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Description
Oral stories form a portal through which rich cultural and linguistic information is passed from generation to generation. The two volumes of Tellings from Our Elders present twenty-seven stories in the Skagit Valley dialects of Lushootseed, the language of the indigenous people of the southern and eastern shores of Puget Sound. These stories – or syeyehub – are told by the last generation to learn the language as its mother tongue, and in many cases were recorded decades ago. Now, they have been transcribed and analyzed by David Beck and Thom Hess, and are published with line-by-line interlinear glosses, to offer a deeper understanding of the structure and logic of the Lushootseed language. This collection opens a doorway to cultural knowledge, specialized vocabulary, and patterns of narrative stylistics typical of Coast Salish storytelling, and will help ensure that the language will live on for future generations.
Contributor Notes
David Beck is a professor of linguistics at the University of Alberta who specializes in typology and morphosyntactic description, lexicography, language documentation, and Mesoamerican historical linguistics. He has worked extensively on Lushootseed archival materials and conducted fieldwork on Upper Necaxa Totonac, a minority language of Mexico. The authors of many journal articles on these two languages, Beck has also produced the Upper Necaxa Totonac Dictionary (2011). He is currently the North American editor of the book series Brill’s Studies in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas and co-editor, with Donna Gerdts, of the International Journal of American Linguistics.
Thom Hess (1936-2009) was a professor of linguistics at the University of Victoria who worked extensively on the Salishan and Wakashan languages of Vancouver Island and northwestern Washington State. In addition to publishing extensively in the academic domain, he dedicated much of his career to the production of materials with practical and pedagogical applications for speaker communities, including the Dictionary of Puget Salish, the Lushootseed Dictionary (with Dawn Bates and Vi Hilbert), and the three-volume Lushootseed Reader series.
Editorial Review
As excellent examples of a specifically linguistic form of textual presentation, these volumes definitely achieve what they have set out to do. As such, they are not books that one would pick up simply to read the stories. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern that the stories are rich in teachings, [and] that they are beautifully told …
— BC Studies
