Lawrence Nicodemus’s Coeur d’Alene Dictionary in Root Format (review)

In 1975, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe published a dictionary entitled Snchitsu’umshtsn: The Coeur d’Alene Language, by Lawrence Nicodemus (1975a). The dictionary was printed in two volumes, Coeur d’Alene to English and English to Coeur d’Alene. The first and only printing of this dictionary was limited, and no new copies remain. Nicodemus died in 2004.

The work reviewed here is an updated rendition of the material found in Nicodemus’s original volumes and a welcome renewal of one of the few works available on this severely endangered Salishan language. This new edition is based on M.A. theses by John Lyon and Rebecca Greene-Wood at the University of Montana. The dictionary begins with a sketch of Nicodemus’s linguistic career by anthropologist Raymond Brinkman, the current director of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s language program and a long-time friend and student of Lawrence Nicodemus. The sketch includes well-deserved praise for the work done by Lyon and Greene-Wood, noting particularly their organization of the original materials, their morphological analyses, and the effort they put in to produce the new edition. Brinkman’s comment that Nicodemus himself would “be thrilled” (p. ix) to see this publication is on the mark: Nicodemus had a passion for teaching and sharing the Coeur d’Alene language. As he began the project that produced the original dictionary, Nicodemus reported on his planned work:

It is my purpose, as a full-blooded Coeur d’Alene, to try to facilitate real understanding of my tribe’s language. . . . My friends, it is my firm conviction that not only the Coeur d’Alenes, but missionaries and our other friends as well, must reawaken, study and speak the Coeur d’Alene language. This is the secret key to the understanding of Indian nature and culture.

[1973]

In fact, Nicodemus thought that widespread understanding of his native language could be linguistically enlightening, and he provides several examples that he believes demonstrate “that Coeur d’Alene may be the key, if not to all, then to many, many languages” (1973:4).

Nicodemus has the long-standing status of native expert on the Coeur d’Alene language, and he is the source of all the data contained in the original volumes, directly or indirectly. There is evidence in the original volumes that much of the data came from the notes or publications of Gladys Reichard (1938, 1939, 1947, n.d.) with whom Nicodemus worked both on the reservation and at Columbia University (Reichard 1947:521). Reichard’s published data were based on narratives and elicited material she collected from native speakers Tom Miyel (a.k.a. Damian), Julia Antelope (Nicodemus’s mother), and Dorothy Nicodemus (Nicodemus’s paternal grandmother) in the late 1920s. Nicodemus incorporated select items from Reichard’s data in his dictionary. This is evident especially where the definitions he provides are identical to those given by Reichard. One of many examples is the root √c̓p̓q̓. In both Reichard’s stem list (1939) and in Nicodemus’s dictionary (1975a, 1:273), the definition given is ‘adhere; stick to (as glue)’. The other data originate from Nicodemus’s own vocabulary and creativity. Brinkman’s biographical note contains an interesting remark on this point: “Lawrence’s dictionary, too, is primarily a collection of texts he never uttered, sentences coined for the purposes of demonstrating the range of the language” (p. viii).

The Nicodemus dictionary volumes were part of a larger project supported by the Institute of American Indian Arts (Nicodemus 1973:3) that included a textbook and an accompanying set of six audio tapes (1975b). The project was a collaborative work produced and designed by Southwest Research Associates, Inc. of Albuquerque, New Mexico (Nicodemus 1975a, 1:i–ii, 1975b:ii). It is unfortunate that these associates are not mentioned anywhere in...