Tonkawa Texts: A New Linguistic Edition

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Description

Although tribal traditions continue to exist a few of the Tonkawa people, now located in northern Oklahoma, the Tonkawa language has been extinct for more than 75 years. Much of what’s known about Tonkawa—an “isolate” language, related to no others—comes to us through the stories collected and translated by twentieth-century anthropologist Harry Hoijer. These texts, constituting all the remaining oral literature of the Tonkawa people, are edited and presented here in the original Tonkawa and newly translated into English, along side a new and up-to-date grammatical description.

Hoijer’s original transcriptions were in large part unannotated and unglossed and were translated word for word, with no free English translation of full clauses. In this volume, Thomas R. Wier provides translations for each line of text along side morphological analysis of each Tonkawa word. He breaks each line of the original Tonkawa text into its constituent parts, glosses each of these in turn, and translates the whole into English. For the first time in nearly a century, his work supplies an entirely new grammatical description—the use of the modern terms, conventions, and insights of modern linguistic theory—so one can help linguists bear in mind the structure of the Tonkawa language. The tales themselves—divided into “Night Stories” of a pre-human mythological past, and “Old Stories” of humans caught up in unexpected adventures—act as a an important resource for scholars and any readers interested in the literature of this prominent Native American tribal group.

For both the language it preserves and the stories it tells, Tonkawa Texts is an invaluable repository of Tonkawa culture.
 

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