Article published In:
Historiographia LinguisticaVol. 2:2 (1975) ► pp.157–174
Jeremiah Curtin (1835–1906)
His Life and Work as Linguist, Folklorist, and Translator
Jeremiah Curtin (1835–1906) was one of the outstanding linguistic field-workers of the 19th century, though much of his material remains in manuscript form. His scholarly reputation rests primarily on his activity as folklorist and translator of the works of Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916), the Nobel Prize-winning novelist. Curtin was born in Detroit and brought up in the wilds of Wisconsin, where his parents, immigrants from Ireland, made a farm. Leaving home at 21, he worked his way through Harvard, learning new languages at every opportunity. After a brief period as a junior diplomat in St Petersburg, he worked as a journalist and eventually joined the Bureau of American Ethnology as a field worker. His assignments took him to the Seneca, to various tribes in Oklahoma and to California and Oregon, where he gathered folktales, myths, and other linguistics materials from many languages of aboriginal America. Returning to Europe on numerous occasions, Curtin gathered and published folklore from Eastern Europe and Ireland; in addition, he continued his studies of the languages of the Caucasus, of India and Persia. Work in Siberia resulted in two volumes about the Mongols. Throughout much of the latter part of his life he continued his translations from the Russian and Polish.
References
The References include several books by Curtin not mentioned in the article but of relevance to the topic. Ed.
Curtin, Jeremiah
(1835–1906) 1890a: Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. (Repr. 1900 and 1906; Detroit: Singing Tree Press 1968.)
1890b: Myths and Folk-Tales of the Russians, Western Slavs, and Magyars. Ibid. (Repr., New York: B. Blom 1971.)
1894 Hero-Tales of Ireland. Ibid. (Repr., New York: B. Blom 1971.)
1895 Tales of the Fairies of the Ghost World, collected from the tradition of south-west Munster. Ibid. (Repr., New York: Lemma Pub. Co. 1970; B. Blom 1971.)
1898 Creation Myths of Primitive America, in relation to the religions, history, and mental development of mankind. Ibid.; London: Williams & Norgate 1899 (Repr. 1903 and 1911; New York: B. Blom 1969.)
1908 The Mongols: A history. With a foreword by Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)
Ibid.
1909 A Journey to Southern Siberia; the Mongols, their religion and their myths. Ibid. (Repr., New York: Arno Press 1971.)
1912 Myths of the Modocs. London: Little, Brown & Co. (Repr., New York: B. Blom 1971.)
1914 Fairy Tales of Eastern Europe. New York: McBride, Nast & Co. (Repr. 1925 and 1949.)
1923 Seneca Indian Myths. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
1940 Memoirs. (=
Wisconsin Biography Series, 2.) Ed. with notes and introd. by Joseph Schafer (1867–1941) [with the assistance of Alma M. (Cardell) Curtin (d1938).] Madison: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
1944 Irish Folk-Tales. Ed. with introd. and notes by Séamus O. Duilearga. Dublin: Talbot Press. (Repr. 1956 and 1960.)
Garth, Thomas Russell
(b.1912) 1953 “Atsugewi Ethnography”. University of California Anthropological Records 14:2.129–212. Berkeley & Los Angeles.
Kroeber, A(lfred) L(ouis
1876–1960) 1958 “An Atsugewi Word List”. IJAL 241:213–14.
Landar, Herbert J.
1974 Review of Albert S(amuel) Gatschet (1832–1907), Zwölf Sprachen aus dem Südwesten Nordamerikas (Repr. of 1876 Weimar ed., Amsterdam: Anthropological Pubs.; New York: Humanities Press 1970) IJAL 401.159–62.
Olmsted, D(avid) L(ockwood)
1954 “Achumawi-Atsugewi Non-reciprocal Intelligibility”. IJAL 201.181–84.
1956 “Palaihnihan and Shasta I: Labial stops”. Lg 321.73–77.
1957 “Palaihnihan and Shasta II: Apical stops”. Lg 331.136–38.
1958 “Atsugewi Phonology”. IJAL 241.215–20.
1959 “Palaihnihan and Shasta III: Dorsal stops”. Lg 351.637–44.
1961 “Atsugewi Morphology I: Verb inflection”. IJAL 271.91–113.
1964 A History of Palaihnihan Phonology. Berkeley & Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.