From Ute Reference Grammar by Talmy Givón
Mesa County Libraries have plenty of resources to delight those interested in history, such as our Veterans Remember collection of interviews, the Mesa County Oral History Project collection, our online obituaries, and the Rashleigh Regional History Room in the Central Branch. But did you know that our history collection also contains linguistic knowledge that, due in part to the effort of historians, has not been consigned to the dustbins of history?
You can learn how to sound out and pronounce Ute words and phrases with John Harrington’s The Phonetic System of the Ute Language, or gain a more in depth understanding of the Ute Language by studying Talmy Givón’s Ute Reference Grammar. Although these books cannot be checked out from the History Room, you are free to read them in the library, and you can now find an updated edition of Givón’s Ute Reference Grammar, along with his Ute Texts and Ute Dictionary, in the Language Learning section of our circulating collection.
From Farm and Ranch Spanish by George and Rex Kelly
Interested in learning regional Spanish? How about a book on Farm and Ranch Spanish by George and Rex Kelly? You can learn how the braceros applied medicina to plants in order to kill insects (let’s hope farm workers are no longer encouraged to call pesticides “medicine”), or how a ranchero might wrangle a sheep para trasquilarlo in the sheering barn. You can also check out A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish to learn some of the old dialect still spoken by the inhabitants of that region.
An Aleut Language primer, a Shoshoni or Navajo dictionary… Visit our collections and learn a new/old language.