Customer Reviews

Dictionary of the Choctaw Language

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Cyrus Byington was a missionary who lived among the Choctaw of Oklahoma in the mid 19th century. He set out to construct a lexicon of the Choctaw language in order to translate many Christian prayers, hymns, and bible passages into Choctaw. What resulted was one of the most complete lexicons for a Native American language that exists today. Dictionary is not complete however, and many of the words do indeed date the work. However the work itself has two parts; an English-Choctaw, and a Choctaw-English component. A must have for anyone interested in languages.

Considering it was written in 1909, this is a very good dictionary. It shares some of the flaws common to all older dictionaries, such as odd omissions and a lack of sophistication in the entries. It does have a pronunciation guide and a few grammatical notes, unlike many older dictionaries. Very interesting from a historical perspective. If you're interested in learning to speak Choctaw yourself, I recommend the language learning CD-ROM at ISBN# 0806133791, but you wouldn't go wrong having both.

I like the fact that this dictionary is from English to Choctaw and Choctaw to English