The Dhegiha Language

Learn about the rich linguistic heritage of the Osage, Omaha, Kaw, and Quapaw tribes with Francis La Flèche and James Owen Dorsey's The Dhegiha Language. Assembled from historical records, this in-depth study of the Dhegiha dialect explores its grammar, vocabulary, and syntax. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Robert L. Rankin was a seminal figure in late 20th and early 21st centuries in the field of Siouan linguistics. His knowledge, like the papers he produced, was voluminous. We have gathered here a representation of his work that spans over thirty years. The papers presented here focus on both the languages Rankin studied in depth (Quapaw, Kansa, Biloxi, Ofo, and Tutelo) and comparative historical work on the Siouan language family in general. While many of the papers included have been previously published, one third of them have never before been made public including a grammatical sketch and dictionary of Ofo and his final paper on the place of Mandan in the larger Siouan family.

The Indigenous Languages of the Americas is a comprehensive assessment of what is known about their history and classification. It identifies gaps in knowledge and resolves controversial issues while making new contributions of its own. The book deals with the major themes involving these languages: classification and history of the Indigenous languages of the Americas; issues involving language names; origins of the languages of the New World; unclassified and spurious languages; hypotheses of distant linguistic relationships; linguistic areas; contact languages (pidgins, lingua francas, mixed languages); and loanwords and neologisms.

The prehistoric native peoples of the Mississippi River Valley and other areas of the Eastern Woodlands of the United States shared a complex set of symbols and motifs that constituted one of the greatest artistic traditions of the pre-Columbian Americas. Traditionally known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, these artifacts of copper, shell, stone, clay, and wood were the subject of the groundbreaking 2007 book Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography, which presented a major reconstruction of the rituals, cosmology, ideology, and political structures of the Mississippian peoples. Visualizing the Sacred advances the study of Mississippian iconography by delving into the regional variations within what is now known as the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere (MIIS). Bringing archaeological, ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and iconographic perspectives to the analysis of Mississippian art, contributors from several disciplines discuss variations in symbols and motifs among major sites and regions across a wide span of time and also consider what visual symbols reveal about elite status in diverse political environments. These findings represent the first formal identification of style regions within the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere and call for a new understanding of the MIIS as a network of localized, yet interrelated religious systems that experienced both continuity and change over time.

The Siouan family comprises some twenty languages, historically spoken across a broad swath of the central North American plains and woodlands, as well as in parts of the southeastern United States. In spite of its geographical extent and diversity, and the size and importance of several Siouan-speaking tribes, this family has received relatively little attention in the linguistic literature and many of the individual Siouan languages are severely understudied. This volume aims to make work on Siouan languages more broadly available and to encourage deeper investigation of the myriad typological, theoretical, descriptive, and pedagogical issues they raise. The 17 chapters in this volume present a broad range of current Siouan research, focusing on various Siouan languages, from a variety of linguistic perspectives: historical-genetic, philological, applied, descriptive, formal/generative, and comparative/typological. The editors' preface summarizes characteristic features of the Siouan family, including head-final and "verb-centered" syntax, a complex system of verbal affixes including applicatives and subject-possessives, head-internal relative clauses, gendered speech markers, stop-systems including ejectives, and a preference for certain prosodic and phonotactic patterns. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Professor Robert L. Rankin, a towering figure in Siouan linguistics throughout his long career, who passed away in February of 2014.

Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World is an authoritative single-volume reference resource comprehensively describing the major languages and language families of the world. It will provide full descriptions of the phonology, semantics, morphology, and syntax of the world’s major languages, giving insights into their structure, history and development, sounds, meaning, structure, and language family, thereby both highlighting their diversity for comparative study, and contextualizing them according to their genetic relationships and regional distribution. Based on the highly acclaimed and award-winning Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, this volume will provide an edited collection of almost 400 articles throughout which a representative subset of the world's major languages are unfolded and explained in up-to-date terminology and authoritative interpretation, by the leading scholars in linguistics. In highlighting the diversity of the world’s languages — from the thriving to the endangered and extinct — this work will be the first point of call to any language expert interested in this huge area. No other single volume will match the extent of language coverage or the authority of the contributors of Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World. * Extraordinary breadth of coverage: a comprehensive selection of just under 400 articles covering the world's major languages, language families, and classification structures, issues and disputes * Peerless quality: based on 20 years of academic development on two editions of the leading reference resource in linguistics, Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics * Unique authorship: 350 of the world's leading experts brought together for one purpose * Exceptional editorial selection, review and validation process: Keith Brown and Sarah Ogilvie act as first-tier guarantors for article quality and coverage * Compact and affordable: one-volume format makes this suitable for personal study at any institution interested in areal, descriptive, or comparative language study - and at a fraction of the cost of the full encyclopedia