Lexical Acculturation in Native American Languages

Lexical Acculturation in Native American Languages
Author: Cecil H. Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 1999-02-04
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0195352874

Lexical acculturation refers to the accommodation of languages to new objects and concepts encountered as the result of culture contact. This unique study analyzes a survey of words for 77 items of European culture (e.g. chicken, horse, apple, rice, scissors, soap, and Saturday) in the vocabularies of 292 Amerindian languages and dialects spoken from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego. The first book ever to undertake such a large and systematic cross-language investigation, Brown's work provides fresh insights into general processes of lexical change and development, including those involving language universals and diffusion.

Deductions Suggested by the Geographical Distribution of Some Post-Columbian Words Used by the Indians of S. America (Classic Reprint)

Deductions Suggested by the Geographical Distribution of Some Post-Columbian Words Used by the Indians of S. America (Classic Reprint)
Author: Erland Nordenskiold
Publisher: Forgotten Books
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2017-11-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780331568240

Excerpt from Deductions Suggested by the Geographical Distribution of Some Post-Columbian Words Used by the Indians of S. America In this volume I have collected the words used by 8. American Indians for certain cultural elements that were introduced into America at the time of, or shortly after, the Discovery, and for which the appellations are known to us from a considerable number of Indian languages. To render the work more lucid I have mapped out these words in such a' way that they appear on the maps at the places where they were recorded?) The maps give the words used by various Indian tribes for the domestic fowl, the horse, the cow, the banana, fire - arms, and scissors, which cultural elements were quite strange to the Indians at the time of the Discovery; as well as for the partly new cultural ele ments, the knife, the needle, and the fish-hook. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The Languages of the Andes

The Languages of the Andes
Author: Willem F. H. Adelaar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 746
Release: 2004-06-10
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 113945112X

The Andean and Pacific regions of South America are home to a remarkable variety of languages and language families, with a range of typological differences. This linguistic diversity results from a complex historical background, comprising periods of greater communication between different peoples and languages, and periods of fragmentation and individual development. The Languages of the Andes documents in a single volume the indigenous languages spoken and formerly spoken in this linguistically rich region, as well as in adjacent areas. Grouping the languages into different cultural spheres, it describes their characteristics in terms of language typology, language contact, and the social perspectives of present-day languages. The authors provide both historical and contemporary information, and illustrate the languages with detailed grammatical sketches. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book will be a valuable source for students and scholars of linguistics and anthropology alike.

Horse Nations

Horse Nations
Author: Peter Mitchell
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 477
Release: 2015-03-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191008818

The Native American on a horse is an archetypal Hollywood image, but though such equestrian-focused societies were a relatively short-lived consequence of European expansion overseas, they were not restricted to North America's Plains. Horse Nations provides the first wide-ranging and up-to-date synthesis of the impact of the horse on the Indigenous societies of North and South America, southern Africa, and Australasia following its introduction as a result of European contact post-1492. Drawing on sources in a variety of languages and on the evidence of archaeology, anthropology, and history, the volume outlines the transformations that the acquisition of the horse wrought on a diverse range of groups within these four continents. It explores key topics such as changes in subsistence, technology, and belief systems, the horse's role in facilitating the emergence of more hierarchical social formations, and the interplay between ecology, climate, and human action in adopting the horse, as well as considering how far equestrian lifestyles were ultimately unsustainable.