Delaware-English/English-Delaware Dictionary

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

At the time of contact with Europeans, the Delaware lived in the
vicinity of New York City. Today, barely two dozen persons still speak
or understand Delaware. This book springs in part from a recognition
that knowledge of the language has all but slipped away.

The book contains a guide to using the dictionary, Delaware–English
and English–Delaware dictionaries, and a brief bibliography. The
layout of the dictionary is reminiscent of that used in Frantz and
Russell’s Blackfoot Dictionary. Each entry consists of a headword,
abbreviated grammatical identification, English meaning, and several
inflectional forms. Unlike Blackfoot, Delaware indicates words and names
of foreign origin (especially English and Dutch) that would otherwise be
hard to recognize as such due to their phonetic assimilation into
Delaware. The most significant difference between the two dictionaries
is that in Delaware only complete words, not prefixes, appear as
headwords.

This superb piece of lexicography will be of interest to linguists and
also to students of First Nations languages, particularly the Algonquian
family.