From: Harald Hammarström
Message: 34228
Date: 2004-09-20
> --- 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
>