have been translated, children's books, even games such as Pictionary and Scrabble. Despite such progress, written Dakota is not without its difficulties. The Pond brothers, Rev. Riggs, and Dr. Williamson were not the only missionaries documenting the Dakota language. Around the same time, missionaries in other Dakota bands were developing their own versions of the written language. Since the 1900s, professional linguists have been creating their own versions of the orthography. The Dakota have also been making modifications. "Having so many different writing systems is causing confusion, conflict between our [the Dakota] people, causing inconstancy in what is being taught to students, and making the sharing of instructional and other materials very difficult" (SICC). Prior to the introduction of the Latin alphabet, the Dakota did have a writing system of their own: one of representational pictographs. In pictographic writing, a drawing represents exactly what it means. For example, a drawing of a dog literally meant a dog. Palmer writes that, For the missionaries, however, documenting the Bible through pictographs was impractical and presented significant challenges. Structure Phonology See Lakota language – Phonology and Dakota language – Phonology. Morphology Dakota is an agglutinating language. It features suffixes, prefixes, and infixes. Each affix has a specific rule in Dakota. For example, the suffix –pi is added to the verb to mark the plurality of an animate subject. "With respect to number agreement for objects, only animate objects are marked, and these by the verbal prefix wicha-." Also, there is no gender agreement in Dakota. Example of the use of –pi: Example of the use of wicha- Infixes are rare in Dakota, but do exist when a statement features predicates requiring two "patients". Example of infixing: Syntax Dakota has subject/object/ verb (SOV) word order. Along the same line, the language also has postpositions. Examples of word order: According to Shaw, word order exemplifies grammatical relations. In Dakota, the verb is the most important part of the sentence. There are many verb forms in Dakota, although they are "dichotomized into a stative-active classification, with the active verbs being further subcategorized as transitive or intransitive." Some examples of this are: stative: ma-khata "I am hot" (I-hot) ni-khata "you are hot" (you-hot) khata "he/she/it is hot" (0-hot) u-khata "we (you and I) are hot" (we-hot) u-khata-pi "we (excl. or pl) are hot" (we-hot-pl.) ni-khata-pi "you (pl.) are hot" (you-hot-pl.) khata-pi "they are hot" (0-hot-pl.) active intransitive