Bøker av Jeff Siegel

Nama is a Papuan language spoken by around 1200 people in the Morehead district of southern New Guinea. It is a member of the Nambu subgroup of the Yam family of languages (also known as the Morehead-Upper Maro family). This grammar is the first published comprehensive description of a language in this subgroup. Nama has an interesting complex morphology with 21 nominal suffixes (17 case-marking) and 31 verbal prefixes and suffixes, indexing arguments (person/number) and indicating tense (current, recent, remote) and aspect (perfective/imperfective, inceptive, punctual, delimited, durative). Nama also has some linguistic features that are either very rare or not attested in other languages.

Jeff Siegel's fascinating book provides a sociolinguistic history of language contact in Fiji where, from the 1860s until 1920, some 90,000 labourers from other Pacific islands and from India worked on the European-owned plantations. It focuses on the pidgins and other language varieties developed to meet the needs of peoples from different linguistic backgrounds and different cultures.