Blackfoot Dictionary of Stems, Roots, and Affixes. 2nd ed.

Richard W. Parker is an associate professor and chair of the Classics
Department at Brock University in St. Catharines.

Blackfoot is a member of the Algonquian family of languages, with
speakers residing principally on four reserves in southern Alberta and
northwestern Montana. This second edition features a considerable
addition of some 300 new entries and the augmentation of another 1000
existing ones. Particularly worth noting is the systematic attempt to
check and correct Latin taxonomic designations for fauna, of which there
are many. Similar, comprehensive treatment for flora must await a
specialized and separate study. To the extent that botanists working in
the area of pharmacology have profitably exploited First Nations medical
lore (whether acknowledged or not), such a study deserves serious
consideration.

The nature of the language, its preservation, and its speakers presents
some unusual obstacles and limitations to the lexicographer. For
example, what to do when most tense and pronominal indicators are
affixes? The authors appear to have overcome these obstacles with
uncommon good sense. A major problem is solved, for example, by
including an English index, which has a Blackfoot gloss and its
morphological type as well as the page number of the Blackfoot entry.
This is an essential feature, all the more so in the light of the fact
that it is a mere 20 years since the Blackfoot officially approved the
alphabet used in the lexicon (consisting of 12 letters from the Roman
alphabet plus an apostrophe to represent the glottal stop).

Individual entries use as lemmata either stem, root, or affix, and
proceed to give a grammatical morphological classification, meaning(s)
in English, and some inflectional forms (usually within phrases or, for
verbs, complete sentences) with their English translations. The thought
and care that have gone into the definitions are everywhere apparent; of
necessity economical, they are always lucid. An introduction explaining
the format of entries, orthography and pronunciation, sources, methods,
and limitations a list of linguistic abbreviations; an appendix on the
Blackfoot alphabet and spelling conventions round out the supporting
material. The result is an admirable example of lexicography.