Böcker av Geoffrey D. Kimball

Geoffrey Kimball presents the first grammar of the American Indian language Atakapa, Yukhiti Koy, once spoken in coastal southwestern Louisiana and coastal eastern Texas.

An American Indian language belonging to the Muskogean linguistic family, Koasati is spoken today by fewer than five hundred people living in southwestern Louisiana and on the Alabama-Coushatta Indian Reservation in Texas. Geoffrey D. Kimball has collected material from the speakers of the larger Louisiana community to produce the first comprehensive description of Koasati. The book opens with a brief history of the Koasati. The chapters that follow describe Koasati phonology, verb conjugation classes and inflectional morphology, verb derivation, noun inflectional and derivational morphology, grammatical particles, and syntax and semantics. A discussion of Koasati speech styles illustrated with texts concludes the book. Because examples of grammatical construction are drawn from native speakers in naturally occurring discourse, they authoritatively document aspects of a language that is little known.

Koasati Dictionary is one of the first modern dictionaries ever published of a language of the Muskogean language family, whose speakers formerly occupied most of the southeastern United States. When first met by Europeans in the sixteenth century, the Koasati people were living in eastern Tennessee. Early in the eighteenth century they moved to southcentral Alabama and eventually migrated to present-day Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma. Today their language survives in southwestern Louisiana, where it is still spoken by the majority of tribal members living there.Published three years after Kimball''s richly detailed Koasati Grammar, this dictionary is the second of three monographs to result from his fifteen-year study of the language. In this work, Kimball provides the user with a substantial introduction outlining Koasati grammar and then organizes dictionary entries into two parts, the first arranged from Koasati to English and the second from English to Koasati. In addition to English translations, entries in the Koasati-English section include sample sentences that illustrate word usage as well as illuminate traditional Koasati culture. Most of these sentences are taken from narrative texts.The dictionary, like Kimball''s grammar of Koasati, is an indispensable reference work for linguists, anthropologists, and historians - indeed, for anyone interested in the native culture history of the southeastern United Stated.Geoffrey D. Kimball is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology, Tulane University.

The first published collection of oral literature of the Koasati Indians, who at the time of first contact with the West lived in the upper Tennessee River valley but now predominantly reside in western Louisiana. The works were gathered from several narrators between 1910 and 1992 and are presented in the original Koasati verse and in English translation.