{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02633118782913985, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005851375073142188, 'mean_word_length': 5.452830188679245, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Establishing Connections to Place: Identifying O’odham Place Names in Early Spanish Documents

The sound system of the O’odham language differs from that of the Spanish language with sounds and processes that a Spanish speaker cannot duplicate when trying to pronounce O’odham words. This became problematic for the Tohono O’odham team reviewing Spanish documents as part of the O’odham–Pee Posh Documentary History Project. Father Eusebio Francisco Kino and Captain Juan Mateo Manje both recorded the O’odham place names of communities they visited, but wrote them as a Spanish speaker would pronounce them, corrupting the O’odham pronunciation in the process. The change made the place names almost unrecognizable as O’odham words and presented us some difficulty in deciphering the original O’odham names for the communities. But by using information from O’odham elders, place names already recognized as being Spanish pronunciations of O’odham words, and descriptions of the places provided in the documents, as well as applying my own linguistic studies to the problem, we have been able to distinguish the original O’odham names for various communities in present-day Mexico, establishing further evidence that these communities were originally O’odham communities. 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.