Dying Words

Nicholas Evans is head of the Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. He has worked on a wide variety of Australian Aboriginal languages as linguist, anthropologist and interpreter, and has recent extended his fieldwork into Papuan languages of the Trans-Fly region. He has written widely both on Aboriginal languages and across a broad spectrum of general linguistic topics, including grammars of Kayardild (1995) and Bininj Gun-wok (2003), dictionaries of Kayardild (1992) and Dalabon (2004, with Francesca Merlan and Maggie Tukumba), plus edited books on linguistics and archaeology (with Patrick McConvell), on polysynthesis (with Hans-Jurgen Sasse), on the classification of north Australian languages, and on grammar-writing ( Catching Language: the standing challenge of grammar writing , with Felix Ameka and Alan Dench).

Acknowledgments. Prologue. A Note on the Presentation of Linguistic Material. Part I: The Library of Babel. 1. Warramurrungunji's Children. 2. Four Millennia to Tune In. Part II: A Great Feast of Languages. 3. A Galapagos of Tongues. 4. Your Mind in Mine: Social Cognition in Grammar. Part III: Faint Tracks in an Ancient Wordscape: Languages and Deep World History. 5. Sprung from Some Common Source. 6. Travels in the Logosphere: Hooking Ancient Words onto Ancient Worlds. 7. Keys to Decipherment: How Living Languages Can Unlock Forgotten Scripts. Part IV: Ratchetting Each Other Up: The Coevolution of Language, Culture, and Thought. 8. Trellises of the Mind: How Language Trains Thought. 9. What Verse and Verbal Art Can Weave. Part V: Listening While We Can. 10. Renewing the Word. Epilogue: Sitting in the Dust, Standing in the Sky. Notes. References. Index of Language Names. General Index.