Content area
Full Text
Hopi Dictionary/Hopiikwa Lavaytutuveni: A Hopi-English Dictionary of the Third Mesa Dialect. The Hopi Dictionary Project. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997. 900 pp. Sample entries: hotamti vi. p.pl. get stretched out.-Itupko kaway'uyit hotamtiqw tiikive'ytani, When the watermelons stretch (with vines on the ground), my younger brother will sponsor a dance.
paapu part. [21 from now on, from this time on.-Nu' teevep taya'iwtaqw nungwu paapu ipono hin 'ur tuyva, I've been laughing so long my stomach is now starting to hurt.
nukusvena vi./vt.p. draw, paint, mark, write or photograph poorly. Nnpiy toriwtaqat akw peenaqe nukusvena, she took a snapshot from a camera that was crooked so she made a bad photograph. natwani n. sg. [ I ] practices related to the continued renewal or rejuvenation of life, such as planting, ritual obligations, hunting and gathering. Qatsi natwanit.sa akw pasiwta, life is possible only with practices related to its rejuvenation. (From almost fifty separate entries beginning with the stem yoy-, rain):
yoyleetsiwnw vi.i. for rain to be moving across showing rain lines in a row at a distance. Tuutukwit angqw peqwwat hoopoq yoyleetsiwma, the rain is moving this way by the looks of rain lines from the Hopi Buttes.
ybytawi n. rain song. Kisiwvave Honanwutaqa ybytatawiy tawlawu, At Kisiwva (a kachina shrine) Old Man Badger is singing his rain songs.
The editors of this new, magnificent dictionary remark that while Hopi culture has received extensive ethnographic attention, the language has received comparatively little-a rather extraordinary paradox. How ethnography could proliferate without a linguistic foundation begs many questions. Reliance on sparse accounts of the language-typically filtered through the prism of heavily freighted theoretical interest, often reproduced in secondary or tertiary sources, and filtered still further from the actualities of language use-has led to some peculiar notions about both Hopi culture and the Hopi language. Within and beyond anthropology,...