Kategoria BISAC: Foreign Language Study >> Indigenous Languages of the Americas

In building up a scenario for the arrival on the shores of Alaska of speakers of languages related to Eskimo-Aleut with genetic roots deep within Sineria, this book touches upon a number of issues in contemporary historical linguistics and archaeology. The Arctic "gateway" to the New World, by acting as a bottleneck, has allowed only small groups of mobile hunter-gatherers through during specific propitious periods, and thus provides a unique testing ground for theories about population and language movements in pre-agricultural times. Owing to the historically attested prevalence of...

Comprehensive in scope and rich in detail, this book explores language planning, language education, and language policy for diverse Native American peoples across time, space, and place. Based on long-term collaborative and ethnographic work with Native American communities and schools, the book examines the imposition of colonial language policies against the fluorescence of contemporary community-driven efforts to revitalize threatened mother tongues. Here, readers will meet those who are on the frontlines of Native American language revitalization every day. As their efforts show, even...

This volume is the first descriptive grammar of Kotiria (Wanano), a member of the eastern Tukanoan language family spoken in the Vaupes River basin of Colombia and Brazil in the northwest Amazon rain forest. The Kotirias, who have lived in this remote region for more than seven hundred years, participate in the complex Vaupes social system, characterized by long-standing linguistic and cultural interaction. The Kotirias remained relatively isolated from the...

South American Indian Languages are a particularly rich field for comparative study, and this book brings together some of the finest scholarship now being done in that area.

The key to the study of the language and history of the Classic Maya (A.D. 293-900) is the verb. Maya Glyphs: The Verbs is a comprehensive study of the verb morphology and syntax of the Maya writing system.

Linda Schele's summary of methodology makes available in a single place many important discoveries and approaches to the Maya language. Hers is the first sourcebook to include so broad a range of dates and to identify for the first time so many Maya rulers and events.

The admirably lucid text provides an excellent introduction to Maya hieroglyphics for the beginner,...

Umatilla Dictionary documents the language of the Umatilla people east of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon and Washington. Working for many years with the accumulated scholarship of linguists and anthropologists as well as with elders on the Umatilla Reservation, tribal linguist Noel Rude has painstakingly recorded and rationalized words, pronunciations, phrases, and other elements of the Umatilla language.

The dictionary includes a grammar and comparative information that places the Umatilla language in its linguistic and historical context and compiles all of its known...

Munsee Delaware, an Eastern Algonquian language, is spoken by a small and steadily declining number of individuals. The Delaware-speaking peoples originally lived in the area of what is now New York City, adjacent regions of New York State, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Today, a small number of speakers of the closely related Unami Delaware language are located in Oklahoma, and, of the three sites where Munsee Delaware was the predominant Delaware language spoken in Canada, only Moraviantown, Ontario, has surviving speakers.

Based on linguistic research carried out with...

Mayan civilization, renowned for its mathematics, writing, architecture, religion, calendrics, and agriculture, fascinates scholars and a wide lay public as archaeology and glyphic decipherment reveal more of its secrets. In this pathfinding study of the Mayan language family, John S. Robertson explores major changes that have occurred in the core of Mayan grammar from the earliest, reconstructed ancestral language down through the colonial languages to the modern languages that are spoken today.

Building on groundwork already laid in phonological studies and in the study of the...