in ladder.; also similar to the single r in Spanish /m/ like the m in miss /n/ like the n in no /ft/ like the ny in canyon /x]/ like the nß in finßer /o/ like the a in all /p/ like the p in pot /s/ like the s in see /s/ like the sh in ship /t/ like the th in with /u/ like the u in brute /w/ like the w in win /y/ like the y in yes It should be noted that in translations discussed below, parentheses around a letter indicate that the letter is an added sound, and a hyphen before a letter indicates that the sound was dropped in written form. [...]I thank the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Southwestern Foundation for Education and Historical Preservation for their support of the O'odham-Pee Posh Documentary History Project.