A Grammar of Central Alaskan Yupik (CAY)
A Grammar of Central Alaskan Yupik (CAY)

Author: Osahito Miyaoka

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 1712

ISBN-13: 311027857X

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The volume is a major grammar of Central Alaskan Yupik (CAY). It is the culmination of the author's linguistic studies done in Alaska and elsewhere since around 1960, with assistance of many native speakers. Central Alaskan Yupik is currently the most vigorous of the nineteen remaining Native Alaskan languages. Descriptive in nature, extensive and deep, this grammar is of typological and of ethnological/anthropological interest. Given the severely endangered state of the language, this much of descriptive linguistic material is without comparison in the field.

The Languages of Native North America
The Languages of Native North America

Author: Marianne Mithun

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001-06-07

Total Pages: 800

ISBN-13: 9780521298759

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This book provides an authoritative survey of the several hundred languages indigenous to North America. These languages show tremendous genetic and typological diversity, and offer numerous challenges to current linguistic theory. Part I of the book provides an overview of structural features of particular interest, concentrating on those that are cross-linguistically unusual or unusually well developed. These include syllable structure, vowel and consonant harmony, tone, and sound symbolism; polysynthesis, the nature of roots and affixes, incorporation, and morpheme order; case; grammatical distinctions of number, gender, shape, control, location, means, manner, time, empathy, and evidence; and distinctions between nouns and verbs, predicates and arguments, and simple and complex sentences; and special speech styles. Part II catalogues the languages by family, listing the location of each language, its genetic affiliation, number of speakers, major published literature, and structural highlights. Finally, there is a catalogue of languages that have evolved in contact situations.

The Languages and Linguistics of Northern Asia
The Languages and Linguistics of Northern Asia

Author: Edward Vajda

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-03-04

Total Pages: 792

ISBN-13: 3110554062

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The Languages and Linguistics of Northern Asia: A Comprehensive Guide surveys the indigenous languages of Asia’s North Pacific Rim, Siberia, and adjacent portions of Inner Eurasia. It provides in-depth descriptions of every first-order family of this vast area, with special emphasis on family-internal subdivision and dialectal differentiation. Individual chapters trace the origins and expansion of the region’s widespread pastoral-based language groups as well as the microfamilies and isolates spoken by northern Asia’s surviving hunter-gatherers. Separate chapters cover sparsely recorded languages of early Inner Eurasia that defy precise classification and the various pidgins and creoles spread over the region. Other chapters investigate the typology of salient linguistic features of the area, including vowel harmony, noun inflection, verb indexing (also known as agreement), complex morphologies, and the syntax of complex predicates. Issues relating to genealogical ancestry, areal contact and language endangerment receive equal attention. With historical connections both to Eurasia’s pastoral-based empires as well as to ancient population movements into the Americas, the steppes, taiga forests, tundra and coastal fringes of northern Asia offer a complex and fascinating object of linguistic investigation.

Memory and Landscape
Memory and Landscape

Author: Kenneth L. Pratt

Publisher: Athabasca University Press

Published: 2022-10-18

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 1771993162

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The North is changing at an unprecedented rate as industrial development and the climate crisis disrupt not only the environment but also long-standing relationships to the land and traditional means of livelihood. Memory and Landscape: Indigenous Responses to a Changing North explores the ways in which Indigenous peoples in the Arctic have adapted to challenging circumstances, including past cultural and environmental changes. In this beautifully illustrated volume, contributors document how Indigenous communities in Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, and Siberia are seeking ways to maintain and strengthen their cultural identity while also embracing forces of disruption. Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors bring together oral history and scholarly research from disciplines such as linguistics, archaeology, and ethnohistory. With an emphasis on Indigenous place names, this volume illuminates how the land—and the memories that are inextricably tied to it—continue to define Indigenous identity. The perspectives presented here also serve to underscore the value of Indigenous knowledge and its essential place in future studies of the Arctic. Contributions by Vinnie Baron, Hugh Brody, Kenneth Buck, Anna Bunce, Donald Butler, Michael A. Chenlov, Aron L. Crowell, Peter C. Dawson, Martha Dowsley, Robert Drozda, Gary Holton, Colleen Hughes, Peter Jacobs, Emily Kearney-Williams, Igor Krupnik, Apayo Moore, Murielle Nagy, Mark Nuttall, Evon Peter, Louann Rank, William E. Simeone, Felix St-Aubin, and Will Stolz.

Yupʼik Eskimo Dictionary
Yupʼik Eskimo Dictionary

Author:

Publisher: Alaska Native Language Center

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 722

ISBN-13:

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The most comprehensive Yup'ik dictionary in existence, the second edition of this important work now adds extensive research on Central Alaskan Yup'ik, enhancing the forty years of research done by Steven A. Jacobson on the Yup'ik language and dialects. Over these decades, Jacobson has combed through records of explorers, linguists, missionaries, and anyone who has come in contact with the actively migratory Yup'ik people. Combined with information from native Yup'ik speakers, that research has led to a richly detailed dictionary that covers the entire language and all its dialects. The dictionary also offers sections on Yup'ik spelling, early vocabulary, demonstrative words, and important intersections of Yup'ik language and culture such as the kayak, dogsled, parka, and old-style dwellings.

The Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis
The Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis

Author: Michael Fortescue

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-09-28

Total Pages: 1398

ISBN-13: 0191506206

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This handbook offers an extensive crosslinguistic and cross-theoretical survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English. These languages and the problems they raise for linguistic analyses have long featured prominently in language descriptions, and yet the essence of polysynthesis remains under discussion, right down to whether it delineates a distinct, coherent type, rather than an assortment of frequently co-occurring traits. Chapters in the first part of the handbook relate polysynthesis to other issues central to linguistics, such as complexity, the definition of the word, the nature of the lexicon, idiomaticity, and to typological features such as argument structure and head marking. Part two contains areal studies of those geographical regions of the world where polysynthesis is particularly common, such as the Arctic and Sub-Arctic and northern Australia. The third part examines diachronic topics such as language contact and language obsolence, while part four looks at acquisition issues in different polysynthetic languages. Finally, part five contains detailed grammatical descriptions of over twenty languages which have been characterized as polysynthetic, with special attention given to the presence or absence of potentially criterial features.

Comparative Chukotko-Kamchatkan Dictionary
Comparative Chukotko-Kamchatkan Dictionary

Author: Michael Fortescue

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2011-12-22

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 3110925389

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This volume is the first comprehensive comparative dictionary to cover the whole of the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family. The genealogical status of this family (whether from a common source or due to convergence) has long been controversial, but its coherence as a family can now be taken as proven. Its geographical position between Siberia and northernmost America renders it crucial in any attempt to relate the languages and peoples of these large linguistic regions. The dictionary consists of cognate sets arranged alphabetically according to reconstructed proto-forms and covers all published lexical sources for the languages concerned (plus a good deal of unpublished material). The criterion for setting up Proto-Chukotian sets is the existence of clear cognates in at least two of the four languages: Chukchi, Koryak, Alutor, and (now extinct) Kerek, and for Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan sets cognates in at least one of these plus Itelmen. Internal loans between the two branches of the family are indicated - this is particularly important in the case of the many loans from Koryak to modern western Itelmen. Proto-Itelmen sets without clear cognates in Chukotian are listed separately, without reconstructions. The data is presented in a reader-friendly format, with each set divided into separate lines for the individual languages concerned and with a common orthography for all reliable modern forms (given as full word stems, not just 'roots'). The introduction contains information on the distribution of the individual languages and dialects and all sound correspondences relating them, plus a sketch of what is known of their (pre)historical background. Inflections and derivational affixes are treated in separate sections, and Chukchi and English proto-form indexes allows multiple routes of access to the data. A full reference list of sources is included.