Explore a landmark Choctaw language dictionary that opens old texts to modern readers.
The book presents Cyrus Byington’s long‑planned dictionary of Choctaw, with notes from editors and scholars. It includes an English–Choctaw index to help locate where terms appear and how they relate to English words.
- Original manuscript work and multiple revisions that capture Byington’s careful approach to language.
- Phonetic guidance, nasalization marks, and a system that maps Choctaw sounds to familiar letters.
- An emphasis on how words function in speech, with notes on dialect differences and historical context.
- Editorial background that preserves much of the original material while organizing it for study.
Ideal for readers of linguistics, historical language study, and those interested in Choctaw culture and translation history.
John R. Swanton was the most prolific author with the Smithsonian Bureau of American Ethnology. He produced twenty works on the American Indian, among them The Indian Tribes of North American and The Indians of the Southeastern United States.