John Kias (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: New. 810 pp. The Kalam people live in the Bismarck and Schrader Ranges in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. They speak a language belonging to the Trans New Guinea family. This dictionary is one of the major products of a project of anthropological and linguistic research among the Kalam, begun in 1960 under the leadership of Ralph Bulmer, with collaboration between native speakers of Kalam, linguists, anthropologists and specialists in various biological disciplines. The dictionary is designed to be an ethnographic record, a kind of encyclopaedia of those elements of Kalam culture and society that are codified in language. The central part, the Kalam to English dictionary, provides definitions for about 14,000 distinct lexical units, grouped under about 6000 headwords. Definitions are often supplemented by ethnographic notes. Entries aim to systematically describe Kalam semantic categories and relations, for example, Kalam taxonomies of animals and plants, and kinship and colour categories, which differ markedly from those of European languages. The English-Kalam finder list provides a multi-level index, designed to enable the reader to find relevant entries and groupings of entries in the Kalam-English part, where fuller information is provided. Three major varieties of Kalam are represented. Two are sharply divergent regional dialects, known as Etp mnm and Ti mnm. The third is Kalam Pandanus language, which people use in the high mountain forest when harvesting mountain pandanus nuts and in certain other special contexts. A substantial grammar sketch is included.