Customer Reviews

The Miami-Illinois Language (Studies in the Native Languages of the Americas)

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This is NOT an "exhaustive grammar" of Miami-Illinois; there is no coverage of word formation (a major component of the grammar of an Algonquian language) nor of syntax. One hopes Costa will go on to cover these areas (so far as such a thing is possible given the absence of native speakers) because his account of the historical phonology and the morphology of Miami-Illinois (which is what this book consists of) really is very good. I suspect it would be most likely to appeal to Algonquianists; it should be pretty useful to the brave souls striving to revive the language, whom one wishes well. Costa says his target audience includes linguists interested in learning about the Algonquian languages, and I think it would indeed be useful for them, especially because of the fairly conservative phonological nature of Illinois compared with eg Ojibwe. A minor quibble: nowhere is the allomorphism of the personal prefixes ni-/nint- ki-/kit- a-/at- mentioned, even though the book has plenty of examples of it; this would mystify readers unfamiliar with other Algonquian languages.

Compiled by professional linguist David J. Costa, The Miami-Illinois Language is an exhaustive grammatical reconstruction of the language spoken by the Miami and the Illinois Native Americans -- dialects of the Algonquian language family. The populations of the speakers of these languages were decimated by warfare and disease; now, The Miami-Illinois Language pieces together a complex technical map of how people once communicated, with information from surviving stories, historical sources, comparison with related languages and more. A seminal work of impeccable scholarship, The Miami-Illinois Language is very highly recommended for inclusion into Native American Studies in general, and Native American Linguistics reference collections in particular.