Customer Reviews

Koyukon Athabascan Dictionary

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During his many years with the Koyukon, Father Jules Jette, one of the few missionaries to learn an Athabaskan language well, made prodigious linguistic and ethnographic notes. This material has been edited and re-organized, and much added, by a distinguished group of linguists, including Eliza Jones, a fluent native speaker of Koyukon. The result is one of the most comprehensive dictionaries ever published for any native language. In part because Jette was able to record so much while elements of the traditional culture now lost were still in place, the ethnographic information is unusually detailed. The dictionary contains hundreds of sketches and photographs. It is in effect not merely a dictionary but an encyclopaedia as well.

I can't deny the truth of the review below, but this book didn't help me because it is too analytical. Verbs are listed by the root, and since in Athabaskan one root may make many verbs, it's hard to find a form on those 3, 4 or maybe more pages of examples. The grammar is also rather analytical than practical. It is true there is a lot of great nonlinguistic information. The dialect described is toneless. BTW Jette was not a good phonetitian, a modern native speaker corrected his k into k, k', kk(=q), kk', g, gg. This dictionary has the full correct pronunciation.