New World Babel is an innovative cultural and intellectual history of the languages spoken by the native peoples of North America from the earliest era of European conquest through the beginning of the nineteenth century. By focusing on different aspects of the Euro-American response to indigenous speech, Edward Gray illuminates the ways in which Europeans' changing understanding of "language" shaped their relations with Native Americans. The work also brings to light something no other historian has treated in any sustained fashion: early America was a place of enormous linguistic diversity, with acute social and cultural problems associated with multilingualism.Beginning with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and using rarely seen first-hand accounts of colonial missionaries and administrators, the author shows that European explorers and colonists generally regarded American-Indian languages, like all languages, as a divine endowment that bore only a superficial relationship to the distinct cultures of speakers. By relating these accounts to thinkers like Locke, Adam Smith, Jefferson, and others who sought to incorporate their findings into a broader picture of human development, he demonstrates how, during the eighteenth century, this perception gave way to the notion that language was a human innovation, and, as such, reflected the apparent social and intellectual differences of the world's peoples.The book is divided into six chronological chapters, each focusing on different aspects of the Euro-American response to indigenous languages. New World Babel will fascinate historians, anthropologists, and linguists--anyone interested in the history of literacy, print culture, and early ethnological thought.Originally published in 1999.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Description: Focusing on the Americas – home to 40 to 50 million Indigenous people – this book explores the history and current state of Indigenous language revitalization across this vast region. Complementary chapters on the USA and Canada, and Latin America and the Caribbean, offer a panoramic view while tracing nuanced trajectories of "top down" (official) and "bottom up" (grass roots) language planning and policy initiatives...read more

Product Description: This book explores several topics in Cree morphology, syntax and discourse structure. Cree, an Algonquian language, is non-configurational: the grammatical relations of subject and object are not expressed by word order or other constituent structure relations, as they are in a configurational language like English...read more

Product Description: This practical book sets out and compares and contrasts the EU and US regulatory responses to Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs). It takes into account very recent regulatory initiatives and simultaneously drawing matters of interest to practitioners regarding the practice of CRAs, as well as the wider implications of CRA regulations to the financial services market...read more

Product Description: The Seneca language belongs to the Northern Iroquoian branch of the Iroquoian language family, where its closest relatives are Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora. Seneca holds special typological interest because of its high degree of polysynthesis and fusion...read more

Product Description: Lonely Planet: The world's #1 phrasebook publisher* Lonely Planet Quechua Phrasebook & Dictionary is your handy passport to culturally enriching travels with the most relevant and useful Quechua phrases and vocabulary for all your travel needs...read more

Product Description: Mayan civilization, renowned for its mathematics, writing, architecture, religion, calendrics, and agriculture, fascinates scholars and a wide lay public as archaeology and glyphic decipherment reveal more of its secrets. In this pathfinding study of the Mayan language family, John S...read more

Product Description: Munsee Delaware, an Eastern Algonquian language, is spoken by a small and steadily declining number of individuals. The Delaware-speaking peoples originally lived in the area of what is now New York City, adjacent regions of New York State, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware...read more

Product Description: The first comprehensive lexicographic work on Cayuga, an Iroquoian language spoken in southern Ontario at Six Nations of the Grand River, this dictionary, combines the work of Dyck, a professor of linguistics, and Froman, Keye, and Keye, all Cayuga language teachers at Six Nations...read more

Product Description: A nostalgic compendium of fascinating answers, from the 1930s, to more than 1,000 curious questionsKnowledge is power. Whether it's at pub quiz or during a lull at a dinner party, a situation could arise at any time when one needs to know if a sloth eats upside down, why onions make us cry, or whether worms are found on mountains...read more

Product Description: First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Description: OPEN, BALANCED DIALOGUE--THE KEY TO PEAK TEAM PERFORMANCE In a world of rapid-fire change, it's more important than ever to build teams that work well when the pressure is on―and quality communication can mean the difference between success and failure...read more

Product Description: The sixteen-volume Handbook of Middle American Indians, completed in 1976, has been acclaimed the world over as the single most valuable resource ever produced for those involved in the study of Mesoamerica. When it was determined in 1978 that the Handbook should be updated periodically, well-known cultural anthropologist Victoria Reifler Bricker was selected to be general editor...read more

Product Description: Through a unique combination of narrative history and primary documents, this book provides an engrossing biography of Sequoyah, the creator of the Cherokee writing system, and clearly documents the importance of written language in the preservation of culture...read more

Product Description: This book fills the crucial need for a single volume that gives broad coverage and synthesizes findings for both the general reader and the specialist. This collection of twenty-two essays from fifteen well-known scholars presents linguistic research on the indigenous languages of South America, surveying past research, providing data and analysis gathered from past and current research, and suggesting prospects for future investigation...read more

Product Description: The Inka empire, Tawantinsuyu, fell to Spanish invaders within a year's time (1532-1533), but Quechua, the language of the Inka, is still the primary or only language of millions of Inka descendants throughout the southern Andes. In this innovative study, Bruce Mannheim synthesizes all that is currently known about the history of Southern Peruvian Quechua since the Spanish invasion, providing new insights into the nature of language change in general, into the social and historical contexts of language change, and into the cultural conditioning of linguistic change...read more