Palestinian  Arabic Texts

Kimary N. Shahin
The University of British Columbia

This is a collection of Palestinian Arabic narratives spoken by speakers of both urban and rural Palestinian dialects. It documents dialectal distinctions which are expected to disappear over the coming decades. The texts are analysed with reference to the grammatical sketch LW/M Series no. 28 by the author and to previous published collections of Palestinian oral texts.

ISBN 9783895861697. Languages of the World/ Text Collections 05. 80pp. 1999.

Tariana Texts

Alexandra Aikhenvald
Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University

Tariana is an endangered North Arawak language now spoken by about a hundred people in the region of the river Vaupes, North-West Amazonia, Brazil. Though about 1.500 people of the region identify as 'ethnic' Tariana, the language was virtually lost one or two generations ago.

Tariana is the only Arawak language spoken in the multilingual context of the Vaupes linguistic area, and it has suffered a heavy areal impact from Tucanoan languages. Typologically, it is a predominantly head-marking language with a few elements of dependent marking. It has several types of classifiers, and two genders, extensive verb serialization; complicated systems of tense, aspect, mood and evidentiality; and it combines elements of morphological ergativity and accusativity depending on discourse structure. The present collection contains twenty texts in Tariana with translation and interlinear glosses, and a vocabulary. These texts, collected by the author during three fieldtrips to the North-West Amazonia, are particularly important for studying the origins of Tarianas, their migration from the Içana river to the multilingual region of the Vaupes, and their identity as a people.

ISBN 9783895860782. Languages of the World/ Text Collections 07. 150pp. 1999.

Camling texts and glossary

Karen Ebert
University of Zürich

This booklet is meant to accompany the grammatical description in LW/M 103, which contains many references to the texts. It contains transcriptions of narrated Camling mythology. Although the texts are of ethnological interest, the presentation is mainly directed towards linguists. A brief introduction is given to the Camling mythological cycles.

The narrations are then presented sentence by sentence with morphological glosses and an English translation.

ISBN 9783895862182. Languages of the World/ Text Collections 11. 130pp. 2000.

Ardesen narrates - Ardeseni na isinapinenpe

Silvia Kutscher & Nuran Sevim Genç
University of Cologne

This is a collection of Laz spoken texts comprising memories, fairy tales, and jokes, which were tape-recorded during a fieldwork trip to Turkey in the summer of 1996. All of the narrators are descended from the city of Ardesen or its surrounding area. Thus, this collection delivers a deeper insight into this dialect of Laz. In respect to the situation of Laz as being an endangered language, we consider the publication of the text collection as a contribution to the urgent task of documenting this language as extensively as possible.

The publication of the texts is based on four languages (Laz, English, German, Turkish). With this arrangement and presentation of the texts we intended to address the Laz-speaking community as well as linguists. Therefore, we split the collection into two parts. The first part consists of the exact transcription of the spoken texts - including notation of speech pauses and intonation - along with German and English glosses and free translations. The second part of the collection presents the transcribed texts in a smoothier, more readable version. Adjacent to each of those texts is its Turkish translation.

ISBN 9783895865176. Languages of the World/ Text Collections 14. 330pp. 1998.

Mbay Texts

Tales, Recipes, Games and Riddles

Djiblo Ngarramadji, Nangbaye Marcel, Yankal Kindomkoul, Serge Koidere, Souangar Mahamat Ngonsay, M. Djimadoumnar;
ed. and translated by John M. Keegan


This collection of Mbay texts was gathered during the periods 1977-1979 and 1988-1990 as part of the research for the Dictionary of Mbay and A Reference Grammar of Mbay by the same author. The collection contains approximately 30 texts of various types. It includes a selection of typical Mbay tales and riddles, a few recipes for typical foods (e.g. 'boule' and 'long sauce'), descriptions of games (e.g. 'jacks' and 'warriors'), several 'how to' descriptions of typical Mbay activities (e.g. 'how to make a mud house' and 'how to make soap'), and a few descriptions of cultural phenomena (e.g. 'lion-men' and 'returned spirits').

The texts are written with the same transcription used in the Dictionary of Mbay, and there is a morpheme-by-morpheme translation of each line followed by a more colloquial translation.

ISBN 9783929075939. Languages of the World/ Text Collections 16. 92pp. 1999.

Urarina Texts

Knut J. Olawsky
Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University

Urarina is a language isolate spoken by approximately 3000 people who live scattered in the Rio Chambira area of Loreto in the Peruvian rainforest. While the majority of Urarina speakers are monolingual, socio-economic changes have already lead to loss of certain cultural knowledge, including the capacity of story telling.

This text collection intends to preserve the records of history from the Urarina perspective. Although very little is known about neighbouring ethnic groups (most of which are extinct), lexical and grammatical aspects indicate that the Urarina language is not genetically related to any of the tongues of the Rio Chambira or nearby areas. Therefore, it is still unclear from where the Urarinas may have descended. However, the content of the stories presented in this book may help to relate the way Urarinas view the world to that of other groups. For example, many cultures of Amazonia know a story of a flood in some way similar to the biblical account.

Interestingly, the Urarinas recognize two quite different versions of a flood tale, which are both presented in this book.

A short introduction to the cultural context offered in this collection helps to understand the way of living of the Urarinas. The sentences of each text include grammatical information in form of an interlinearised translation and a free translation. All data is based on recent fieldwork undertaken by the author.

ISBN 9783895866937. Languages of the World/Text Collections 17. 150pp. 2002.

Rawang Texts

Randy J. LaPolla & Dory Poa
City University of Hong Kong

This volume is a collection of fully analyzed texts of the Mvtwang dialect of the Rawang language collected as part of fieldwork on the language. Rawang is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by approximately fifty thousand people who live in northern Kachin State, Myanmar (Burma), particularly along the Mae Hka (‘Nmai Hka) and Maeli Hka (Mali Hka) river valleys just south and east of Tibet. The Mvtwang dialect is considered to be the most central of the many Rawang dialects spoken in Myanmar, and so has become a standard for writing and intergroup communication.

The texts include the Rawang creation and migration stories, other folk stories, and also dialogic procedural texts detailing how to weave cloth, how to prepare different traditional foods and how to make a bow and arrows. An introductory chapter gives a brief grammatical description of the language and introduces the Rawang orthography.

(The orthography uses the roman alphabet and a few other symbols; it was developed by American missionary Robert H. Morse in the 1960’s, and is commonly used by the Rawangs.) The texts are given in this orthography. They are first presented unanalyzed side-by-side with a free English translation, section by section. Then each section is presented again in the standard four-line format (as spoken/morphemic analysis/morpheme gloss/free translation).

ISBN 9783895867835. Languages of the World/Text Collections 18. 300 pp. 2001.

ISBN 9783862889549 (e-book, pdf)

Narratives teribes

J. Diego Quesada
University of Toronto

Este libro se enmarca dentro del proyecto Aspects of Teribe Grammar, auspiciado por el Consejo de Investigación en Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades de Canadá (SSHRC por sus siglas en inglés), cuyo fin consiste en la documentación de la lengua chibcha de Panamá, el teribe, y su descripción estructural. Además de varios artículos sobre aspectos varios de la estructura gramatical del teribe, ya se ha publicado una gramática de la lengua (LINCOM EUROPA, LSNAL 36, 2000 A Grammar of Teribe).

Este libro pues representa la realización de una tarea más del proceso de documentación y descripción de esta lengua. De hecho la recopilación de estas narraciones debe verse como complemento de la gramática ya publicada. El libro contiene 18 narraciones en lengua teribe, las cuales versan sobre temas varios de la cultura teribe; aparecen en tres versiones: teribe, glosa interlineal, y español, reflejando los tres tipos de lectores a los que el autor se dirige: nativohablantes del teribe, lingüistas profesionales, e hispanohablantes.

Luego de una breve presentación de aspectos generales de la lengua y cultura teribe (Parte I), se presentan las 18 narraciones (Parte II) que componen el cuerpo del texto. Cabe destacar, como dato curioso, que cuatro de las historias fueron contadas por la última hablante monolingüe del teribe, la señora Maragarita Calixto.

ISBN 9783895863073. Languages of the World/Text Collections 20. 140pp. 2002.