The Miami-Illinois Language (review)

Costa’s description of Miami-Illinois (M-I) synchronic and historical phonology and inflectional morphology is an impressive testament to what can be achieved working on an American Indian language with no native speakers. The records of M-I are voluminous but inconsistent, and C’s meticulous interpretation and comparison of different sources results in a thorough and sound description. C’s work is a revised version of his dissertation, and a recipient of the Mary R. Haas book award, presented by the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas.

In Ch. 1, ‘On the sources’, C assesses each of the archival sources he uses. The M-I language, while currently being revitalized, has had no native speakers since the 1960s. Costa’s description relies entirely on records of the language that date from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries, including a great deal of material from French missionaries. Readers will appreciate his meticulous description of his sources and forthright assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of each.

The following two chapters are a synchronic and diachronic study of the consonant (Ch. 2) and vowel (Ch. 3) systems. C traces the development of Proto-Algonquian consonants and vowels in M-I, citing cognates in other Algonquian languages, and Proto-Algonquian reconstructions both from oft-cited sources and of his own suggestion. The status of preaspirated consonants and vowel length present a philological challenge, since both of these are represented inconsistently in the source materials.

Ch. 4 describes the inflectional morphology of nouns, pronominals, and numerals, including gender, number, obviation, locative, possession, and vocative. Ch. 5 describes verbal inflection, with sections on the three Algonquian orders: independent, conjunct (C uses the term ‘dependent’), and imperative. It also includes a description of the marking of obviation, inversion, negation, animacy, subjects, and objects. Ch. 6 compares the use of independent and conjunct verbs and describes the form and function of initial change (initial-syllable ablaut found on some participles and conjuncts). Appendices provide more examples of inflected verbs and are organized by inflectional category.

C intends the book to be accessible to non-Algonquianists and succeeds in this goal, succinctly explaining the (at times obscure) terminology that is common among Algonquianists.

The success of C’s description is inspiring to those linguists who work on underdescribed languages that no longer have native speakers. There are, of course, gaps in the record. C notes, for example, that inflected forms of numerals are not widely attested. Despite these gaps, C has managed to cull a remarkably thorough description from disparate sources of varying quality. An unfortunate aspect of the data cited throughout is that it tends to be words in isolation rather than full clauses or excerpts from texts. This is undoubtedly due to the scope of the volume (phonology and inflectional morphology). Hopefully C will continue this work and publish a description of areas of grammar not covered in the present volume.