Uto Aztecan

John Dedrick, who lived and worked among the Yaquis for more than thirty years, shares his extensive knowledge of the language, while Uto-Aztecan specialist Eugene Casad helps put the material in a comparative perspective."--Jacket

Native American languages are spoken from Siberia to Greenland, and from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego; they include the southernmost language of the world (Yaghan) and some of the northernmost (Eskimoan). Campbell's project is to take stock of what is currently known about the history of Native American languages and in the process examine the state of American Indian historical linguistics, and the success and failure of its various methodologies. There is remarkably little consensus in the field, largely due to the 1987 publication of Language in the Americas by Joseph Greenberg. He claimed to trace a historical relation between all American Indian languages of North and South America, implying that most of the Western Hemisphere was settled by a single wave of immigration from Asia. This has caused intense controversy and Campbell, as a leading scholar in the field, intends this volume to be, in part, a response to Greenberg. Finally, Campbell demonstrates that the historical study of Native American languages has always relied on up-to-date methodology and theoretical assumptions and did not, as is often believed, lag behind the European historical linguistic tradition.

Compiled in honor and celebration of veteran anthropologist Harold C. Fleming, this book contains 23 articles by anthropologists (in the general sense) from the four main disciplines of prehistory: archaeology, biogenetics, paleoanthropology, and genetic (historical) linguistics. Because of Professor Fleming's major focus on language — he founded the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory and the journal Mother Tongue — the content of the book is heavily tilted toward the study of human language, its origins, historical development, and taxonomy. Because of Fleming's extensive field experience in Africa some of the articles deal with African topics. This volume is intended to exemplify the principle, in the words of Fleming himself, that each of the four disciplines is enriched when it combines with any one of the other four. The authors are representative of the cutting edge of their respective fields, and this book is unusual in including contributions from a wide range of anthropological fields rather than concentrating in any one of them.

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A study in historical linguistics of the presence of Semitic and Egyptian in the Uto-Aztecan language family, helping to explain various puzzles of linguisitics within Uto-Aztecan

This book offers a new approach to the use of linguistic data to reconstruct prehistory. The author shows how a well-studied language family—in this case Uto-Aztecan—can be used as an instrument for reconstructing prehistory. The main focus of Shaul’s work is the mapping of Uto-Aztecan. By presenting various models of Uto-Aztecan prehistory, by assessing multiple models simultaneously, and by guiding readers through areas where the evidence is not so clear, Shaul helps nonspecialists develop the tools needed for evaluating various historical linguistics models themselves. He evaluates both archaeological and genetic evidence as well, placing it carefully alongside the linguistic evidence he knows best. Shaul’s thorough treatment provides many new avenues for future research on the historical anthropology of western North America.