This collection of invited papers honors Ives Goddard, an outstanding figure in the field of the languages of the Americas as well as in historical linguistics and ethnohistory. Goddard is the single most knowledgeable scholar in historical and comparative Algonquian, a field to which he has been contributing since his undergraduate Harvard thesis; he has also carried out extensive fieldwork on Meskwaki and on the Delaware languages Unami and Munsee. Goddard is also well known for his work editing and translating early indigenous texts, including Wampanoag (in collaboration with Kathleen Bragdon) and Meskwaki texts from the early 20th century written in the Great Lakes syllabary by Alfred Kiyana and other writers. Moreover, Goddard’s 1996 map of North American language families has become the new standard for representing the genetic relationships of the languages of the continent.

The title of this volume, Webs of Relationship and Words from Long Ago, is a translation of the Meskwaki title of Alfred Kiyana’s most metalinguistic text. The twenty essays in this volume by many of Goddard’s colleagues and former students all discuss webs of relationships and words from long ago, either or both: papers on many of the Algonquian languages (Plains Cree, Woods Cree, Innu, Arapaho, Menominee, Miami-Illinois, Meskwaki, and a proposed Core Central group), linguistic treatments of other American languages (Iroquoian, Montana Salish, Zapotec), historical analyses of languages in other parts of the world (Tocharian, Latin, Caucasian Albanian, Udi), ethnohistorical or cultural investigations (Passamaquoddy, Wampanoag, Onondaga, exploration of the Upper Mississippi), and a retrospective of the last 40 years of historical study of American Indian languages.

Amy Dahlstrom - University of Chicago