Customer Reviews

An English Dakota Dictionary (Borealis)

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After searching libraries, the net, and schools for an accurate, good Dakota dictionary, I finally found this book. I was, to be blunt, amazed! Not only does it have a great listing of words (that you can actually use), but it also includes a short introduction of grammar and usage.

I got to test my new skills at a recent Powwow in Minnesota, where I had an entire conversation (although slow!) with a Dakota man. Although he needed to correct me on a few words and some grammar, he was impressed. He was shocked when I told him I had only begun learning within the last six months! I could not have done it without the aid of this book! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

This is an excellent English-Dakota dictionary, but be aware that it does not include a Dakota-English section. The Dakota-English volume is sold separately (ISBN 0873512820) and is also high quality. The English-Dakota volume does include a pronunciation guide and clear grammatical overview.

I am Lakota on my father side and Dakota on my mother side. My mother finds the Dakota words in this dictionary puzzling, she doesn't recognize many of them.

This dictionary has been great to learn more of the Dakota language. We like learning more words all the time, as we live very near a Reservation. I've always loved learning about Native culture, so it's fun to be able to learn some of the language too. We've noticed that many movies use the Dakota/Lakota language, or at least parts of it. Watching Avatar, we recognized many Dakota/Lakota words and phrases.

This dictionary is really outdated. The words were collected more than a century ago and not in a very reliable fashion. And the writing system doesn't allow you to learn the pronunciation of words. If you want a really reliable reference to the Dakota get the New Lakota Dictionary, it includes Dakota variants for all Lakota words in it.

This dictionary is not helpful for someone who wants to learn the language. The spelling is inconsistent and doesn't provide help with pronunciation, definitions are often incomplete or inaccurate, no information is provided on ablaut and other features of the words, example sentences and collocations are scarce and their translations inaccurate.

Williamson's dictionary is a typical example of lexicographical work done by the early missionaries among native people; it is a mixture of very careful and very careless work.

In 1902 John P. Williamson published An English-Dakota Dictionary based on his work with Santee speakers from the Santee reservation in Nebraska and Yankton speakers from Yankton, South Dakota. Williamson attempted to fill the existing gap since the Riggs dictionary was only one-sided, Dakota-English, and not English-Dakota. But instead of using the words available in Riggs's dictionary and listing them under English entries, Williamson apparently selected words from an English dictionary and asked his native consultants to translate them into Dakota. However, many of Williamson's entries look more like unidiomatic translations rather than actual Dakota words in use. For instance, under the word "oath" he gave Wakantanka cazeyatapi (which literally means "pronouncing God's name"), but did not provide any of the numerous words used in the native context for taking an oath, such as ic'íchunza, iwáhoic'iya, wóic'ihdaka, awásuic'iya, etc., most of which had been recorded in the Riggs dictionary. The verb "peek" is translated with ohdatetanhan wanyáka (sic) which literarily means "to look at something from underneath," rather than with the commonly used verb éyokas'in. Similarly unidiomatic are many of the expressions in this dictionary. Williamson's selection of the English headwords included many concepts that were foreign to Dakota culture of that time, which resulted in coining a large number of neologisms. Some of these newly created words would have been useful additions to the language in terms of the cultural changes that the Dakota people were facing. However, a large number of these neologisms are unconvincing in terms of their structure or idiomatic quality. For example "pension" is translated as Akicita enakiya Tunkasina ówicakiya (sic) which is a not fully grammatical sentence meaning something like "Grandfather (i.e., the President) helps the soldiers who quit." Many of the newly coined words are ambiguous (in that a single Dakota word is used for too many different English concepts), or inconsistently applied (e.g., "to insure" is given as idekazuzu, but "to reinsure" is translated as ake wahuhnahyapi kicicazuzupi opekiya). As the examples show, many of the neologisms are three or four words long and thus unlikely to be adopted by the community of speakers. A survey of Dakota speakers showed that most of the neologisms introduced in Williamson's dictionary have not become part of the Dakota lexicon. The work with contemporary Dakota speakers has been published in the New Lakota Dictionary which incorporates Dakota dialects.

For the reasons mentioned above (apart from others) Williamson's English-Dakota Dictionary presented a far less reliable lexicographic work than Riggs's Dakota-English Dictionary. But both of these dictionary are obsolete today.

this is a good dictionary but lacks some words (like full list of names for uncles) and doesn't give a full transcription regarding stops series

John P.Williamson married my Great Great Aunt Sarah, my great great grandmothers sister. I recently pulled out of my trunk of family heirlooms a book about him and started reading it. I am not yet finished but close. What a man. I can only imagine what a good job his translation is. For his day and time, for the modes of transportation they did not have, he sure got around and met quite a few important people.