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Preserving the voice of a vanished people through language, history, and scholarship.

Taken from the surviving contemporary documentary sources, Julian Granberry's volume describes the grammar and lexicon for the extinct 17th-century Timucua language of Central and North Florida and traces the origins of the 17th-century Timucua speakers and their language. Originally privately published in 1987, with limited circulation, this is the only available publication on the Timucuan language. It provides full grammatical analysis and complete lexical data, and it synthesizes both linguistic and archaeological data in order to provide a coherent picture of the Timucua peoples. Granberry traces the probable historical origins of Timucua speakers to a central Amazonian homeland at approximately 2,500 B.C. and proposes that Timucua speakers were responsible for introducing ceramic wares into North America.

A comprehensive account of an endangered Scandinavian language, with an introduction to its history, sociolinguistics, and status.

Elfdalian is the language traditionally spoken in Älvdalen, central Sweden. Due to its linguistic difference from Swedish, several attempts have been made in Sweden to acquire official recognition of it as a minority language. However, despite the growing interest in documenting and revitalizing Elfdalian, it is still regarded as a dialect.

As one of the best-preserved members of a larger but lesser-known sub-branch of the Scandinavian languages called Dalecarlian (or Dalmål), Elfdalian is a unique language to study. The purpose of this grammar is to account for Late Classical, or Preserved Elfdalian from linguistic, historical, and sociolinguistic angles, and to make the language, including both its archaic and innovative features, accessible to a wider audience.

Grammar of Elfdalian serves as a valuable resource for Ölvdan locals who wish to revitalize or retake their language, for those who wish to transmit the language to others through preschool, school, or adult instruction, and for people who wish to study a North Germanic language for the first time. Linguists may find Elfdalian interesting from the angle of its language structure, as well as from the perspectives of sociolinguistics and language policy.

This book provides a grammar of the extrabiblical Hebrew inscriptions of Palestine that have been attributed by various archaeological, historical, and paleographic analyses to the period between the tenth and the sixth century B.C.E. These pre-Persian inscriptions constitute a corpus of epigraphic Hebrew inscriptions (including ostraca, graffiti, and seals) that has never been studied comprehensively. While studies of the better-known epigraphic Hebrew inscriptions have been attempted, this book covers the entire corpus. In addition, the seal inscriptions and the personal names have been systematically compared with the longer inscriptions for the first time.

The first comprehensive descriptive grammar of the understudied Indo-Aryan Pahari language, Gaddi.

A Grammar of Gaddi is the first long-form descriptive grammar of the Pahari Indo-Aryan language, Gaddi (also called Bharmauri), spoken by the Gaddi people, a traditionally pastoral community in India. The volume presents a meticulous linguistic analysis of Gaddi, showcasing its phonemic inventory, phonotactics, syllable structure, and its phonological and morpho-phonological processes.

A pioneering linguistic study documenting Khowar’s complex structure and historic oral tradition, shaped by centuries of cultural exchange in northern Pakistan.

Grammar of Khowar is the first comprehensive English-language study of Khowar, a unique Indo-Aryan language spoken in northern Pakistan. Drawing on over thirty years of field research, Elena Bashir provides a detailed snapshot of the language at a critical moment in its evolution, as increasing cultural and economic pressures accelerate linguistic change.

The book presents Khowar’s phonology, morphology, and syntax, alongside an in-depth analysis of how its grammatical structures shape the way speakers conceptualize the world. Rife with original example sentences—many sourced from oral texts recorded in multiple villages—this work preserves linguistic data that might otherwise be lost. A special appendix includes a thirty-page sample text in Khowar’s Perso-Arabic script, followed by a romanized transcription and English translation, offering an invaluable resource for scholars.

A critical contribution to South Asian linguistics, this book underscores the urgency of studying and preserving endangered mountain languages before they fade from use.
 

This is the first full-length reference grammar of Mam, a Mayan language spoken today by over 400,000 people in the western highlands of Guatemala and the state of Chiapas, Mexico. The result of over three years of extensive fieldwork in Guatemala, A Grammar of Mam, a Mayan Language is based on the dialect of Mam spoken by 12,000 people in San Ildefonso Ixtahuacan in the department of Huehuetenango, Guatemala.

England organizes A Grammar of Mam according to two complementary principles: to analyze Mam following basically traditional levels of grammatical description and to present material in such a way that the background information necessary for understanding each topic of discussion shall have been previously provided. Accordingly, England's analysis of the sound system and morphophonemic processes of Mam is followed by a description of the characteristics of root, inflectional, and derivational morphology. Chapters on phrase structure precede two chapters on sentence-level syntax.

A Grammar of Mam is of particular interest in analyzing a Mayan language that is both syntactically and morphologically ergative and that is innovative in the direction of strengthening the ergative system. Indeed at all levels of linguistic organization Mam is innovative, and for this reason it is uniquely interesting both historically and theoretically.

The history of Guarani is a history of resilience. Paraguayan Guarani is a vibrant, modern language, mother tongue to millions of people in South America. It is the only indigenous language in the Americas spoken by a non-ethnically-indigenous majority, and since 1992, it is also an official language of Paraguay alongside Spanish. This book provides the first comprehensive reference grammar of Modern Paraguayan Guarani written for an English-language audience. It is an accessible yet thorough and carefully substantiated description of the language’s phonology, morphosyntax, and semantics. It also includes information about its centuries of documented history and its current sociolinguistic situation.
 

Still a standard of Brazilian Portuguese language instruction.

A Grammar of Ugaritic is an accessible yet academically rigorous textbook for first-year students of Ugaritic. Eight digestible lessons include more than 150 exercises to strengthen readers’ understanding through translation and composition of not only vocalized Ugaritic but also transcribed texts and cuneiform script—strategies that develop language skills and provide a sound basis for classroom teaching. Short stories interspersed among the lessons help students consolidate their knowledge and bolster recognition of forms. An introduction to the language and its historical context, glossaries, paradigms, and a bibliography and guide for further learning supplement the lessons. Students who work through the grammar in the classroom or individually will be rewarded with the ability to read real Ugaritic texts in cuneiform.

This book was designed for students transitioning from the study of Greek grammar to translation of texts. It was developed in classroom use for classroom use, in the context of an integrated Great Books program in liberal arts and sciences. It is meant for students not only of Classics, but more, for students of Humanities interested in direct engagement of primary sources. Each Greek text offered for translation was chosen for its theoretical interest as well as the interest of its Greek. The selections of Greek literature offered in this Sourcebook are wide-ranging. The indisputable standard of excellence for classicists is of course the Attic dialect of Athens in its glory. However, this Sourcebook is meant for students of liberal arts and sciences whose interests range far more widely. Thus, it does not hesitate to extend not only backward to the archaic Greek of Homer, but also forward to the koine Greek of the Alexandrian and Roman empires. Greek works were chosen for being seminal to Western thinking today, chosen to give students of Western arts and sciences introductions to its Greek sources Naturally, Greek grammar is taught to the newcomer analytically and sequentially, but the continuing student needs to synthesize these distended enumerations of elements and principles. Accordingly, grammatical synopses are not appended as reference tables but placed front and center as objects of study. The grammar tables offer synoptic views of integral parts of Greek grammar to show the form and logic of the whole part of speech or part of a sentence. On the basis of these tables, detailed grammatical notes and commentary appended to Greek selections that follow are tailored for continuing students.

This volume of the American Sign Language series explains in-depth the grammar and structure of American Sign Language (ASL) while also presenting a description of the Deaf community in the United States. Written for teachers with minimal training in linguistics, it includes many illustrations, examples, and dialogues that also focus on specific aspects of the Deaf community.

Many Christians have the desire to read the New Testament in its original language. Unfortunately, books that introduce the student to New Testament Greek either tend to be long-winded, or overly simplified, or both. In this book, legendary scholar of biblical Greek, the late Frank Gignac provides a straight-forward "just the facts" approach to the subject. In fifteen lessons, he presents the basics of the grammar and the vocabulary essential for reading the Gospels in the original language. All the reader need do is to supply the desire to learn. As Gignac writes, "good luck as you begin to learn another language! It may be sheer drudgery for a while, but the thrill will come when you begin to read the New Testament in the language in which it was written."

Because of the ease of their implementations, attribute-value nased theorires of grammar are becoming increasingly populaar in theoretical linguistics as an alternative to transformational accounts, as well as in computational linguistics. Mark Johnson provides a formal analysis of attribute-value structures, of their use in a theory of grammar, of the representation of grammatical relations in such theories of grammar, and the implications of different representations. A classical treatment of disjunction and negation is alo included. "Essential reading for anyone interested in recent unification-based approcahes to grammar. Johnson lucidly lays out a formal framework in which a sharp distinction is drawn between descriptions of linguistic objects and the objects themselves. Negation and disjuntion over complex features, though linguistically desirable, have given rise to many problems, and one of Johnson's main achievements is to show that they can be interpreted using classic logic." -Ewan Klein, University of Edinburgh MARK JOHNSON is assitant professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences at Brown University.