About Us
At Exploration Press we are devoted to inquiry, exploration, and the preservation of knowledge, language, and culture.
Indigenous languages and cultures preserve a rich legacy of human history, creativity, and experience. As our globe becomes increasingly monolithic, this heritage is rapidly being lost forever. Our ambition at Mundart Press is to battle this decline by preserving and revitalizing endangered languages and cultures.
Books
WEBS OF RELATIONSHIPS AND WORDS FROM LONG AGO
“This collection of invited papers honors Ives Goddard, an outstanding figure in the field of the languages of the Americas as well as in historical linguistics and ethnohistory. Goddard is the single most knowledgeable scholar in historical and comparative Algonquian, a field to which he has been contributing since his undergraduate Harvard thesis; he has also carried out extensive fieldwork on Meskwaki and on the Delaware languages Unami and Munsee.”
Amy Dahlstrom – University of Chicago
MINOAN, ETRUSCAN, AND RELATED LANGUAGES
“I hope that the text can be widely disseminated among the scholars in this field. If my experience is any indication of the likely response, it will be treasured. . . . Jatsemirskij clearly was set for a productive academic career that realistically could have culminated in finally cracking the code. In the wake of his passing, the book must be made available.”
—Bernard Taylor, PhD, Research Professor, Loma Linda
THE CADDO LANGUAGE
The Caddos once inhabited a vast area that is now included in eastern Texas and parts of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Their descendants have lived in southwestern Oklahoma since the middle of the nineteenth century. Their language is distantly related to Pawnee, Arikara, Witchita, and Kitsai within the Caddoan language family. Its polysynthetic verb morphology was described in an earlier work by Lynette Melnar. Chafe’s work expands on that description, adding nouns and adjectives, a collection of representative texts, and an English-Caddo dictionary.
MOBILIAN TRADE LANGUAGE
The Mobilian Trade Language (aka Mobilian Jargon) is a Native American pidgin, primarily based on Muskogean languages, that was spoken in the North American Southeast until the 1950s. For centuries, Mobilian Trade Language served as a lingua franca for various indigenous groups (and later Europeans and Africans) that came together for trade and ritual. As a pidgin, the language is grammatically streamlined and easy to learn. This book is a phrasebook with bidirectional lexicon that can help reawaken this now dormant language by providing a handy lexical reference and common phrases.
BILOXI DICTIONARY
The Biloxi-English Dictionary serves as a handy reference for Biloxi descendants who want to learn their ancestral language as well as serving as a valuable research tool for linguists, anthropologists, historians, and others interested in Biloxi and Siouan languages in general. Biloxi is a dormant Siouan language once spoken along the Gulf of Mexico in the Southeastern United States. Biloxis merged with the unrelated Tunicas in 1981 to form the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana. The dictionary contains over 2,100 entries with etymological analyses and notations, an English-Biloxi index, comparative data from Siouan and other languages, cross-referencing of entries as well as appendices on numbers, days of the week, flora and fauna, place names, and medicinal plants. For this edition, new entries are included that did not appear in the first two editions, along with new notes reflecting the latest research. In addition, 74 more example phrases and sentences have been added.
OUTLINE FOR A COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR OF SOME ALGONQUIAN LANGUAGES
A comparative grammar of five Algonquian Native American languages, this book treats most parts of speech and provides a solid introduction to the major important morphological features of this family and its languages. Updated with recent work in the field.
Authors
Dr. Ives Goddard
Goddard is the single most knowledgable scholar in historical and comparative Algonquian, a field to which he has been contributing since his undergraduate Harvard thesis; he has also carried out extensive fieldwork on Meskwaki and on the Delaware languages Unami and Munsee. Goddard is also well known for his work editing and translating early indigenous texts, including Wampanoag (in collaboration with Kathleen Bragdon) and Meskwaki texts from the early 20th century written in the Great Lakes syllabary by Alfred Kiyana and other writers. Moreover, Goddard’s 1996 map of North American language families has become the new standard for representing the genetic relationships of the languages of the continent.
Dr. Wallace Chafe
After receiving his PhD in Linguistics from Yale in 1958, Dr. Wallace Chafe accepted a position at the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, where he began to study the Caddo language. He went on to teach at the University of California at Berkeley from 1962 to 1986 and then at UC Santa Barbara until his retirement in 1991. Materials that he collected with the Caddo in Oklahoma beginning in the 1960s became the basis for his new book, The Caddo Language, with Mundart Press.
Dr. David Kaufman
Dr. David Kaufman holds advanced degrees in linguistics and anthropology and has done extensive work in the preservation and revitalization of Native American languages. He is a polyglot as well as linguistic anthropologist and uses a cross-field (linguistic, ethnographic, cultural, and archaeological) approach in many of his writings. He has taught and tutored Spanish, English, Portuguese, Italian, and Russian. His primary foci are on comparative-historical Siouan, Romance, and Germanic linguistics, although his interests go far beyond this in the realms of language, history, anthropology, and other fields. He is from San Francisco but currently lives in Wisconsin.
Wendy Taylor
A beloved professor of Composition and Creative Writing, Wendy Taylor practices what she preaches, carefully crafting exquisite, meaningful prose. Adept at teaching students, she also expands the minds of her many readers.
S. C. Compton
S. C. Compton has been fascinated with ancient civilizations since childhood adventures living in the rainforests of Peru and exploring Incan ruins in the nearby Andes. Now residing in Chicago and traveling extensively, he holds three degrees and edits academic journals in the fields of history and literature for Oxford University Press.
JOSHUA JACOB SNIDER
Joshua has been studying secondary languages since 1992 and secondary Germanic languages since 1994. He reads all fifteen official modern written Germanic languages and is fluent in English, German, Dutch/Flemish, and Swedish. His Mennonite grandparents’ native tongue was Pennsylvania German, a Frankish language similar to Yiddish. Snider, who also has Native American family, has translated and published a comparative Algonquian grammar from Dutch and has published a Meskwaki (Fox) dictionary for the Smithsonian Institution, both through Mundart Press. He is currently translating the Itzik Kipnis novel ‘Months and Days’ and working on several other publishing projects.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”