<p style="margin-bottom: 4em"></p> <h1 style="text-align: center;">Preface</h1> <p style="margin-bottom: 4em"></p> The idea for this work began several years ago with a simple question: how much of Canidic still survives? At the time, I expected the answer to be found in archives, manuscripts, and the scattered references preserved in historical scholarship. Like many students of linguistics, I approached Canidic as a language whose living tradition had largely disappeared from the historical record. What remained, I believed, would be fragments—valuable fragments, certainly, but fragments nonetheless. The reality proved far more complicated. The surviving documentation of Canidic is limited, often contradictory, and frequently incomplete. Many texts exist only as damaged copies of older works. Others have been preserved in isolation, stripped of the cultural and historical contexts necessary for confident interpretation. Even the most basic questions regarding pronunciation, usage, and linguistic change often resist definitive answers. as this research progressed, however, it became increasingly clear that historical records alone could not provide a complete picture of the language. Languages do not exist solely in manuscripts. They exist in memory, in speech, and in the experiences of those who use them. Any attempt to understand Canidic required listening not only to the surviving documents, but also to the perspectives of those who inherited its traditions. This volume represents an effort to bring these sources into conversation with one another. It combines evidence drawn from historical materials with contemporary field research in the hope of producing a more complete description than either source could provide independently. The result is necessarily imperfect. Numerous uncertainties remain unresolved, and many conclusions presented herein should be regarded as provisional pending future discoveries. The reader will therefore find a work divided between description and reconstruction. Some entries are supported by multiple independent sources. Others rest upon limited evidence and informed interpretation. Wherever possible, I have attempted to distinguish observed usage from historical inference. Where uncertainty remains, I have preferred transparency over unwarranted confidence. No dictionary can preserve a language on its own. At best, it can record a small portion of what speakers have created, maintained, and passed forward across generations. If this work succeeds in any measure, it is because of the individuals, named and unnamed, whose knowledge made it possible. It is my hope that the pages which follow will contribute, however modestly, to the study and preservation of a linguistic tradition whose history remains both richer and more complex than I initially imagined. <p style="margin-bottom: 4em"></p> Elara Venn Department of Comparative Linguistics