Sagard’s Dictionary of Huron

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Recollect Brother Gabriel Sagard’s 144-page French-Huron dictionary, first published in 1632, is one of the earliest dictionaries of any Native American language and is the foundation of French missionary studies in Iroquoian. This exhaustive new edition by renowned Huron scholar John Steckley is a complete translation of this historic dictionary. It begins with a thorough introduction, including extensive notes on Huron linguistic variation and dialect differences, featuring comparisons with other Iroquoian languages. This introduction also breaks new ground in offering evidence of a trade language or pidgin with a St. Lawrence Iroquoian component-the first definitive evidence of the survival of that language since it was first encountered by Cartier in the 1530s. The dictionary section is a direct translation from Sagard’s original text, featuring the original French entry, a newly-added English translation, and then the corresponding Huron phrase with added etymological and comparative analyses. Steckley also complements Sagard’s phrase-based arrangement with a complete index to the over 230 Huron noun stems and 360 verb stems featured in the dictionary-the first such indexing since the work’s original publication and an invaluable asset for detailed linguistic study of early Huron.