Book Description

Excerpt from The Mutsun Dialect of Costanoan Based on the Vocabulary of De La Cuesta A century ago Father Felipe Arroyo de la Cuesta, one of the most earnest and indefatigable members of the order of St. Francis, collected a mass of 2884 words, phrases, and sentences from the language of the Mutsun Indians, spoken at his mission of San Juan Bautista near Monterey, California. At about the same time he composed a grammar of the language, which is one of the branches of the Costanoan linguistic group. These two manuscripts were sent by Alexander S. Taylor to the Smithsonian Institute, which loaned them for publication to John G. Shea, in whose Library of American Linguistics they appear as volumes IV and VIII, 1861 and 1862. Together they form one of the fullest and most complete collections of data extant on a Pacific Coast language. There is little doubt that the missionary knew the language well and interpreted its psychology and spirit fairly correctly. In his grammar there appears less strict adherence to the form and structure of Latin grammar, less subconscious premise of Latin as the standard par excellence than is generally found in grammars of this time and type. Nevertheless, in spite of the comparative excellence of the grammar, but because of its lack of scientific arrangement, unphonetic orthography, and the foreign tongue, it is deemed better to rearrange and formulate the grammar, using as a basis the phrases of the vocabulary. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.