1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910822290103321

Autore

Golla Victor

Titolo

California Indian languages / / Victor Golla

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, : University of California Press, 2011

ISBN

1-283-33186-1

9786613331861

0-520-94952-8

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (395 p.)

Disciplina

497.09794

Soggetti

Indians of North America - California - Languages

Linguistics

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

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

Sommario/riassunto

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basic structural features of more than two dozen language types, and cites all the major sources, both published and unpublished, for the documentation of these languages-from the earliest vocabularies collected by explorers and missionaries, to the data amassed during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.