American Indian Languages

American Indian Languages PDF

Author: Lyle Campbell

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2000-09-21

Total Pages: 527

ISBN-13: 0195349830

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Native American languages are spoken from Siberia to Greenland, and from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego; they include the southernmost language of the world (Yaghan) and some of the northernmost (Eskimoan). Campbell's project is to take stock of what is currently known about the history of Native American languages and in the process examine the state of American Indian historical linguistics, and the success and failure of its various methodologies. There is remarkably little consensus in the field, largely due to the 1987 publication of Language in the Americas by Joseph Greenberg. He claimed to trace a historical relation between all American Indian languages of North and South America, implying that most of the Western Hemisphere was settled by a single wave of immigration from Asia. This has caused intense controversy and Campbell, as a leading scholar in the field, intends this volume to be, in part, a response to Greenberg. Finally, Campbell demonstrates that the historical study of Native American languages has always relied on up-to-date methodology and theoretical assumptions and did not, as is often believed, lag behind the European historical linguistic tradition.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics PDF

Author: Keith Allan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-03-28

Total Pages: 945

ISBN-13: 0199585849

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Leading scholars examine the history of linguistics from ancient origins to the present. They consider every aspect of the field from language origins to neurolinguistics, explore the linguistic traditions in different parts of the world, examine how work in linguistics has influenced other fields, and look at how it has been practically applied

California Indian Languages

California Indian Languages PDF

Author: Victor Golla

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2022-02

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 0520389670

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Nowhere was the linguistic diversity of the New World more extreme than in California, where an extraordinary variety of village-dwelling peoples spoke seventy-eight mutually unintelligible languages. This comprehensive illustrated handbook, a major synthesis of more than 150 years of documentation and study, reviews what we now know about California's indigenous languages. Victor Golla outlines the basic structural features of more than two dozen language types and cites all the major sources, both published and unpublished, for the documentation of these languages—from the earliest vocabularies collected by explorers and missionaries, to the data amassed during the twentieth-century by Alfred Kroeber and his colleagues, to the extraordinary work of John P. Harrington and C. Hart Merriam. Golla also devotes chapters to the role of language in reconstructing prehistory, and to the intertwining of language and culture in pre-contact California societies, making this work, the first of its kind, an essential reference on California’s remarkable Indian languages.

Origin of the Earth and Moon

Origin of the Earth and Moon PDF

Author: Shirley Silver

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 9780816521395

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This comprehensive survey of indigenous languages of the New World introduces students and general readers to the mosaic of American Indian languages and cultures and offers an approach to grasping their subtleties. Authors Silver and Miller demonstrate the complexity and diversity of these languages while dispelling popular misconceptions. Their text reveals the linguistic richness of languages found throughout the Americas, emphasizing those located in the western United States and Mexico while drawing on a wide range of other examples from Canada to the Andes. It introduces readers to such varied aspects of communicating as directionals and counting systems, storytelling, expressive speech, Mexican Kickapoo whistle speech, and Plains sign language. The authors have included the basics of grammar and historical linguistics while emphasizing such issues as speech genres and other sociolinguistic issues and the relation between language and worldview. American Indian Languages: Cultural and Social Contexts is a comprehensive resource that will serve as a text in undergraduate and lower-level graduate courses on Native American languages and provide a useful reference for students of American Indian literature or general linguistics. It also introduces general readers interested in Native Americans to the amazing diversity and richness of indigenous American languages.

Tradition and Argument in Classical Indian Linguistics

Tradition and Argument in Classical Indian Linguistics PDF

Author: Johannes Bronkhorst

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 9400953941

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This book was written as a doctoral thesis. It was submitted to and accepted by the University of Poona in 1979. Several people contributed to the creation of this book, in various ways. Prof. S. D. Joshi, my supervisor, introduced me to the study of the Sanskrit grammatical tradition. His unfailing skepticism towards and disagreement with the ideas worked out in this book contributed more to their development than he may have been aware. Prof. Paul Kiparsky gave encouragement when this was badly needed. In the years following 1979 Dr. Dominik Wujastyk was kind enough to read the manuscript and suggest improvements in language and style. To all of these lowe a debt of gratitude, but most of all lowe such a debt to Pandit Shivarama Krishna Shastri. In the course of several years he read with me many portions of Nagesa's grammatical and other works, and much besides. His ability to understand difficult grammatical and philosophical texts in Sanskrit was unequalled, and without his help it would have taken far longer to write this book and indeed might very well have proved impossible. Shivarama Krishna Shastri never saw the result of our reading; he died before this book could appear in print. I dedicate it to his memory. J. BRONKHORST Xl INTRODUCTION In the following pages an attempt will be made to establish that the part of Nagesa's Paribha$endusekhara (PS) which deals with Par.