{"id":1129,"date":"2010-12-06T10:00:46","date_gmt":"2010-12-06T08:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1129"},"modified":"2010-09-24T09:36:31","modified_gmt":"2010-09-24T07:36:31","slug":"modern-chitimacha-sitimaxa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1129","title":{"rendered":"Modern Chitimacha (Sitimaxa)"},"content":{"rendered":"
Modern Chitimacha (Sitimaxa)<\/strong>.<\/strong> 2nd edn. Ed. by Julian Granberry<\/strong>. <\/strong>(Language of the world\/materials 438.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2006. Pp. 115. ISBN 9783895863523<\/a>. $69.86.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Peter Freeouf<\/strong><\/a>, Chiang Mai University<\/em><\/p>\n

The last fluent native speaker of Chitimacha, a Native American language of southern Louisiana, passed away in 1940. Now the language is being restored by members of the Chitimacha Tribe who still reside in the vicinity of their ancestral homeland. The purpose of this book is to serve as a resource for members of the Chitimacha Tribe in order to help revitalize the language within their community. \u00a0Topics included in this publication are word-formation, phonology, syntax, and the coining of new words.<\/p>\n

Efforts to restore the language, including the development of textbooks and audio materials by the Chitimacha Cultural Department, are discussed in some detail in the preface. The \u2018Introduction\u2019 (12\u201324) includes a history of the Chitimacha people and gives an account of the records of the language that have been archived in various locations but never published. These records include a few invaluable audio recordings, which have proven indispensable for details of the pronunciation and intonation of the language as spoken by the last fluent speakers.<\/p>\n

Julian Granberry<\/strong> gives a detailed description of the sounds and phonological processes of the language, including stress and intonation. There are rather complex sound alternations involved in word derivation (exclusively suffixal) and composition. There are three word classes posited for Chitimacha: verbs, nouns, and particles. Verbs are always inflected, nouns are sometimes inflected, and particles are never inflected.<\/p>\n

Morphology is the most complex feature of the language. Here, G<\/strong> discusses preverbs, auxiliary verbs, and verbal morphology. A maximum of seven suffixes may be added to a verb stem in order to express various grammatical functions. The first four slots are filled by stem-extending suffixes and the final three are modifying suffixes that indicate tense\/mood, number, and person of both finite and non-finite verb forms.<\/p>\n

The chapter on nouns (78\u201385) includes a discussion of numerals, adjectival modifying nouns, and deverbal nouns as well as their relationships within a sentence. A limited but important subclass of nouns obligatorily shows singular and plural. Possession is shown by the juxtaposition of a possessor noun followed by the possessed noun. G explains the use of particles in a separate chapter (86\u201390) that discusses pronouns, demonstratives, locative particles, interrogatives, conjunctions, and postpositions.<\/p>\n

Ch. 7 deals with sentence structure. The canonical word order of Chitimacha is subject-verb-object, and \u00a0subordination is expressed exclusively through participial forms that precede the main clause, and suffixes on the participle consistently mark same and different subjects as well as relative time. Several example sentences with glosses are provided in a grammatical summary (105\u201310).<\/p>\n

The publisher is to be commended for making available this valuable addition to the small amount of published linguistic work on Chitimacha. Modern Chitimacha (Sitimaxa)<\/em> is an excellent introduction for linguists and non-linguists to study Native American languages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Modern Chitimacha (Sitimaxa). 2nd edn. Ed. by Julian Granberry. (Language of the world\/materials 438.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2006. Pp. 115. ISBN 9783895863523. $69.86. Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University The last fluent native speaker of Chitimacha, a Native American language of southern Louisiana, passed away in 1940. Now the language is being restored by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1129"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1130,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129\/revisions\/1130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}