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Description:
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"Anthology of Menominee Sayings" is the result of seven years of field work
(conducted during the 1980's) with about half a dozen speakers of one of
Wisconsin's indigenous Algonquian languages. The anthology, consisting of
some 450 short pieces of Menominee oral tradition, contains weather rules,
conventions and taboos surrounding hunting and fishing, wisdom on the
conduct of life, and omens predicting good or ill. The texts, therefore,
tell of the community's interest in the contour of life from its inception
to its preservation and eventual demise. Each text is accompanied by an
English translation and, where necessary, explanatory linguistic and
cultural notes.
The notes take Bloomfield's grammatical description and lexicon of
Menominee as a point of comparison, and indicate phonetic, phonological,
morphological, syntactic and semantic departures from the state of the
language as described by him. The text is useful to students of culture,
folklore, Native American studies, as well as historical and descriptive
linguistics.
The volume concludes with a short descriptive grammar focusing on
phonology, morphology and syntax.
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