A Creole Lexicon: Architecture, Landscape, People

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Description

Throughout Louisiana’s colonial and postcolonial periods, there evolved a highly specialized vocabulary for describing the region’s buildings, people, and cultural landscapes. This creolized language — a unique combination of localisms and words borrowed from French, Spanish, English, Indian, and Caribbean sources — developed to suit the multiethnic needs of settlers, planters, explorers, builders, surveyors, and government officials. Today, this historic vernacular is frequently opaque to historians, architects, attorneys, geographers, scholars, and most of the people who want to take into account its meanings. With A Creole Lexicon, Jay Edwards and Nicolas Kariouk provide a highly organized resource for its recovery. Here are definitions for thousands of prior to now lost or misapplied terms, including watercraft and land vehicles, furniture, housetypes unique to Louisiana, people, and social categories.
Drawn directly from travelers’ accounts, historic maps, and legal documents, the volume’s copious entries document what would if truth be told have been heard and seen by the peoples of the Louisiana territory. Newly produced diagrams and drawings in addition to reproductions of original eighteenth- and nineteenth-century documents and Historic American Buildings Surveys fortify understanding. Sixteen subject indexes list equivalent English words for simple access to appropriate Creole translations. A Creole Lexicon is a useful resource for exploring and preserving Louisiana’s cultural heritage.

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