Results by title
97 books match the query 'Historical & Comparative' and 9 start with a
A Grammar and Dictionary of the Timucua Language
Julian Granberry
University of Alabama Press, 1993
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.
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A Grammar of Gaddi
Preeti Kumari, Shreya Mehta, Anjali Nair, Anusuya Nayak, Yangchen Roy, and Vyom Sharma
University College London, 2026
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.
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A Grammar of Khowar
Descriptive and Comparative AnalysisElena Bashir
University College London, 2025
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.
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.
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A Historical Grammar of the Maya Language of Yucatan
1557-2000Victoria R. Bricker
University of Utah Press, 2018
Victoria Bricker’s painstaking work is based on almost one thousand provenienced notarial documents and letters written by native speakers of Yucatec Maya from colonial times to the modern day. Because the documents are dated and also specify the town where they were written, Bricker was able to determine when and where grammatical changes first appeared in the language and the trajectory of their movement across the Yucatan peninsula. This exemplary grammar of Yucatec Maya includes examples and careful explanations of the phonological, morphological, and syntactic structures of the language. Bricker’s research is distinguished in its treatment of seemingly aberrant spellings of Maya words as clues to the way they were actually pronounced at different times in the past. Her chapters include topics seldom covered, such as deictic particles, affects, and reduplication. Of special interest is a poetic form of reduplication composed of couplets (or triplets) found in documents from each of the centuries, indicating the continuity of this genre from the Colonial to the Modern version of this language.
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A History of Language
Steven Roger Fischer
Reaktion Books, 2018
This second edition of Steven Roger Fischer’s fascinating book charts the history of communication from a time before human language was conceived of to the media explosion of the present day. Fischer begins by describing the modes of communication used by whales, birds, insects, and nonhuman primates, suggesting these are the first contexts in which the concept of “language” might be applied. He then moves from the early abilities of Homo erectus to the spread of languages worldwide, analyzing the effect of the development of writing along the way. With the advent of the science of linguistics in the nineteenth century, the nature of human languages first came to be studied and understood. Fischer follows the evolution of linguists’ insights and the relationship of language to social change into the mid-1900s. Taking into account the rise of pidgin, Creole, jargon, and slang, he goes on to raise provocative questions about literature’s—and literacy’s—relationship to language. Finally, touching on the effects of radio, television, propaganda, and advertising, Fischer looks to the future, asking how electronic media are daily reshaping the world’s languages and suggesting a radical reinterpretation of what language really is.
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A Key into the Language of America
The Tomaquag Museum EditionRoger Williams
Westholme Publishing, 2019
A New Edition of One of the Most Important Cultural Artifacts of European and Indigenous American Contact
Roger Williams’s Key into the Language of America, first published in 1643, is one of the most important artifacts of early Indigenous American culture. In it, Williams recorded the day-to-day experience of the Narragansett people of Rhode Island in their own words, the first documentation of an American Indian language in English. Williams’s Key can be read at many levels because of its historical, literary, political, and religious significance. Its greatest value, though, is its intimate portrait of the Narragansett and their linguistic neighbors in the early years of European colonial settlement, before disease, dislocation, warfare—in particular, King Philip’s War—and colonial interference had diminished their population and power in the region. An extraordinary achievement, Williams’s Key gives us a contemporary account of Narragansett family life, of their sociability and skill in business, their dress, foodways, and the farming, fishing, and hunting that formed the basis of their sustenance practices.
This new Tomaquag Museum edition includes for the first time cultural commentary provided by the Narragansett Tribe as well as modern linguistic information provided by a leading authority in the study of American Indian languages.
The Tomaquag Museum, located in Exeter, Rhode Island, is an Indigenous nonprofit organization dedicated to sharing the culture, arts, and history of the Narragansett and other tribal communities of southern New England.
Roger Williams’s Key into the Language of America, first published in 1643, is one of the most important artifacts of early Indigenous American culture. In it, Williams recorded the day-to-day experience of the Narragansett people of Rhode Island in their own words, the first documentation of an American Indian language in English. Williams’s Key can be read at many levels because of its historical, literary, political, and religious significance. Its greatest value, though, is its intimate portrait of the Narragansett and their linguistic neighbors in the early years of European colonial settlement, before disease, dislocation, warfare—in particular, King Philip’s War—and colonial interference had diminished their population and power in the region. An extraordinary achievement, Williams’s Key gives us a contemporary account of Narragansett family life, of their sociability and skill in business, their dress, foodways, and the farming, fishing, and hunting that formed the basis of their sustenance practices.
This new Tomaquag Museum edition includes for the first time cultural commentary provided by the Narragansett Tribe as well as modern linguistic information provided by a leading authority in the study of American Indian languages.
The Tomaquag Museum, located in Exeter, Rhode Island, is an Indigenous nonprofit organization dedicated to sharing the culture, arts, and history of the Narragansett and other tribal communities of southern New England.
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Africans and Native Americans
The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black PeoplesJack D. Forbes
University of Illinois Press, 1993
Jack D. Forbes's monumental Africans and Native Americans has become a canonical text in the study of relations between the two groups. Forbes explores key issues relating to the evolution of racial terminology and European colonialists' perceptions of color, analyzing the development of color classification systems and the specific evolution of key terms such as black, mulatto, and mestizo--terms that no longer carry their original meanings. Forbes also presents strong evidence that Native American and African contacts began in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean.
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Articulating Difference
Sex and Language in the German Nineteenth CenturySophie Salvo
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Enriches contemporary debates about gender and language by probing the histories of the philosophy and sciences of language.
Drawing on a wide range of texts, from understudied ethnographic and scientific works to canonical literature and philosophy, Sophie Salvo uncovers the prehistory of the inextricability of gender and language. Taking German discourses on language as her focus, she argues that we are not the inventors but, rather, the inheritors and adapters of the notion that gender and language are interrelated. Particularly during the long nineteenth century, ideas about sexual differences shaped how language was understood, classified, and analyzed. As Salvo explains, philosophers asserted the patriarchal origins of language, linguists investigated “women’s languages” and grammatical gender, and literary Modernists imagined “feminine” sign systems, and in doing so they not only deemed sex-based divisions to be necessary categories of language but also produced a plethora of gendered tropes and fictions, which they used both to support their claims and delimit their disciplines.
Articulating Difference charts new territory, revealing how gendered conceptions of language make possible the misogynistic logic of exclusion that underlies arguments claiming, for example, that women cannot be great orators or writers. While Salvo focuses on how male scholars aligned language study with masculinity, she also uncovers how women responded, highlighting the contributions of understudied nineteenth-century works on language that women wrote even as they were excluded from academic opportunities.
Drawing on a wide range of texts, from understudied ethnographic and scientific works to canonical literature and philosophy, Sophie Salvo uncovers the prehistory of the inextricability of gender and language. Taking German discourses on language as her focus, she argues that we are not the inventors but, rather, the inheritors and adapters of the notion that gender and language are interrelated. Particularly during the long nineteenth century, ideas about sexual differences shaped how language was understood, classified, and analyzed. As Salvo explains, philosophers asserted the patriarchal origins of language, linguists investigated “women’s languages” and grammatical gender, and literary Modernists imagined “feminine” sign systems, and in doing so they not only deemed sex-based divisions to be necessary categories of language but also produced a plethora of gendered tropes and fictions, which they used both to support their claims and delimit their disciplines.
Articulating Difference charts new territory, revealing how gendered conceptions of language make possible the misogynistic logic of exclusion that underlies arguments claiming, for example, that women cannot be great orators or writers. While Salvo focuses on how male scholars aligned language study with masculinity, she also uncovers how women responded, highlighting the contributions of understudied nineteenth-century works on language that women wrote even as they were excluded from academic opportunities.
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As Sacred to Us
Simon Pokagon’s Birch Bark Stories in Their ContextsBlaire Morseau
Michigan State University Press, 2023
Originally published in 1893 and 1901, Simon Pokagon’s birch bark stories were printed on thinly peeled and elegantly bound birch bark. In this edition, these rare booklets are reprinted with new essays that set the stories in cultural, linguistic, historical, and even geological context. Experts in Native literary traditions, history, Algonquian languages, the Michigan landscape, and materials conservation illuminate the thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge that Pokagon elevated in his stories. This is an essential resource for teachers and scholars of Native literature, Neshnabé pasts and futures, Algonquian linguistics, and book history.
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