Yokuts

• Geoffrey Gamble (editor), Yokuts Texts. Native American Texts Series (new series) 1. Mouton de Gruyter, 1994. 108 pp. $14.95. --- Although there is an extensive literature on Yokuts phonology and morphosyntax, much of it derivative from Stanley Newman's classic descriptive grammar (1944), hardly any Yokuts narrative texts have been published. This compact collection of 16 texts from eight of the Yokuts dialects admirably fills the gap. The texts come from four sources, spanning 60 years (1922-1982). Three (all Yawelmani) were collected by John P. Harrington in 1922; ten come from Newman's fieldwork in 1930-31 and are distributed among six dialects; two Wikchumni texts come from the editor's own work in 1972; and one Tachi text was collected by Susan Britsch in 1982. The six Yawelmani texts represent parallel versions of three stories, one version collected by Harrington and the other by Newman. G. presents all of the texts in a standard format, with a regularized phonemic orthography (except for Britsch's text), interlinear glosses, free translations, and notes. --- Order from: Mouton de Gruyter, 200 Saw Mill River Road, Hawthorne, NY 10532 (tel: 914/747-0110; fax: 914/747-1326). [Jan. 1994]