--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Harald Hammarstrom <haha2581@...> wrote:
> Thanks for this enlightening email. Are there reference grammars
> available for Eyak, Tlingit or Haida? /Harald
Well, no. Although a lot of research has been done on Tlingit and
Haida, no one seems to have written a general grammar to tie it all
together for either language. The closest thing might be John
Enrico's _Haida Syntax_ (2 vols., U of Nebraska Press, 2003), but that
isn't very useful for comparative purposes.
For Tlingit most research seems to be ethnolinguistic in nature; many
collections of myths and songs, etc. Again, nothing useful for
comparative purposes.
As for Eyak, there hasn't been much written about it at all, which is
a shame because there's only one speaker left and she's well into old age.
One scholar who has written a lot about Na-Dene and the controversy
over it is Hans-Juergen Pinnow. He argues that the family does exist
and contains both Haida and Tlingit. His publications would be a good
place to start looking at the issue, since they are the most rigorous
from a comparative/historical perspective and contain a wealth of data.
Alexis Manaster Ramer's article "Sapir's Classifications: Haida and
the Other Na-Dene Languages" (_Anthropological Linguistics_ 38:2,
1996) is said to be quite good and evenhanded, but I haven't read it
so I can't personally vouch for that.
Jedediah