A milestone in Sinama research has been reached with the publication of the Central Sinama-English Dictionary, making available a wealth of lexical, grammatical, and cultural information.
A milestone in Sinama research has been reached with the publication of the Central Sinama-English Dictionary, making available a wealth of lexical, grammatical, and cultural information.
A milestone in Sinama research has been reached with the publication of the Central Sinama-English Dictionary, making available a wealth of lexical, grammatical, and cultural information on a lesser-researched but important language of the Sulu archipelago in southwestern Philippines.
The collection of words and study of culture was compiled over 60 years, initially capturing a rare snapshot of Sama language and culture in Sulu in the 1960s and 1970s. The dictionary database was expanded in subsequent years through the efforts of contributors and researchers, with each entry containing well chosen, highly idiomatic, and culturally rich example sentences. The local speech community will find it a rich practical resource, as will Philippine university researchers and schoolteachers.
This volume will be of value to Austronesianists, anthropologists, typologists, and theoretical linguists, and lexicographers will be interested in the use of FLEx tools for cross-referencing the web of thesaurus relations.
The Central Sinama-English Dictionary presents the results of decades of intensive research on the
Central Sinama language, a member of the Sama-Bajaw branch of Western Malayo-Polynesian. The
Sama languages have many features that are of interest to typologists and theoretical linguists, and the
Dictionary is a valuable contribution to the Sama literature, in addition to being an important practical
resource for speakers of the language.
Prof. Robert D. Van Valin, Jr.
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, and
Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
The Sinama-English dictionary is the kind of dictionary one always hopes for but rarely finds when
searching for lexical, cultural, or grammatical information on lesser-researched speech communities. It
is very rich, not only in the number of entries, but in that each entry contains very well chosen, highly
idiomatic and culturally rich example sentences, in addition to notes on dialectal alternates as well as
grammatical and cultural notes. Six decades of work in and with Sinama speech communities have
gone into this dictionary, and the tremendous expertise resulting from a large team of contributors and
researchers shows on every page. Definitely a major resource both for the speech community and the
scientific community.
Nikolaus P. Himmelmann
Universität zu Köln, Germany
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