California Indian languages / Victor Golla.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Golla, Victor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Indians of North America--California--Languages.

Indians of North America.

Linguistics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (395 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, 2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Nowhere was the linguistic diversity of the New World more extreme than in California, where an extraordinary variety of village-dwelling peoples spoke seventy-eight mutually unintelligible languages. This comprehensive illustrated handbook, a major synthesis of more than 150 years of documentation and study, reviews what we now know about California's indigenous languages. Victor Golla outlines the basic structural features of more than two dozen language types, and cites all the major sources, both published and unpublished, for the documentation of these languages-from the earliest vocabularies collected by explorers and missionaries, to the data amassed during the twentieth-century by Alfred Kroeber and his colleagues, and to the extraordinary work of John P. Harrington and C. Hart Merriam. Golla also devotes chapters to the role of language in reconstructing prehistory, and to the intertwining of the language and culture in pre-contact California societies, making this work, the first of its kind, an essential reference on California's remarkable Indian languages.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

PREFACE

PHONETIC ORTHOGRAPHY USED IN THIS BOOK

PART 1. INTRODUCTION. Defining California as a Sociolinguistic Area

PART 2. HISTORY OF STUDY

PART 3. LANGUAGES AND LANGUAGE FAMILIES

PART 4. TYPOLOGICAL AND AREAL FEATURES

PART 5. LINGUISTIC PREHISTORY

APPENDIX A. C. Hart Merriam's Vocabularies and Natural History Word Lists for California Indian Languages

APPENDIX B. Materials on California Indian Languages in the Papers of John Peabody Harrington

APPENDIX C. Phonetic Transcription Systems Widely Used in California Indian Language Materials

APPENDIX D. Basic Numerals in Selected California Languages

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN:

9786613331861

9781283331869

1283331861

9780520949522

0520949528

OCLC:

745865836