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50books_poc5. Kanyen'keha Tewatati (Let's Speak Mohawk), by David Kanatawakhon Maracle
The first thing I noticed about this book was that it was awfully thin for a language textbook. (I bought the edition with CDs, for which Amazon misleadingly lists the dimensions as 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches. The page for the edition without CDs gives the true dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.3 inches.)
This book is linguistically quite sound - the author clearly knows his linguistics and is not bogged down in "all languages are really Latin" or prescriptivist nonsense (which is my biggest pet peeve when it comes to language materials) - but it's not really sufficient for self-study. There are a few sample dialogues at the beginning, but after that, it's pretty much a straight grammar and not a textbook, with no texts longer than a sentence (and sentences only there to illustrate grammatical points in as concise a manner as possible), and lots of verb and noun inflection charts. Enough of that and my eyes glaze over; I really can't learn a language without corpora, and I assume the same is true for most people. It seems as if the author is more used to providing sketches of Mohawk grammar so that linguists can learn facts about its typology than providing enough examples and exercises so that people can learn to apply the rule he's talking about in all/most possible contexts.
The CD was also disappointing: its content is nothing more than the examples in the book, read multiple times with their English translation. This translates to the author reading pages and pages of verb conjugation charts out loud. Hearing it did help me internalize some of the phonology, and it is essential to hear how a language you want to learn is spoken. But it was still disappointing.
I think this book would be a fine supplement to another more comprehensive book (and an actual live class). But I'm not sure said more comprehensive book actually exists.
6. One Thousand Useful Mohawk Words, by David Kanatawakhon Maracle
This book is mostly a dictionary, with a few pages of grammar at the beginning. Strangely enough, the treatment of verb conjugation in this book is more comprehensive than that of the previous book. (I spent some gleeful linguistics-nerd time figuring out the morphophonological rules to derive the different forms of the subject agreement prefixes from an underlying form.) :)
Once again: I want more information. It's extremely disappointing to me how little material there is on the Mohawk language. (And I'm relatively lucky - a lot of Native American languages are much more endangered and less documented than Mohawk.) :(
Edit: I can't add a tag for the author because it would exceed the 1000 tag limit!
Edit 2: Fixed.
The first thing I noticed about this book was that it was awfully thin for a language textbook. (I bought the edition with CDs, for which Amazon misleadingly lists the dimensions as 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches. The page for the edition without CDs gives the true dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.3 inches.)
This book is linguistically quite sound - the author clearly knows his linguistics and is not bogged down in "all languages are really Latin" or prescriptivist nonsense (which is my biggest pet peeve when it comes to language materials) - but it's not really sufficient for self-study. There are a few sample dialogues at the beginning, but after that, it's pretty much a straight grammar and not a textbook, with no texts longer than a sentence (and sentences only there to illustrate grammatical points in as concise a manner as possible), and lots of verb and noun inflection charts. Enough of that and my eyes glaze over; I really can't learn a language without corpora, and I assume the same is true for most people. It seems as if the author is more used to providing sketches of Mohawk grammar so that linguists can learn facts about its typology than providing enough examples and exercises so that people can learn to apply the rule he's talking about in all/most possible contexts.
The CD was also disappointing: its content is nothing more than the examples in the book, read multiple times with their English translation. This translates to the author reading pages and pages of verb conjugation charts out loud. Hearing it did help me internalize some of the phonology, and it is essential to hear how a language you want to learn is spoken. But it was still disappointing.
I think this book would be a fine supplement to another more comprehensive book (and an actual live class). But I'm not sure said more comprehensive book actually exists.
6. One Thousand Useful Mohawk Words, by David Kanatawakhon Maracle
This book is mostly a dictionary, with a few pages of grammar at the beginning. Strangely enough, the treatment of verb conjugation in this book is more comprehensive than that of the previous book. (I spent some gleeful linguistics-nerd time figuring out the morphophonological rules to derive the different forms of the subject agreement prefixes from an underlying form.) :)
Once again: I want more information. It's extremely disappointing to me how little material there is on the Mohawk language. (And I'm relatively lucky - a lot of Native American languages are much more endangered and less documented than Mohawk.) :(
Edit 2: Fixed.
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