Michael Fortescue

The walled - and very private - village of Greendale is not all that it appears to be from the outside. Superficially it embodies all that is quaint and desirable in the English country way of life. Within it is concealed an exclusive language academy catering for wealthy foreigners. This curious institution purports to teach 'perfect' English - with a 100 % success rate - and successful graduation holds out the promise of integration into the English upper crust. Everything seems light and amusing at the onset, and the latest electronic technology is regarded just as fun by the new intake of students. But gradually the gadgetry grows more and more intrusive into their private lives and it emerges that both the teaching staff and the 'villagers' are more eccentric than either the students or the naïve new teacher Adrian have bargained for. Trying to enter the village under false pretences can lead to unpleasant consequences, but when students try to escape things can grow nasty indeed...

The Greendale Voice

Steven A. Jacobson

Michael D. Fortescue

Lawrence Kaplan

Lawrence D. Kaplan

This dictionary covers 10 Eskimo dialects (Alutiiq, Central Alaskan Yupik, Naukan, Central Siberian Yupik, Sirenik, Seward Peninsula Inuit, North Alaskan Inuit, Western Canadian Inuit, Eastern Canadian Inuit, Greenlandic Inuit). An introductory section details the classification of languages and dialects and their phonologies, and discusses the relationship of Eskimo and Aleut languages. Following this, the main section lists base words alphabetically, with dialectal variations. Subsequent sections address these categories of linguistic forms: forms from single Eskimo languages with proposed cognates in Aleut; postbases and enclitics; inflections; and demonstratives. Indexes are given separately for Aleut, Central Alaskan Yupik, Eastern Canadian Inuit, Greenlandic Inuit, and proto-form glosses. A dialect map with distribution of settlement is not included. Contains over 100 references. (MSE)

With Aleut Cognates

Comparative Eskimo Dictionary

This book contains an innovative approach to the semantics and diachronic source of cognitive verbs across a representative array of the world’s languages.

Polysemy, Diachrony, and the Circle of Cognition

In building up a scenario for the arrival on the shores of Alaska of speakers of languages related to Eskimo-Aleut with genetic roots deep within Sineria, this book touches upon a number of issues in contemporary historical linguistics and archaeology. The Arctic "gateway" to the New World, by acting as a bottleneck, has allowed only small groups of mobile hunter-gatherers through during specific propitious periods, and thus provides a unique testing ground for theories about population and language movements in pre-agricultural times. Owing to the historically attested prevalence of language shifts and other contact phenomena in the region, it is arguable that the spread of genes and the spread of language have been out of step since the earliest reconstructable times, contrary to certain views of their linkage. Proposals that have been put forward in the past concerning the affiliations of Eskimo-Aleut languages are followed up in the light of recent progress in reconstructing the proto-languages concerned. Those linking Eskimo-Aleut with the Uralic languages and Yukagir are particularly promising, and reconstructions for many common elements are presented. The entire region "Great Beringia" is scoured for typological evidence in the form of anomalies and constellations of uncommon traits diagnostic of affiliation or contact. The various threads lead back to mesolithic times in south central Siberia, when speakers of a "Uralo-Siberian" mesh of related languages appears to have moved along the major waterways of Siberia. Such a scenario would acount for the present distribution of these languages and the results of their meeting with remnants of earlier linguistic waves from the Old World to the New.

Reappraising the Archaeological and Linguistic Evidence

Language Relations Across The Bering Strait

The diversity of works contained here cover dialogue, narration, poetic elaboration, and philosophic commentary on Greenlandic life; they display the distinctive voices of talented and unique authors. The Greenlandic text is presented with a sentence-by-sentence English translation on the facing page.

From the Writings of the Greenlanders

This volume is the first comprehensive comparative dictionary to cover the whole of the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family. The genealogical status of this family (whether from a common source or due to convergence) has long been controversial, but its coherence as a family can now be taken as proven. Its geographical position between Siberia and northernmost America renders it crucial in any attempt to relate the languages and peoples of these large linguistic regions. The dictionary consists of cognate sets arranged alphabetically according to reconstructed proto-forms and covers all published lexical sources for the languages concerned (plus a good deal of unpublished material). The criterion for setting up Proto-Chukotian sets is the existence of clear cognates in at least two of the four languages: Chukchi, Koryak, Alutor, and (now extinct) Kerek, and for Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan sets cognates in at least one of these plus Itelmen. Internal loans between the two branches of the family are indicated - this is particularly important in the case of the many loans from Koryak to modern western Itelmen. Proto-Itelmen sets without clear cognates in Chukotian are listed separately, without reconstructions. The data is presented in a reader-friendly format, with each set divided into separate lines for the individual languages concerned and with a common orthography for all reliable modern forms (given as full word stems, not just 'roots'). The introduction contains information on the distribution of the individual languages and dialects and all sound correspondences relating them, plus a sketch of what is known of their (pre)historical background. Inflections and derivational affixes are treated in separate sections, and Chukchi and English proto-form indexes allows multiple routes of access to the data. A full reference list of sources is included.

Comparative Chukotko-Kamchatkan Dictionary

James, an IT consultant engaged in upgrading the computer system of the Brain Imaging Institute at Cambridge, discovers something strange in the institute's server - a number of encrypted titles of books. But before he can investigate further the institute's director is dismissed for appropriating institute funds to acquire a large quantity of beryllium fluoride from Russia for his own obscure ends. He disappears. Since James' company is engaged in nanotechnological research involving this substance he is more than a little curious to know what the director has been up to. A visit to the local library in order to track down one of the encrypted titles - "Christina's Book" - leads to an initial dead-end: no such book exists, although the title appears as an otherwise blank catalogue entry under the director's name. What does it refer to? James will finally discover - but only after a massive solar storm has undermined the intended results of an extraordinary clandestine experiment...

Christina's book

Nicholas Evans

Marianne Mithun

This handbook offers an extensive crosslinguistic and cross-theoretical survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English. These languages and the problems they raise for linguistic analyses have long featured prominently in language descriptions, and yet the essence of polysynthesis remains under discussion, right down to whether it delineates a distinct, coherent type, rather than an assortment of frequently co-occurring traits. Chapters in the first part of the handbook relate polysynthesis to other issues central to linguistics, such as complexity, the definition of the word, the nature of the lexicon, idiomaticity, and to typological features such as argument structure and head marking. Part two contains areal studies of those geographical regions of the world where polysynthesis is particularly common, such as the Arctic and Sub-Arctic and northern Australia. The third part examines diachronic topics such as language contact and language obsolence, while part four looks at acquisition issues in different polysynthetic languages. Finally, part five contains detailed grammatical descriptions of over twenty languages which have been characterized as polysynthetic, with special attention given to the presence or absence of potentially criterial features.

The Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis

Orientation Systems of the North Pacific Rim is an extension of the author's earlier volume Eskimo Orientation Systems (also published in the series Monographs on Greenland - Meddelelser om Grønland, Man & Society, 1988). This time it covers all the contiguous languages ? and cultures ? across the northern Pacific rim from Vancouver Island in Canada to Hokkaido in northern Japan, plus the adjacent Arctic coasts of Alaska and Chukotka. These form a testing ground for recent theories concerning the nature and classification of orientation systems and their shared ?frames of reference?, in particular the many varieties of ?landmark? systems typifying the Arctic and sub-Arctic. Despite the wide variety of languages spoken here (all of them endangered), there is much in common as regards their overlapping geographical settings and the ways in which terms for orientation within the microcosm (the house) and within the macrocosm (the surrounding environment) mesh throughout the region. This is illustrated with numerous maps and diagrams, from both coastal and inland sites. Attention is paid to ambiguities and anomalies within the systems revealed by the data, as these may be clues to pre-historic movements of the populations concerned ? from a riverine setting to the coast, from the coast to inland, or more complex successive displacements. Cultural factors over and beyond environmental determinism are discussed within this broad context.

Michael Fortescue

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