Hopi Dictionary: Hopìikwa Lavàytutuveni facts for kids

Hopi Dictionary: Hopìikwa Lavàytutuveni: A Hopi Dictionary of the Third Mesa Dialect with an English-Hopi Finder List and a Sketch of Hopi Grammar is an English-Hopi (Hopi: Hopílavayi) reference book published by the Dictionary Project at the Bureau of Applied Anthropology, the University of Arizona.

Some of the Hopi community tried to prevent it from being published because they did not want non-Hopis to have access to the Hopi language, which they held to be the specific cultural heritage of their community. After a period of discussions and legal proceedings, the dictionary was published in 1998.

Contents

The dictionary has an introduction with bibliography, a guide to dictionary entries, a list of abbreviations, a 797-page Hopi-English section, a 161-page English-Hopi finder list and a 30-page grammatical sketch of the Hopi language including an explanation of the orthography used. The dictionary has 29,394 entries of which 23,994 are main entries and the rest cross-references.

Compilation

No comprehensive dictionary of the Hopi language had been published when the Hopi Dictionary Project was instigated at the University of Arizona in 1985, as only wordlists, texts and smaller grammar sketches had been published by linguists. Hopi was then not a literary language and speaker numbers were in decline. The dictionary was envisioned both as a scholarly reference work and as a tool to revitalizing the Hopi language. Kenneth C. Hill, a linguist specialising in Uto-Aztecan languages, was made the director of the project and was in charge of procuring funding for it and making basic preparations. The project achieved funding from 1986. Editors included the Hopi native speaker and teacher Emory Sekaquaptewa, Ekkehart Malotki, Hopi specialist and professor at Northern Arizona University, librarian and Hopi student Mary E. Black, and the native speakers and language consultants Michael and Lorena Lomatuway'ma.

The editors tried to ensure that the dictionary entries did not infringe on the Hopis' sense of religious propriety: for example, they did not give detailed translations of the meanings of the names of different Kachinas. They also carefully considered the format in which the linguistic data should be represented, in order to best facilitate its use among both native speakers and scholars. To assure community support and involvement, Sekaquaptewa set up a board of Hopi elders who volunteered to take part in the dictionary compilation process in order to help the survival of the Hopi language. While the copyright was retained for the University of Arizona, it was arranged so that all royalties from the book were to go to the Hopi Foundation, a charitable foundation devoted to improve Hopi education. A preliminary presentation of the Project in 1991 also received a favorable response from parts of the Hopi community. The compilation of the dictionary took 10 years and in May 1996 Hill sent a camera-ready copy to the University of Arizona Press.

Aftermath and influence

After publication the conflict between the CPO and the dictionary project was laid aside and Hill reports that the Dictionary seems to have become valued by the Hopi community. It was also favourably reviewed by several scholars in the field. Anthropological linguist William Bright wrote that the dictionary "takes its place as one of the most sophisticated and comprehensive dictionaries ever prepared for an American Indian language; indeed, it is among the best dictionaries available for any language of the world, and a model for future lexicographers of 'neglected' languages."