Ebook: The Yurok language: Grammar, texts, lexicon

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1958. - 311 p.The Yurok Indians live, as they have always lived in their recorded history, near the mouth of the Klamath River in Del Norte County in northern California. From there Yurok territory extends up the river some thirty miles to include the junction of the Trinity and Klam.ath rivers, and south along
the coast as far as the neighborhood of Trinidad in Humboldt County. Yurok dwellings were never far from the sea or a river, and intercommunication was mainly by water, along the coast or up the Klamath or one of the smaller rivers. To this day the normal direct route between the upper Klannath Yurok habitations and the more numerous ones around the river mouth is by the river.The Yurok language has not been securely assigned to any of the larger linguistic groups of the American continent. Though culturally the Yurok shared many nonlinguistic features with their neighbors in northwest California, and the tribe was described by Kroeber as a center of cultural diffusion, linguistically they are somewhat isolated, and the only suggested relation with a neighboring language is with Wiyot. These two languages were regarded by Sapir as Algonkian, though on relatively slight evidence; This classification was accepted by Kroeber and others, though it was strongly attacked by Michelson.On the evidence so far made available the question of the Algonkian affiliation of Yurok must be left undecided, though it is to be hoped that the Yurok material published in this volume, together with further researches into the Algonkian linguistic family and the comparative study of American Indian languages generally, may throw some light on this problem.