The Crow Language. Grammatical Sketch and Analyzed Text

Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1941. V, 141 p.In the summer of 1931 a grant from the Committee on Native Languages of the American Council of Learned Societies enabled me to resume field work on the Crow Reservation in southeastern Montana, with emphasis on the language. As a result, a fair amount of textual material was obtained, including some prayers, a long historical tradition, several trickster tales, a version of the Creation story, and a full variant of "Old Woman's Grandchild," the most popular Crow hero tale. I have published the prayers in text, and four of the tales in English, utilizing the tradition for ethnographic purposes. The text of "Old Woman's Grandchild" being now ready for publicationt with grammatical notes, it seems best to defer more adequate grammatical treatment, and to prefix a preliminary sketch. The data presented naturally supersede those accompanying a very brief text communicated some years ago. For illumination of grammatical points I have drawn freely upon the texts I recorded on other field trips, undertaken under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History, in 1907 and 1910-1916. Unfortunately, Zellig Harris' and C. F. Voegelin's edition of "Hidatsa Texts, with Grammatical Notes and Phonograph Transcriptions"| was issued too late for me to make use of it.