Author: Ana Kondic Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press ISBN: 0806152370 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 217
Book Description
South Eastern Huastec, a Mayan language from Mexico, has never before been written down. Although the master storytellers of the language are long gone, today’s older generations preserve the vast knowledge of their culture in speech. That spoken heritage in South Eastern Huastec—ranging from traditional house-building techniques to herbal remedies and funerary practices—is gathered here and transcribed for the first time. Collected and recorded by Ana Kondic in the village of San Francisco Chontla in La Sierra de Otontepec, Veracruz, Mexico, between 2007 and 2011, and translated into English and Spanish, the accounts in this landmark trilingual collection provide a rare opening into South Eastern Huastec traditions, oral literature, and daily life. Kondic divides South Eastern Huastec Narratives into five thematic sections: traditional practices, contemporary life, stories, songs, and customary foodways. Within these categories, eighteen Huastec narrators describe local beliefs, religion, rituals, and cosmology as observed in cleansing ceremonies and celebrations. They detail building methods and traditional craftsmanship, the care of children, daily routines, and use of the South Eastern Huastec language itself. They recount stories and legends—of killer coyotes, drunken horsemen, and encounters with death—and explain the preparation of tamales, coffee, and hand-pressed tortillas. Wherever possible, Kondic retains in her transcriptions the unique characteristics of each speaker’s voice—the self-corrections, repetitions, and pauses. Her morphological analysis of South Eastern Huastec will help experts understand the language more deeply. An accompanying audio-video DVD-ROM allows readers the rare chance to hear and see these narrators tell their stories in their own language. Of the approximately 100,000 people who speak the Huastec language, only about 12,000 use the South Eastern variety presented here. As the only book recording and analyzing this endangered language, this collection of narratives is a crucial document for preserving the South Eastern Huastec language, and the remarkable culture it conveys. The book includes a CD-ROM with both audio and video tracks.
Author: Tatiana B. Agranat Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030793419 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 247
Book Description
This volume provides an overview of experimental methods, approaches, and techniques used by field linguists of the Russian school, and highlights the fieldwork experience of Russian scholars working in regions with a range of languages that differ genetically, typologically, and in the degree of their preservation. The collection presents language and sociolinguistic data relating to fieldwork in diverse languages: Uralic, Altaic, Paleo-Siberian, Yeniseian, Indo-European Iranian, Vietic, Kra-Day, and Mayan languages, as well as pidgin. The authors highlight the fieldwork techniques they use, and the principles underlying them. The volume’s multidisciplinary approach covers linguistic, ethnolinguistic, sociolinguistic, educational, and ethnocultural issues. The authors explore problems associated with the study of minority languages and indicate diverse and creative techniques for data elicitation. Close collaboration with speakers lies at the core of their approach. The collection presents strategies for eliciting systems of knowledge from mother-tongue speakers, triggering linguistic self-awareness, and providing semantic and morphosyntactic context for their languages. This publication is intended for academics, and for specialists in the field of linguistics and minority and indigenous languages. It will also benefit students as a guide to field research, as well as language activists, interested in documenting and preserving their mother tongue.
Author: Katherine A. Faust Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press ISBN: 0806149574 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
In The Huasteca: Culture, History, and Interregional Exchange, a range of authorities on art, history, archaeology, and cultural anthropology bring long-overdue attention to the region’s rich contributions to the pre-Columbian world. They also assess how the Huasteca fared from colonial times to the present. The authors call critical, even urgent attention to a region highly significant to Mesoamerican history but long neglected by scholars.
Author: John Staller Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1315427281 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
Abridged and updated version of the basic work on the development of maize, including 20 chapters of interest to Mesoamerican specialists, updated with recent findings and interpretations.
Author: Nicholas A. Hopkins Publisher: University Press of Colorado ISBN: 1646421302 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
The Chuj of northwestern Guatemala are among the least studied groups of the Mayan family, and their relative isolation has preserved a strong indigenous tradition of storytelling. In Chuj (Mayan) Narratives, Nicholas Hopkins analyzes six narratives that illustrate the breadth of the Chuj storytelling tradition, from ancient mythology to current events and from intimate tales of local affairs to borrowed stories, such as an adaptation of Oedipus Rex. The book illustrates the broad range of stories people tell each other, from mythological and legendary topics to procedural discussions and stories borrowed from European and African societies. Hopkins provides context for the narratives by introducing the reader to Chuj culture and history, conveying important events as described by indigenous participants. These events include customs and practices related to salt production as well as the beginnings of the disastrous civil war of the last century, which resulted in the destruction of several villages from which the narratives in this study originated. Hopkins also provides an analytical framework for the strategies of the storytellers and presents the narratives with Chuj text and English translation side-by-side. Chuj (Mayan) Narratives analyzes the strategies of storytelling in an innovative framework applicable to other corpora and includes sufficient grammatical information to function as an introduction to the Chuj language. The stories illustrate the persistence of Classic Maya themes in contemporary folk literature, making the book significant to Mesoamericanists and Mayanists and an essential resource for students and scholars of Maya linguistics and literary traditions, storytelling, and folklore.
Author: Durbin Feeling Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press ISBN: 0806160624 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
The stories of the Cherokee people presented here capture in written form tales of history, myth, and legend for readers, speakers, and scholars of the Cherokee language. Assembled by noted authorities on Cherokee, this volume marks an unparalleled contribution to the linguistic analysis, understanding, and preservation of Cherokee language and culture. Cherokee Narratives spans the spectrum of genres, including humor, religion, origin myths, trickster tales, historical accounts, and stories about the Eastern Cherokee language. These stories capture the voices of tribal elders and form a living record of the Cherokee Nation and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians' oral tradition. Each narrative appears in four different formats: the first is interlinear, with each line shown in the Cherokee syllabary, a corresponding roman orthography, and a free English translation; the second format consists of a morpheme-by-morpheme analysis of each word; and the third and fourth formats present the entire narrative in the Cherokee syllabary and in a free English translation. The narratives and their linguistic analysis are a rich source of information for those who wish to deepen their knowledge of the Cherokee syllabary, as well as for students of Cherokee history and culture. By enabling readers at all skill levels to use and reconstruct the Cherokee language, this collection of tales will sustain the life and promote the survival of Cherokee for generations to come.
Author: Brad Montgomery-Anderson Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press ISBN: 0806149337 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 537
Book Description
The Cherokees have the oldest and best-known Native American writing system in the United States. Invented by Sequoyah and made public in 1821, it was rapidly adopted, leading to nineteenth-century Cherokee literacy rates as high as 90 percent. This writing system, the Cherokee syllabary, is fully explained and used throughout this volume, the first and only complete published grammar of the Cherokee language. Although the Cherokee Reference Grammar focuses on the dialect spoken by the Cherokees in Oklahoma—the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians—it provides the grammatical foundation upon which all the dialects are based. In his introduction, author Brad Montgomery-Anderson offers a brief account of Cherokee history and language revitalization initiatives, as well as instructions for using this grammar. The book then delves into an explanation of Cherokee pronunciation, orthography, parts of speech, and syntax. While the book is intended as a reference grammar for experienced scholars, Montgomery-Anderson presents the information in accessible stages, moving from easier examples to more complex linguistic structures. Examples are taken from a variety of sources, including many from the Cherokee Phoenix. Audio clips of various text examples throughout can be found on the accompanying CDs. The volume also includes three appendices: a glossary keyed to the text; a typescript for the audio component; and a collection of literary texts: two traditional stories and a historical account of a search party traveling up the Arkansas River. The Cherokee Nation, as the second-largest tribe in the United States and the largest in Oklahoma, along with the United Keetoowah Band and the Eastern band of Cherokees, have a large number of people who speak their native language. Like other tribes, they have seen a sharp decline in the number of native speakers, particularly among the young, but they have responded with ambitious programs for preserving and revitalizing Cherokee culture and language. Cherokee Reference Grammar will serve as a vital resource in advancing these efforts to understand Cherokee history, language, and culture on their own terms.
Author: John Staller Publisher: Left Coast Press ISBN: 1598744623 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 706
Book Description
Histories of Maize is the most comprehensive reference source on the botanical, genetic, archaeological, and anthropological aspects of ancient maize published to date.
Author: Ana Kondic
Author: Tatiana B. Agranat
Author: Katherine A. Faust
Author: John Staller
Author: Nicholas A. Hopkins
Author: Durbin Feeling
Author: Myrna I. Santiago
Author: Brad Montgomery-Anderson
Author: John Staller
Author: Marcia Haag