Zompist Bboard Again

What are some of your favorite natlang reference grammars?

Amazon/e-commerce links appreciated. Looking to do some shopping.

Probably A Handbook of Vlax Romani by Ian Hancock (my advisor when I was in grad school)

The 2nd edition of YIP Po-Ching and Don Rimmington's Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar (2016) is great. Make sure to get the 2nd edition, as it is a substantial improvement over the 1st edition, with many confusing passages clarified plus a few extra chapters. A warning: glosses are used only sparingly, by which I mean most example sentences are unglossed. You need some rudimentary command of Mandarin to be able to follow them.

Amazon.com link:
https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehe ... 1540876353

As an alternative there is also HUANG Chu-Ren and SHI Dingxu's (eds.) book, A Reference Grammar of Chinese (2016), which does have glosses throughout. I think Huang and Shi's work might be a drier work to read though, as it often gets into nitty-gritty details on the syntactic behaviour of specific words or types of words, which you might not care about if you're not learning Mandarin. I think a conlanger would profit more from Yip and Rimmington's book.

Amazon.com link:
https://www.amazon.com/Reference-Gramma ... 782&sr=1-4

Both grammars have a bit over 600 pages of content.

If there are free legal versions, I'm interested in not-shopping.

love me that a reference grammar of nishnaabemwin

Yeah, I have Valentine's Nishnaabemwin too. It's a great resource, but it's bullheadedly a reference grammar, thus terrible for learning the language or even really figuring out how it works.

For Mandarin, I like Li & Thomspon's Mandarin Chinese. But thanks for the recs on other Chinese grammars; those sound interesting! Pulleyblank's Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar is great for Old Chinese.

Also worth a mention: Whitney's Sanskrit Grammar is available online. But Jan Gonda's A Concise Elementary Grammar of the Sanskrit Language is much more accessible.

mèþru wrote: ↑Tue Oct 30, 2018 7:01 am If there are free legal versions, I'm interested in not-shopping.

If that includes the Vlax Romani grammar, that's available for free through this post on the old forum.

I recall Trask's Standard Basque as being a model of clarity and exhaustiveness, but it's been years since I've been able to look at my copy (it's in a box somewhere).

The Nishnaabemwin grammar is great, but morpheme-by-morpheme glosses would have been helpful. I'm aware this was at the request of the Ojibwe nation with which Valentine worked, but it does make it a little bit difficult to figure out exactly what a word is doing when the language puts its polysynthetic nature on full display.

Cowell and Moss's The Arapaho Language is another good Algonquian example; Bloomfield's The Menomini Language is a bit old-fashioned and doesn't have anywhere near enough on pragmatics or syntax, but Bloomfield basically founded the Algonquianist tradition, so...

I'm fond of Launey's Introduction à la langue et à la littérature aztèques for Classical Nahuatl, if you can read French. It's a learner's grammar, but relatively well-rounded, with an accompanying second volume of textual material if you want to shell for that. Wimmer as put online a pretty extensive dictionary, which is helpful, because the lexicons in Launey are REALLY IMPRACTICAL if you don't have the pdf version (and even if you do: the OCR is far from perfect!)!

Parlons Quechua http://www.editions-harmattan.fr/index. ... e&no=14755 (same publisher), while defintely not a reference grammar, isn't too bad as an introduction.

For Classical Nahuatl, I really like Thelma D. Sullivan's Compendium of Nahuatl Grammar. Probably more of a learner's grammar than a reference one, but comprehensive and very clear.

My absolute favorite is probably A Grammar of Bella Coola (Davis & Saunders 1997) which is pretty unique as far as grammars go. It sort of… abandons normal linguistic frameworks and develops a Salish-o-centric approach to linguistics and analyzes Bella Coola (aka Nuxalk aka xłp̓χʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ lang) within that framework. To quote it,

The A Grammar of the title is not as neutral as it may seem. The primary intent in presenting information about Bella Coola is not merely to attest some one affix of construction, but to demonstrate how ᴘʀᴏᴘᴏꜱɪᴛɪᴏɴꜱ are composed and how ᴘʀᴏᴘᴏꜱɪᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟ content melds with the contexts in which Bella Coola is used.

It's a really interesting read (though it probably helps that I absolutely adore Nuxalk and the Salish languages in general).

There are some other really good grammars like Aikhenvald's Tariana one (boy is it ever comprehensive) and A grammar of Abui (Kratochvíl 2007).

dhok wrote: ↑Tue Oct 30, 2018 10:29 pm I recall Trask's Standard Basque as being a model of clarity and exhaustiveness, but it's been years since I've been able to look at my copy (it's in a box somewhere).

My favourite natlang grammar is also called Standard Basque, but it's attributed to Rudolf de Rijk. This Amazon link says "Volume 1", but it actually contains both volumes.

Yes, that's right, I was thinking of de Rijk's. Sorry.

Circeus wrote: ↑Wed Oct 31, 2018 9:57 pm I'm fond of Launey's Introduction à la langue et à la littérature aztèques for Classical Nahuatl, if you can read French. It's a learner's grammar, but relatively well-rounded, with an accompanying second volume of textual material if you want to shell for that. Wimmer as put online a pretty extensive dictionary, which is helpful, because the lexicons in Launey are REALLY IMPRACTICAL if you don't have the pdf version (and even if you do: the OCR is far from perfect!)!

Launey's book is available in English. It's not perfect but it's definitely useful.