Current Trends in Caucasian, East European and Inner Asian Linguistics

by Dee Ann Holisky (Editor)

This volume is a collection of seventeen papers, on languages of all three indigenous Caucasian families as well as other languages spoken in the territory of the former Soviet Union. Several papers are concerned with diachronic questions, either within individual families, or at deeper time depths. Some authors utilize their field data to address problems of general linguistic interest, such as reflexivization. A number of papers look at the evidence for contact-induced change in multilingual areas. Some of the most exciting contributions to the collection represent significant advances in the reconstruction of the prehistory of such understudied language families as Northeast Caucasian, Tungusic and the baffling isolate Ket. This book will be of interest not only to specialists in the indigenous languages of the former USSR, but also to historical and synchronic linguists seeking to familiarize themselves with the fascinating, typologically diverse languages from the interior of the Eurasian continent.

Dee Ann Holisky is Professor of English and Linguistics, and Associate Dean for Academic Programs of the College of Arts & Sciences at George Mason University. She is the author of Aspect and Georgian Medial Verbs (Caravan Books, 1981) and of numerous articles on Georgian and Kartvelian linguistics. Kevin Tuite is Professor of Anthropology at the Université de Montréal. Among his books are An Anthology of Georgian Folk Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994) and Ethnolinguistics and Anthropological Theory (co-edited with Christine Jourdan; Montré Éditions Fides, 2003).

426 pages, Hardcover

First published October 27, 2003

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Howard Aron was an American linguist specializing in the languages of the Caucasus. This volume dedicated to him is a curious Festschrift, in that most of the contributions within don't aim to celebrate him particularly. Rather, they began life as papers read at the tenth and final NSL (Conference on Non-Slavic Languages) held at the University of Chicago in May of 1997. As Aronson helped to organize these conferences, it was decided that this collection – finally published in 2003 – would be dedicated to him.

Some of the papers deal with the Caucasian languages so dear to Aronson. Kartvelian gets the most attention. Shukia Apridonidze compares the syntax of possessive reflexive pronouns in Modern Georgian and certain Indo-European languages. Marcello Cherchi attempts to determine the number of verb classes in Mingrelian. Kora Singer writes on double dative constructions in Georgian, and Kevin Tuite on Kartvelian series markers.

There are other papers on languages of the Caucasus: John Colarusso gives another installment of his “Pontic” theory that Indo-European and Northwest Caucasian share some lexicon in common. Victor A. Friedman offers some Lak folktales as material towards a bilingual reader. Zev Handel classifies Ingush inflectional verb morphology and compares it to Chechen. Alice C. Harris reconstructs the prehistory of Udi locative cases and locative preverbs. Johanna Nichols writes on the consonant correspondences between Nakh and Dagestanian. Finally, Wolfgang Schulze offers a diachronic look at demonstrative pronouns in East Caucasian.

But the collection goes very far afield from the Caucasus. For me personally, the most interesting papers were those dealing with Siberian languages. Gregory Anderson looks at languages of this vast area in a typological framework by considering the presence of four nasals (m, n, ŋ and ń). Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley aim for a bottom-up categorization of Tungusic languages that incorporates dialect continua, with plural morphology being diagnostic. Edward J. Vajda's contribution is a detailed description of Ket tone, drawing Werner in recognizing four tones, but proposing a small vowel inventory for Ket based on tone-based allophony, and showing that tone is a feature of the phonological word and not the individual syllable.

There are a few further papers here that cannot be classified in those two larger themes. K. David Harrison and Abigail R. Kaun describe the vowels and vowel harmony of the little-known Namangan Tatar, a Kipchak language of Uzbekistan though they sadly did not draw on Tumasheva's work in their survey of Kipchak vowel shifts overall. Donald Dyer describes the sociolinguistics of the Bulgarians of Moldova. Thomas V. Gamkrelidze discusses the typology of writing, Greek, and the origin of the alphabetic scripts of the Christian Orient.