The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations

The work examines the language and ethnology of the Arawack people of Guiana, combining field description, historical sources, and manuscript lexicons and grammars to reconstruct vocabulary, phonetics, and grammatical structure. It surveys phonetic inventory and orthographic conventions as rendered by German transcription, analyzes noun morphology, plural formation, a twofold gender system (masculine and neuter), pronoun incorporation, and other syntactic patterns, and relates linguistic data to social features such as kinship, family organization, and cultural traits. The author situates surviving records within earlier missionary manuscripts and translations to argue for former geographic distribution and linguistic relationships.