Name: California Indian Languages
Brand: Victor Golla
Price: 100.0 USD
Availability: InStock

California Indian Languages

$100.00

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basic structural features of more than two dozen language types and cites all the major sources, both published and unpublished, for the documentation of these languages—from the earliest vocabularies collected by explorers and missionaries, to the data amassed during the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

A Grammar of Cupeno

$52.95

In one of the most thorough studies ever prepared of a California language, Hill’s grammar reviews the phonology, morphology, syntax and discourse features of Cupeño, a Uto-Aztecan (takic) language of California. Cupeño exhibits many unusual typological features, including split ergativity, that require linguists to revise our understanding of the development of the Uto-Aztecan family of languages in historical and areal perspective.

Technology and Scholarly Communication

$34.95

Electronic publishing has been gaining ground in recent years and is now a recognized part of the digital world. In the most comprehensive assessment of electronic publishing to date, thirty-one scholars, librarians, and publishers focus specifically on scholarly publishing. They analyze a number of case studies and offer original insights on a range of topics, including the financial costs involved, market forces, appropriate technological standards, licensing issues, intellectual property, copyright and associated user rights, and the changing roles of researchers, publishers, and librarians.

The editors begin with an overview of scholarly communication and develop a novel interpretation of the important role that technology now plays. Many of the following chapters are based on actual electronic publishing projects in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, so the evidence and data are drawn from real-life experiences. Of special value are the attempts to measure costs and patterns of usage of electronic publishing and digital libraries.

Electronic publishing has moved well past the experimental stage, and with numerous projects under way this seems an appropriate time to assess its impact on the academic world, from teaching to research to administration.

Writing Signs

$33.95

Irene Bierman explores the complex relationship between alphabet and language as well as the ways the two elements are socially defined by time and place. She focuses her exploration on the Eastern Mediterranean in the sixth through twelfth centuries, notably Cairo's Fatimid dynasty of 969-1171. Examining the inscriptions on Fatimid architecture and textiles, Bierman offers insight into all elements of that society, from religion to the economy, and the enormous changes the dynasty underwent during that period. Bierman addresses fundamental issues of what buildings mean, how inscriptions affect that meaning, and the role of written messages and the ceremonies into which they are incorporated in service of propagandist goals. Her method and conclusions provide a pioneering model for studying public writing in other societies and offer powerful evidence to show that writing is a highly charged and deeply embedded social practice.

Nuuchahnulth (Nootka) Morphosyntax

$37.95

This volume describes aspects of word- and sentence-formation in Nuuchahnulth (formerly known as Nootka), a language spoken on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Aspects included are polysynthetic word formation, word classes, and clause structure. The morphosyntactic regularities are examined in the context of general structural characteristics of the language in an attempt to contribute to the language an internally and typologically accurate understanding of Nuuchahnulth morphosyntactic structures.

Studies in American Indian Languages

$47.95

This collection of 31 articles (dedicated to Margaret Langdon) represents the multitude of approaches to Native American languages taken by linguists today. Half of the essays treat Hokan languages, but Uto-Aztecan, Penutian, Muskogean, Iroquoian, Mayan, and other groups are also represented, with pieces on phonology, syntax, the lexicon, and discourse.

Central Hill Nisenan Texts with Grammatical Sketch

$29.95

Central Hill Nisenan was spoken in the hills northeast of Sacramento, California, but like many other California languages, it is no longer spoken. This monograph includes texts recorded by the late Richard Smith, a brief description of the language (with chapters on phonology, morphology, and syntax), and a short word list.

Central Hill Nisenan Texts with Grammatical Sketch

Proto-Wintun

$47.95

This volume represents a reconstruction of Proto-Wintun, the parent language of a group of California Indian languages. It includes a grammatical sketch of Proto-Wintun, cognate sets with reconstructions and an index to the reconstructions. The book fulfills a need for in-depth reconstructions of proto-languages for California Indian language families, both for theoretical purposes and deeper comparison with other proto- or pre-languages.

Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman

$100.00

This 800-page volume is a clear and readable presentation of the current state of research on the history of the Tibeto-Burman (TB) language family, a typologically diverse group of over 250 languages spoken in Southern China, the Himalayas, NE India, and peninsular Southeast Asia. The TB languages are the only proven relatives of Chinese, with which they form the great Sino-Tibetan family.

The exposition is systematic, treating the reconstruction of all the elements of the TB proto-syllable in turn, including initial consonants (Ch. III), prefixes (Ch. IV), monophthongal and diphthongal rhymes (Ch. V), final nasals (Ch. VII), final stops (Ch. VIII), final liquids (Ch. IX), root-final *-s (Ch. X), suffixes (Ch. XI). Particular attention is paid to variational phenomena at all historical levels (e.g. Ch. XII "Allofamic variation in rhymes").

This Handbook builds on the best previous scholarship, and adds up-to-date material that has accumulated over the past 30 years. It contains reconstructions of over a thousand Tibeto-Burman roots, as well as suggested comparisons with several hundred Chinese etyma. It is liberally indexed and cross-referenced for maximum accessibility and internal consistency.

Emphasis is placed on the special theoretical issues involved in historical reconstruction in the East/Southeast Asian linguistic area.

From Grammar to Politics

$30.95

Alessandro Duranti explores the way traditional oratory in a Samoan village is shaped by the needs of the political process and shows how language insulates ceremonial speakers from the perils of everyday confrontation. He proposes a "moral flow hypothesis" in discourse, to describe a grammar that distributes praise and blame and in that way defines the standing of individuals in the community. This ethnographic journey from linguistic to political anthropology demonstrates that the analysis of grammar in context needs ethnography just as much as the conduct of politics needs grammatical analysis.

Essentials of Modern Literary Tibetan

$84.00

"Half of the words are read by implication." This Tibetan saying explains the main difficulty Westerners face in learning to read Tibetan fluently. This book will allow beginners to understand the logic of Tibetan grammar and syntax through graded readings and narrative explanations. The large glossary, which is indexed by page, will serve as an invaluable reference grammar for readers of Tibetan at all levels.

The reading course includes a wide range of modern literary styles from literature, history, current affairs, newspapers, and even communist political essays.

The Creative Process

$29.95

This unique anthology brings together material from 38 well-known writers, artists, and scientists who attempt to describe the process by which original ideas come to them. Contributors include Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Amy Lowell, Rudyard Kipling, Max Ernst, Katherine Anne Porter, Henry Miller, Carl Gustav Jung, Mary Wigman, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Henri Poincaré and many others.

A Basic Grammar of Ugaritic Language

$73.95

In 1929, the first cuneiform tablet, inscribed with previously unknown signs, was found during archeological excavations at Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) in northern Syria. Since then a special discipline, sometimes called Ugaritology, has arisen. The impact of the Ugaritic language and of the many texts written in it has been felt in the study of Semitic languages and literatures, in the history of the ancient Near East, and especially in research devoted to the Hebrew Bible. In fact, knowledge of Ugaritic has become a standard prerequisite for the scientific study of the Old Testament.

The Ugaritic texts, written in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B. c., represent the oldest complex of connected texts in any West Semitic language now available (1984). Their language is of critical importance for comparative Semitic linguistics and is uniquely important to the critical study of Biblical Hebrew. Ugaritic, which was spoken in a northwestern corner of the larger Canaanite linguistic area, cannot be considered a direct ancestor of Biblical Hebrew, but its conservative character can help in the reconstruction of the older stages of Hebrew phonology, word formation, and inflection. These systems were later-that is, during the period in which the biblical texts were actually written-complicated by phonological and other changes.

The Ugaritic texts are remarkable, however, for more than just their antiquity and their linguistic witness. They present a remarkably vigorous and mature literature, one containing both epic cycles and shorter poems. The poetic structure of Ugaritic is noteworthy, among other reasons, for its use of the "parallelism of members" that also characterizes such ancient and archaizing poems in the Hebrew Bible as the Song of Deborah (in Judges 5), the Song of the Sea (in Exodus 15), Psalms 29, 68, and 82, and Habakkuk 3.

Textual sources and their rendering

The basic source for the study of Ugaritic is a corpus of texts written in an alphabetic cuneiform script unknown before 1929; this script represents consonants fully and exactly but gives only limited and equivocal indication of vowels. Our knowledge of the Ugaritic language is supple-mented by evidence from Akkadian texts found at Ugarit and containing many Ugaritic words, especially names written in the syllabic cuneiform script. Scholars reconstructing the lost language of Ugarit draw, finally, on a wide variety of comparative linguistic data, data from texts not found at Ugarit, as well as from living languages. Evidence from Phoenician, Hebrew, Amorite, Aramaic, Arabic, Akkadian, Ethiopic, and recently also Eblaitic, can be applied to good effect.

For the student, as well as for the research scholar, it is important that the various sources of U garitic be distinguished in modern transliteration or transcription. Since many of the texts found at Ugarit are fragmentary or physically damaged, it is well for students to be clear about what portion of a text that they are reading actually survives and what portion is a modern attempt to fill in the blanks. While the selected texts in section 8 reflect the state of preservation in detail, in the other sections of the grammar standardized forms are presented, based on all available evidence.

Ingush Grammar

$75.00

Comprehensive reference grammar of Ingush, a language of the Nakh branch of the Nakh-Daghestanian or East Caucasian language family of the central Caucasus (southern Russia). Ingush is notable for its complex phonology, prosody including minimal tone system, complex morphology of both nouns and verbs, clause chaining, long-distance reflexivization, and extreme degree of syntactic ergativity.

Beginning Tagalog

$54.95

A comprehensive, one-year introductory textbook for Tagalog, the language spoken in the Philippines.

Beginning Tagalog has been designed to meet the specific needs of adult native speakers of English who wish to learn spoken Tagalog, though students with other language backgrounds may be able to follow the course with profit. With fairly intensive class scheduling, and assuming laboratory assignments and home study, the text can be covered in one academic year.

The text is designed to accomplish two aims. The first is to impart oral control of Tagalog and, by means of an acquaintance with the major patterns of the language, to provide the means for additional independent study that will lead to a full mastery of the structures and a vocabulary that is sufficiently broad to meet the needs of most students. The second aim is to provide accurate, up-to-date information about the patterns of Filipino culture that will enable a student to understand the social customs, standards, values, and aspirations of the Filipino people, in order to prepare him for sympathetic, enlightened, and useful participation in the context of Filipino society. . . .

The text consists of 25 units and appendices. In the first half of the text, the student plays the part of hearer and speaker, with only incidental reading of oral dialogs and drills. From Unit XIII on there is a reading section designated for each unit, correlated with the primarily spoken materials, but designed to promote facility in the orthography and distinctive patterns of the written language. . .

The basic format is as follows:

A. Basic Dialog

B. Cultural and Structural Notes

C. Pronunciation Exercises (to Unit XIII)

D. Drills and Grammar

E. Cumulative Drills

F. Visual-Cue Drills

G. Comprehension-Response Drills

H. Readings (from Unit XIII)"

The Rhetoric of Religion

$30.95

"But the point of Burke's work, and the significance of his achievement, is not that he points out that religion and language affect each other, for this has been said before, but that he proceeds to demonstrate how this is so by reference to a specific symbolic context. After a discussion 'On Words and The Word,' he analysess verbal action in St. Augustine's Confessions. He then discusses the first three chapters of Genesis, and ends with a brilliant and profound 'Prologue in Heaven,' an imaginary dialogue between the Lord and Satan in which he proposes that we begin our study of human motives with complex theories of transcendence,' rather than with terminologies developed in the use of simplified laboratory equipment.

. . . Burke now feels, after some forty years of search, that he has created a model of the symbolic act which breaks through the rigidities of the 'sacred-secular' dichotomy, and at the same time shows us how we get from secular and sacred realms of action over the bridge of language.

. . . Religious systems are systems of action based on communication in society. They are great social dramas which are played out on earth before an ultimate audience, God. But where theology confronts the developed cosmological drama in the 'grand style,' that is, as a fully developed cosmological drama for its religious content, the 'logologer' can be further studied not directly as knowledge but as anecdotes that help reveal for us the quandaries of human governance."

--Hugh Dalziel Duncan from Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke, 1924 - 1966, edited by William H. Rueckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969).

Coproduction and Coarticulation in IsiZulu Clicks

$36.95

This book provides an in-depth look at the production of clicks using a variety of different techniques. Static palatography, linguography, electropalatography, and aerodynamic data, including the intra-oral pressure of the click cavity, never previously before measured, all combine to create a comprehensive picture of click consonants. This important work provides conclusive evidence that click consonants co-articulate, or adjust their articulation, with adjacent consonants in interesting ways.

Although clicks are widely considered to be among the most interesting classes of segments, many aspects of their phonetics are little known. This book examines how the three different click types of IsiZulu differ from each other in their production in both spatial and temporal dimensions, and considers the question of how these complex segments are integrated into the stream of speech. Strong claims have been made in the literature that clicks do not coarticulate, but there is little articulatory evidence to support this claim. Coproduction and coarticulation of the dental, palato-alveolar and lateral clicks of IsiZulu were examined using three different techniques for the collection of physiological phonetic information: staticpalatography and linguography, dynamic palatography, and aerodynamic records. Four native IsiZulu speakers provided controlled data sets of real IsiZulu words.

Results indicate that the characteristics of the front closure release are markedly different for the three click types. Rarefaction in all three click types is achieved by lowering the tongue center, with the greatest proportional change in cavity volume occuring in palato-alveolar clicks and the least with laterals. Palato-alveolar clicks supplement tongue center lowering with some retraction of the location of the dorsal closure. Quite extensive adaptation of both spatial and timing properties of clicks to the different vowel contexts is observed. For example, the dorsal closure is fronted in front vowel contexts, and before mid vowels the tongue center rises in preparation for the upcoming mid-vowel. Clicks are indeed complex articulations but they none-the-less coarticulate. This book contains a wealth of physiological phonetic data, including aerodynamic measures of the click cavity, which have never before been measured, and provides us with a comprehensive account of click consonants.

Cover image for Coproduction and Coarticulation in IsiZulu Clicks, isbn: 9780520098763

Chimariko Grammar

$36.95

The Chimariko language, now extinct, was spoken in Trinity County, California. This reference grammar, based on data collected by Harrington in the 1920's, represents the most comprehensive description of the language. Written from a functional-typological perspective this work also examines language contact in Northern California showing that grammatical traits are often shared among genetically unrelated languages in geographically contiguous areas.

Even the Terrible Things Seem Beautiful to Me Now

$28.00 $8.40 Save $19.60

What it means when your father dies. How it feels when summer comes. What it’s like to live in a great but troubled American city. The value of wearing sunscreen.

These are just a few of the topics that Mary Schmich addresses in this second, expanded edition of Even the Terrible Things Seem Beautiful to Me Now, a collection of her columns from the Chicago Tribune, including the 10 that won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

Schmich is the rare newspaper columnist whose writing resonates long after it’s published and far beyond the place she lives. She may be best known for a column widely called “Wear Sunscreen”—misattributed to Kurt Vonnegut and turned into a hit recording by Baz Luhrmann—but her writing ranges as widely as life itself. It can be slyly humorous, deeply moving, or tough. She addresses subjects as varied as family love, sexual harassment, long friendships, poverty, and Chicago violence.

Every city has its voices, the enduring writers who both explain and create a city’s culture. Chicago has had many, including the legendary Mike Royko and Studs Terkel. Mary Schmich is among them. In a hectic age, her writing lifts us, calms us, and helps us understand.

Even the Terrible Things Seem Beautiful to Me Now

The Best of Royko

$28.00 $12.60 Save $15.40

For more than 30 years, Mike Royko was a part of the daily fabric of Chicagoans’ lives, penning often humorous and always honest columns first for the Chicago Daily News, then the Sun-Times, and finally the Tribune. Culled from thousands of his Tribune columns and edited by his son David Royko, this collection offers up his best material from the last stage in his career, which was cut short by his premature death in 1997.

The Technique of the Mystery Story

$12.99 $8.44 Save $4.55

The Technique of the Mystery Story (1914) is a book by Carolyn Wells. Before she began writing her Detective Fleming Stone series of mystery novels, Carolyn Wells was a published poet, accomplished children’s author, and professional jingle writer. In the middle of her career, she heard a mystery story by Anna Katharine Green and was instantly hooked. Through years of practice and attention to the craft, she earned a reputation as a leading fiction writer of her generation, an adept craftswoman whose stories appeared in some of the leading newspapers and magazines of the day. “Why is the detective story? To entertain, to interest, to amuse. It has no deeper intent, no more subtle raison d'être than to give pleasure to its readers.” Writing is a simple act, requiring only the mind, a pen, and a piece of paper. But how does one write well, grabbing the reader’s attention and ensuring their time will be rewarded by the end of the story? In The Technique of the Mystery Story, Carolyn Wells cuts to the core of a craft she defined despite coming to it late in her career. Exploring the history of the genre, defining its many different forms, and illuminating the stylistic choices that keep a mystery tale running smoothly, Wells provides an invaluable template for writers looking to follow in her footsteps or for readers looking for access to the mind and process of a woman revered in her field. This edition of Carolyn Wells’ The Technique of the Mystery Story is a classic work of American detective fiction reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

The Philosophy of Composition

$4.99 $3.24 Save $1.75

The Philosophy of Composition (1846) is an essay by Edgar Allan Poe. Recognized as a foundational figure of nineteenth century fiction, Poe has inspired generations of readers and writers with his craftsmanship and taste for tragedy and terror. His brief but meteoric career shaped the trajectory of American literature forever, forming a legacy without which science fiction, horror, and detective writing would surely be shells of themselves. Published only three years before his untimely death, the essay appeared in an April 1846 issue of Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature and Art, whose editor had previously made the mistake of turning down “The Raven.” Both influential and controversial, Poe’s essay on craft was intended as a dismissal of the myth of spontaneous art, arguing instead that a true artist depends upon attention to detail and adherence to a logical creative process. Using his own poetic masterpiece as an example, Poe claims that the writer must maintain “unity of effect” throughout the work in order to inspire the intended emotional response in the reader. Once this element has been set in place, the writer may proceed with the more technical aspects of composition, such as characters, setting, and plot. Although Poe’s essay drew the ire of Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot, it was immensely popular among Poe’s Francophone audience and served as inspiration for such artists as Maurice Ravel and Charles Baudelaire. This edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Philosophy of Composition is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Metadata Essentials

$13.99

". . . An essential, unique, and thoroughly 'user friendly' instructional reference and guide that should be an integral part of every author and every publisher's professional book marketing plan instructional reference collection." - Midwest Book Review

Metadata Essentials: Proven Techniques for Book Marketing and Discovery provides clear and easy-to-implement recommendations so you can focus your efforts on the industry's most relevant metadata.

Based on direct feedback from retailers and librarians, Metadata Essentials unlocks insights into the value and real-life uses of the metadata you spend so many precious hours editing and curating. Because it does matter.

Enhance the metadata that yields proven results
Boost title discovery
Increase online conversion rates
Save time and money

Metadata Essentials

$17.99

". . . An essential, unique, and thoroughly 'user friendly' instructional reference and guide that should be an integral part of every author and every publisher's professional book marketing plan instructional reference collection." - Midwest Book Review

Metadata Essentials: Proven Techniques for Book Marketing and Discovery provides clear and easy-to-implement recommendations so you can focus your efforts on the industry's most relevant metadata.

Based on direct feedback from retailers and librarians, Metadata Essentials unlocks insights into the value and real-life uses of the metadata you spend so many precious hours editing and curating. Because it does matter.

Enhance the metadata that yields proven results
Boost title discovery
Increase online conversion rates
Save time and money