This is considered a first edition of vocabulary collected and published by Dimick B. Huntington. The title of this book is unknown because the front and back covers are missing. This version of the vocabulary was mentioned in P. Crawley's descriptive bibliography on page 879. This version of the book was compared to galley sheets included with the Thomas Bullock collection given to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Catalogers Joan Nay and Scott Christensen provided evidence that this file was indeed a first edition and it was then proceed and stored in an archival vault.
Hart Merriam Papers: Indian Vocabularies; Shoshonean (Uto-Aztecan); Shoshone (Shoshoni); Uinta Ute / Pah’-vo-wats (Uintah Ute) (collected c. 1880s–1910s) are a collection of unpublished and published field notes and vocabulary lists compiled by C. Hart Merriam during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on direct work with Native speakers, these materials record word lists, variant forms, and dialect distinctions among Shoshonean languages, with particular attention to Shoshone (Shoshoni) and Uinta Ute (Pah’-vo-wats).
Vocabulary of the Utah and Sho-shone or Snake Dialects: With Indian Legends and Traditions, Including a Brief Account of the Life and Death of Wah-ker, the Indian Land Pirate (1872), by Dimick Baker Huntington, G. W. Hill, and W. P. Clark, is an early ethnolinguistic work combining vocabulary lists with narrative and historical material. The volume presents comparative word lists of the Utah (Ute) and Sho-shone (Snake) dialects, offering insight into their linguistic similarities and differences within the broader Shoshonean/Uto-Aztecan language family.
Beyond its lexical content, the book includes transcribed legends and traditions, reflecting nineteenth-century efforts to document Indigenous oral literature, as well as a biographical account of Wah-ker (Walkara), a prominent Ute leader.
Vocabulary of the Snake or Shoshone Dialect (1859), compiled by Joseph A. Gebow, interpreter, is one of the earliest recorded word lists of the Shoshone language. Created during the mid-nineteenth century, the vocabulary presents English terms alongside their Shoshone equivalents, reflecting practical communication needs in diplomacy, trade, and government interactions between Native communities and Euro-American authorities.
Comparative Vocabulary of Utah Dialects (1877) is an early comparative linguistic work that assembles parallel word lists from a range of Indigenous languages and dialects spoken in what is now Utah and the surrounding Great Basin and Plateau regions. Compiled during the formative period of American ethnology, the study was intended to identify linguistic relationships by systematically comparing basic vocabulary—such as terms for kinship, natural features, animals, numbers, and everyday actions—across different speech communities.
The volume reflects nineteenth-century efforts to classify Native languages, particularly those later recognized as belonging to the Uto-Aztecan family, including Ute, Paiute, Shoshonean, and related dialects. While its orthography and analytical framework predate modern linguistic standards, the work preserves early records of speech forms that have since changed or, in some cases, disappeared.
Dictionary of the Ute Indian Language (1899) is an early linguistic reference work documenting the vocabulary of the Ute language at the end of the nineteenth century. Compiled through direct engagement with Native speakers, the dictionary presents Ute words with English equivalents and reflects contemporary efforts to record Indigenous languages during a period of rapid cultural change.
Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Jun. 1930
Edward Sapir. Vol. 65 — No. 1, 2, 3
Southern Paiute, a Shoshonean Language by Edward Sapir is a foundational linguistic study of the Southern Paiute language, published in 1930 in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Sapir provides a comprehensive grammatical description of the language, including its phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary. The work situates Southern Paiute within the Shoshonean branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family and demonstrates its structural complexity and expressive range. Long regarded as a landmark in American linguistics, the volume remains an essential reference for scholars of Native American languages, historical linguistics, and ethnolinguistic studies of the Great Basin.
Texts of the Kaibab Paiutes and Uintah Utes is a significant ethnographic and linguistic collection presenting traditional narratives, oral histories, and spoken texts from the Kaibab Paiute and Uintah Ute peoples. Compiled through fieldwork with Native speakers, the volume preserves myths, historical accounts, and everyday discourse, often presented in the original language with English translations and explanatory notes.
Southern Paiute Dictionary is a comprehensive lexical reference documenting the vocabulary of the Southern Paiute language. Organized for scholarly and educational use, it provides Southern Paiute words with English glosses and, in many cases, grammatical information, variant forms, and usage notes. The dictionary is an essential resource for linguists, historians, and community members, supporting language study, preservation, and revitalization, and offering insight into the cultural concepts embedded in Southern Paiute speech.
Ute Reference Grammar by Talmy Givón is a comprehensive 2011 book that provides a detailed description of the Ute language, an endangered Uto-Aztecan language, focusing on its grammatical structures, communicative functions, and historical changes. It serves as a resource for both linguists and Ute speakers, offering a functional and typologically-informed analysis with many examples, and is part of a larger series that includes a dictionary and texts.
This second volume of our Ute trilogy contains a collection of Ute oral texts. Ute oral literature reflects the life experience of a small-scale hunting-and-gathering Society of Intimates and its tight connection to the local terrain, flora and fauna that supported the hunter-gatherer life. Ute story-telling tradition is the people's literary heritage, with the narrative style allowing considerable artistic freedom and diversity in contents and style. Stories were not memorized verbatim, and story-tellers took creative liberty in elaborating and re-inventing the 'same' tale. The core cultural contents of each story are nevertheless preserved across tellers. Ute stories were most likely told at night around the fire, in front of or inside the lodge, to a mixed audience of children and adults who had heard the tale many time before. The stories aimed to both instruct and entertain. Their underlying themes are stoic and oft-cynical reflections on the vagaries of human behavior and harsh existence. They are the foundational literary tradition of The People--Núuchi-u.
This third volume of our Ute language collection contains the Ute dictionary. It opens with several introductory chapters that link the dictionary to our Ute Reference Grammar (2011) and explain the structure and use of the dictionary. The bulk of the information on the meaning and usage of Ute words is then given in the Ute-English part. The English-Ute part, next, serves primarily as a search-and-reference tool. A short section on traditional semantic-cultural fields follows. Ute is a Northern Uto-Aztecan language of the Numic sub-family. Together with its northern dialects (Southern Paiute, Uintah, White River), it should be considered a single language, Núuchi ("of the people") or Núu-'apaghapi ("the people's speech"). While our work was done primarily in the southern dialects (Southern Ute, Ute Mountain, Uncompaghre), we have included as many words as could be safely extracted from Powel's and Smith's work on the northern dialects, as well as some from Sapir's work (1931) on Northern Ute, adjusting them to Southern-dialect pronunciation. This brings the work as close as one could hope, at this time, to a comprehensive all-Ute dictionary, a task that yet remains to be done. We have tried to emphasize in the Ute-English entries the historical and derivational connectivity of Ute vocabulary and its gradual growth and expansion. This is also underscored in the introductory chapter on word derivation. While this work remains incomplete, we hope it can be some day expanded into an all-inclusive Ute dictionary, and will help the people - Núuchiu - preserve their language and culture.
"The Ute Language in Context: Essays Relating the Ute Language to Practices, Culture, and History" by Kevin Loeffler is a study or presentation exploring how supernatural beliefs influence Ute naming, kinship terms, and speech about plants and animals, revealing a deep spiritual connection between language, land, and traditional Ute worldview, as it's part of a broader cultural understanding of the Ute people's heritage.