Book Description

This Comanche dictionary is based on research drawn from the files of the late Eliot Canonge which he initiated in the early 1940s under the auspices of SIL International. Dr. Robinson has rescued and enhanced this important body of data which spans traditional and contemporary varieties of Comanche speech styles and four geographically identifiable dialects. The Comanche-English section of the work, with over 5,500 entries, constitutes the central portion of the dictionary, but an English-Comanche section indexes Comanche entries to aid in locating Comanche forms from the point of view of their English equivalents. In turn, Dr. Armagost's provision of an introductory exploration of Comanche morphology and syntax further enhances this volume as an important contribution to our knowledge of this branch of the Uto-Aztecan family of languages. This second edition has been improved for user-friendliness, especially in the English-Comanche section, making it much easier to find a Comanche equivalent of an English term. Lila Wistrand-Robinson has a Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin and served several years with SIL International in Peru. Her research was published in the book, Cashibo Folklore and Culture: Prose, Poetry, and Historical Background (SIL International Publications, 1998). She has also published an Iowa/Otoe-English dictionary and taught Linguistics and Anthropology at Kansas State University. James Armagost has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Washington. He has taught Comanche and other subjects at Kansas State University until retiring in 2001. He is the author of multiple papers on Comanche.