Overview

Lexical acculturation refers to the accommodation of languages to new objects and concepts encountered as the result of culture contact. This unique study analyzes a survey of words for 77 items of European culture (e.g. chicken, horse, apple, rice, scissors, soap, and Saturday) in the vocabularies of 292 Amerindian languages and dialects spoken from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego. The first book ever to undertake such a large and systematic cross-language investigation, Brown's work provides fresh insights into general processes of lexical change and development, including those involving language universals and diffusion.

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9780195121612

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This is a complex effort, and one can only marvel at the amount of work required to gather the data, analyze them, sort them into meaningful categories, and then draw some general conclusions. Obviously, the comparative exercise - over and above the studies of linguistic acculturation in the individual languages - was a fruitful and fulfilling one. Certainly Brown...has accomplished a major task, and one that is an excellent demonstration of method as well as results. This volume should be of considerable use in courses on Native American languages, acculturation, comparative methods, and historical approaches. Language in Society

This is a complex effort, and one can only marvel at the amount of work required to gather the data, analyze them, sort them into meaningful categories, and then draw some general conclusions. Obviously, the comparative exercise - over and above the studies of linguistic acculturation in the individual languages - was a fruitful and fulfilling one. Certainly Brown...has accomplished a major task, and one that is an excellent demonstration of method as well as results. This volume should be of considerable use in courses on Native American languages, acculturation, comparative methods, and historical approaches. --Language in Society

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