Lakota

Bruce Ingham
SOAS, London

Lakota is a language of the Siouan family spoken in the region of the Northern Plains of America. Speakers of Lakota and the related Dakota dialect were traditionally known in English as the Sioux Indians and were a powerful and numerous component of the horse born plains culture since the mid 1700s. There are now thought to be around 20,000 speakers mainly in the states of North and South Dakota and in Saskatchewan in Canada.

Lakota has a complex derivational and relational morphology with relational morphology centred on the verb. This shows prefixes, suffixes, infixes and reduplication. The main word classes are verb, noun, adverb, postposition and conjunction. The language is remarkable for its extensive use of adverbs and for its elaborate system of stems of circumstantial meaning. Its syntax is interesting for its use of stem truncation associated with subordination, producing participle-like words from verbs and incorporating nouns as modifiers.

Bruce Ingham is Reader in Arabic Linguistic Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies of London University. He has worked on Arabic since the 1960s and begun working on Lakota in 1992. He has done field work in South Dakota and Canada and is the author of an English-Lakota Dictionary, 2001.  

ISBN 9783895868498. Languages of the World/Materials 426. 114pp. 2003.

Marwari

Lakhan Gusain
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Marwari, a standard dialect of Rajasthani language of Indo-Aryan family, is spoken by about thirteen million speakers in western Rajasthan comprising Churu, Bikaner, Nagaur, Ajmer, Jodhpur, Pali, Jalore, Jaisalmer, and Barmer districts of Rajasthan. It is also spoken in eastern parts of upper Sindh province of Pakistan. Having several dialects, Marwari is very rich in literary style known as Dingal and has a literary history of over one thousand years.

This grammar includes chapters on its phonology, morphology, syntax, and a sample text. Introductory section includes geographical and sociolinguistic sketch of Marwari and its speakers. The chapter on phonology includes vowels, consonants, diphthongs, and suprasegmentals. Glottalized sounds, murmur vowels, tones, and retroflexives are very prominent. The chapter on morphology describes nominal and verbal morphology. There are two numbers, two genders, and three cases. The nouns are declined according to their final segments. Case marking is partly inflectional and partly inflectional. The third person pronouns are distinguished on the proximity/remoteness dimension in each gender. Intransitive verbs can be passivised. There are three tenses and four moods. Cardinals up to ten are inflected. The chapter on syntax describes sentence types, word order, coordination, subordination, negation and participles. The chapter on sample texts presents free and interlinear translations of some samples.

ISBN 9783895864407. Languages of the World/Materials 427. 60pp. 2004.

Betoi

Raoul Zamponi
Università degli Studi di Siena

Betoi was once spoken by a people of the same name who located in an area of the extensive region of the llanos of the Orinoco, bounded on the south by the Sarare River and on the north by the Uribante. The area is today included in the western extremity of the Apure State of Venezuela not far from the border of that country with Colombia. Betoi is a dialect of an extinct language (an isolate) spoken at contact in the same area and along the nearby Arauca River by numerous other tribes and peoples.

The author's intention with this brief monograph is to present for Betoi all the knowledge that he has been able to gather from all of its surviving material. The present work therefore includes chapters on phonology, morphology, and syntax, as well as the two available texts (with morphemic analysis), and a word list. The introductory chapter deals with the sources attesting Betoi and the socio- and geolinguistic situations. In this chapter, one can also find a discussion on Betoi co-dialects.

ISBN 9783895867576. Languages of the World/Materials 428. 62pp. 2003.

Classical Mongolian

Alice Sárközi
University Eötvös Loránd, Budapest

The present work is a brief grammar of Classical Mongolian, or, in other words, Written Mongolian that has been the literary language of all the Mongols (Khalkhas, Oirats, Buriats, Kalmüks, etc). It has never been spoken in this form and served as the language of books. Today a little modified version of this written language is used in Inner Mongolia, in the Xinjiang Autonom territory. They write and publish books in the Uighur script, however the pronunciation is far from the written form. Nowadays, the Uighur script is going to be reintroduced in the Mongolian Republic, it is taught in the elementary school side by side with the Cyrillic scrip.

The monuments of Written Mongolian cover large-scale literary forms: inscriptions, Buddhist sûtras, historical chronicles, folklore texts, and poetical and prosaic works of poets and writers of the centuries. This short grammar may help anybody interested in Mongolian culture to get closer to these literary monuments.

The work was carried out in the framework of the project of description of grammars of the Altaic languages fulfilled by the members of the Research Group of Altaic Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Science and the Department of Inner Asian Studies of the Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem of Budapest.

ISBN 9783895868597. Languages of the World/Materials 429. 60pp. 2004.

Modern Mohegan

Julian Granberry
Native American Language Services

Mohegan, a dialect of the Mohegan-Pequot language of Southern New England, was one of the major Algonquian languages of Connecticut, spoken from the Connecticut River in the west to the Thames River in the east and from central Connecticut south to Long Island Sound from at least the 13th century through the 1800s. Its last speaker, Mrs. Fidelia A.H. Fielding, died in 1908.

From detailed professional phonetic recordings of lengthy texts in Mrs. Fielding's speech we have adequate data to effect a reconstruction of the language as it was spoken in the early 1900s. The present volume gives the reader an account of the phonological, morphological, and syntactic structures of the language, as well as a summary of the position and development of Mohegan and the other Mohegan-Pequot dialects (Pequot, Shinnecock, and Montauk) within the Eastern Branch of the Algonquian language family. Lexical data and sample texts are provided.

ISBN 9783895862472. Languages of the Wolrd/Materials 430. 60pp. 2003.

Mewari

Lakhan Gusain
Johns Hopkins University

This is a linguistic description of Mewari, a dialect of Rajasthani of Indo-Aryan family, spoken by about five million speakers in Rajsamand, Bhilwara, Udaipur, and Chittorgarh districts of Rajasthan state of India. It has SOV word order.

This grammar includes chapters on phonology, morphology, syntax, and a sample text. Consonants, vowels, diphthongs and suprasegmentals have been discussed in the chapter of phonology. There are 31 consonant, 10 vowels, and 2 diphthongs in Mewari. Intonation is prominent. Dental fricative is replaced by glottal stop at initial and medial positions. Inflection and derivation have been discussed in the chapter of morphology. There are two numbers--singular and plural, two genders--masculine and feminine, and three cases--simple, oblique, and vocative. Case marking is partly inflectional and partly postpositional. Concord is of object-verb type. Nouns are declined according to their endings. Pronouns are inflected for number, person, and gender. There are tenses--present, past, and future; and four moods. Adjective are of two types--either ending in /-o/ or not ending in /-o/.

Three participles are there--present, past, and prefect. Sentence types, simple and complex sentences including coordination and subordinat-ion are analyzed in the chapter of syntax. In the sample text, interlinear and free translations are provided with original text.

ISBN 9783895868290. Languages of the World/Materials 431. 80pp. 2013.

Upper Necaxa Totonac

David Beck
University of Alberta

Upper Necaxa Totonac is a member of the Totonac-Tepehua family of languages spoken in East Central Mexico in the lowlands of Veracruz and the adjacent mountainous regions of the states of Puebla and Hidalgo. One of the smaller languages in the family, Upper Necaxa has around 3,000 speakers, most of them in their forties or older, living in three villages in the Necaxa River Valley in northern Puebla State, Mexico.

Upper Necaxa Totonac is a morphologically complex language featuring particularly rich inflectional marking on the verb. Active verb stems are inflected for subject- and object-agreement, four aspects, and three tenses, and the language has a wide-range of valency-altering affixes that includes two causatives and four applicatives. The language is also notable for its lack of prepositions and its use of bodypart prefixes on verbs to form locative expression and to localize the affected parts of event-participants, in many cases increasing the basic valency of the stem.

David Beck is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Alberta. He began work on Upper Necaxa Totonac in 1998 as a graduate student at the University of Toronto, and is currently compiling a trilingual (Totonac/English/Spanish) dictionary.

ISBN 9783895868214. Languages of the World/Materials 432. 120pp. 2004.

Mochica

Even Hovdhaugen
University of Oslo

The Mochica language was spoken on the North-West coast of Peru and in some inland villages. The first attested documentation of the language is from 1607. The language was widely used in the area in the 17th and early 18th century, but records of the language at the end of the 19th century show a dying language only spoken by a few persons in some villages around Chiclayo. The language died out as a spoken language about 1920, but certain words and phrases were in use in some families up to the 1960s.

Mochica was the language of the Chimú culture and it may have been the language of the Moche culture. Mochica was the language of one of the main pre-Inca cultures of Perú, a culture that created the great town Chanchan and the impressive pyramids, temples and tombs from Trujillo in the south to Túcume in the north.

Our main source for the knowledge of this ancient South American language is Fernando de la Carrera: ARTE DE LA LENGVA YVNGA DE LOS VALLES del Obispado de Truxillo del Peru, con vn Confessonario, y todas las Oraciones Christianas, traducidas en la lengua, y otras cosas. (Lima 1644). The book contains a grammar, all the basic religious texts, confessional formulas, extensive explanatory questions and answers to most texts, psalms, as well as some brief non-religious dialogues and a number of sentences in Mochica. The author had a native command of the lanuage.

Mochica is typologically different from the other main languages on the West coast of South America (Quechua, Aymara, and Mapudungun) and contains features that are rare both within South American languages and in the languages of the world: case system where cases are build on each other in a linear sequence, e.g. the ablative suffix has to be added to the locative which again must be added to an oblique case form - all nouns have two stems: a possessed stem and a non-possessed stem - an agentive case suffix mainly used for the agent in passive clauses - a verbal system where all finite forms are formed with the copula. Mochica appears to be a linguistic isolate with no clear cognates among attested American Indian languages.

ISBN 9783895868627. Languages of the World/Materials 433. 80pp. 2004.

Manx

John D. Phillips
Yamaguchi University

Manx is the recently-extinct language of the Isle of Man, located in the northern part of the Irish Sea between Britain and Ireland. It is a member of the Celtic group of the Indo-European family of languages, and as such is related to the other modern Celtic languages: Welsh, Breton, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish. It is closest to Scottish Gaelic and Irish, but is not mutually intelligible with either.

Until the nineteenth century, the great majority of the island's inhabitants were monolingual Manx-speaking, but after the island came under British rule in 1765, Manx receded from public and later private life and was replaced by English. The last native speaker died in 1974.

Manx is an isolating language with very little morphology. The basic word order is VSO, though the clause-initial auxiliary marks only tense, with the main verbal meaning carried by an indeclinable verbal noun. Like the other Celtic languages, Manx has a system of initial consonant mutation: words beginning with mutable consonants have two forms, plain and lenited.

This grammar is based on a corpus of tape recordings of the speech of ten of the last native speakers of Manx, with other sources used to confirm and supplement as necessary.

ISBN 9783895867651. Languages of the World/Materials 434. 140pp. 2004.

Dhundhari

Lakhan Gusain
Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC

This is a comprehensive linguistic study of Dhundhari, a dialect of Rajasthani language of Indo-Aryan family, spoken by about nine million persons in Jaipur, Dausa, Tonk, Ajmer, Karauli and Sawai Madhopur districts of Rajasthan. It was first surveyed upon by G. Macliester who published specimens of fifteen varieties of Dhundhari spoken in the territory of the former state of Jaipur in 1898. It has SOV word order, and the typical feature of the language is /chE/ which is used as an auxiliary verb or copula.

This grammar includes four chapters including a sample text. Consonants, vowels, diphthongs and suprasegmentals of Dhundhari are discussed in the chapter of phonology. There are two numbers, two genders, and three cases. The nouns are declined according to their final segments. Case marking is postpositional. All pronouns are inflected for number and case. The third person pronouns are distinguished on the proximity/remoteness dimension in each gender. Adjectives end either in /-o/ or not. There are three tenses and four moods. There is no difference in active and passive voice. Participles function as adjectives. Cardinal numbers up to ten are inflected. Sentence types are of traditional nature. Complex sentences are analyzed including coordination and subordination. Particles are discussed in syntax.

ISBN 9783895867392. Languages of the World/Materials 435. 88pp. 2015.