Books available for review in Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area

BOOKS AVAILABLE FOR REVIEW IN LTBA

Dörte Borchers

A Grammar of Sunwar (Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region, Volume 7)

Leiden & Boston: Brill, xxvi, 318 pp. Publication Date: 2008.

This description of Sunwar, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in eastern Nepal, is based on extensive field work by the author and contains a chapter with background information on the Sunwar language, its speakers and their culture, followed by sections on the phonology, the indigenous writing system and the morphology of Sunwar. Verb paradigms, glossed texts, a Sunwar-English glossary and bibliographical references are also presented. Contact between the Sunwar and Nepali languages resulted in language change, most visible in the verbal system, where the older biactantial agreement system typical for Kiranti languages disappeared and suffix conjugations emerged. This book will interest those interested in descriptive linguistics, language change and languages of South Asia.

David Bradley

Dictionary of Southern Lisu

STEDT Monograph 4, US$100. Publication Date: 2006.

A new dictionary of Southern Lisu by David Bradley has been published as STEDT Monograph Series No. 4. This includes a seven-page introduction by the series editor, James A, Matisoff, a 20-page introduction giving linguistic and other background on the Lisu, and 346 pages of dictionary entries including many sentences and other examples. Lisu forms are given in Lisu orthography and in phonetic transcription; the entries also include a wealth of cultural information. The Southern Lisu dialect spoken in Thailand and represented in this dictionary is quite different from the dialect represented in the 1994 Northern Lisu dictionary by the same author, published by Pacific Linguistics.

Richard S. Cook

Classical Chinese Combinatorics: Derivation of the Book of Changes Hexagram Sequence

STEDT Monograph 5 (ISBN: 0-944613-44-6), US$100. Publication Date: 2006.

The first and most enigmatic of the Chinese classics is the Book of Changes, and the reasoning behind its binary hexagram sequence remained an unsolved mystery for some 3,000 years (according to the tradition ascribing it to King Wen of Zhou, d. -11th c.). STEDT Monograph 5: Classical Chinese Combinatorics: Derivation of the Book of Changes Hexagram Sequence, by Richard S. Cook, resolves the classical enigma. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the hexagram sequence, showing that its classification of binary sequences demonstrates knowledge of the convergence of certain linear recurrence sequences (LRS; Pingala -5th c.?, Fibonacci 1202) to division in extreme and mean ratio (DEMR, the “Golden Section” irrational; Pythagoras -6th c.?, Euclid -4th c.). It is shown that the complex hexagram sequence encapsulates a careful and ingenious demonstration of the LRS/DEMR relation, that this knowledge results from general combinatorial analysis, and is reflected in elements emphasized in ancient Chinese and Western mathematical traditions. This copiously illustrated 656-page volume presents a detailed introduction of the classical problem, an overview and in-depth derivation of the solution, an extensive terminological glossary, and computer source code formalizing all aspects of the derivations. The conclusion of this work situates the major findings in a larger historical context.

James A Matisoff

English-Lahu Lexicon

The University of California Press, UC Publications in Linguistics, 139 (ISBN: 978-0-520-09855-8), Cloth $39.95, £26.95. Publication Date: 2006.

Lahu is an important minority language of Southeast Asia, belonging to the Lolo-Burmese subgroup of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is spoken by over 500,000 people in China. Burma, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. This English-Lahu Lexicon (ELL) is a computer-aided but manually edited "reversal" of the author's monumental Lahu-English dictionary (The Dictionary of Lahu, UCPL #111, 1988, xxv + 1436 pp.). English-Lahu Lexicon contains nearly 5400 head-entries and well over 10,000 carefully arranged subentries. Every Lahu expression is provided with a form-class designation to indicate its grammatical function. Eight useful Appendices (e.g. Plant and Animal Names) round out the volume's 450 pages.

James A Matisoff

Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and Philosophy of Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction

The University of California Press, UC Publications in Linguistics, 135 (ISBN: 0520098439), Cloth $95, £63. Publication Date: July 2003.

This 800-page volume is a clear and readable presentation of the current state of research on the history of the Tibeto-Burman (TB) language family. The exposition is systematic, treating the reconstruction of all the elements of the TB proto-syllable in turn, including initial consonants (Ch. III), prefixes (Ch. IV), monophthongal and diphthongal rhymes (Ch. V), final nasals (Ch. VII), final stops (Ch. VIII), final liquids (Ch. IX), root-final *-s (Ch. X), suffixes (Ch. XI). Particular attention is paid to variational phenomena at all historical levels (e.g. Ch. XII; "Allofamic variation in rhymes"). This Handbook contains reconstructions of over a thousand Tibeto-Burman roots, as well as suggested comparisons with several hundred Chinese etyma. It is liberally indexed and cross-referenced for maximum accessibility and internal consistency. Emphasis is placed on the special theoretical issues involved in historical reconstruction in the East/Southeast Asian linguistic area.

Jean Robert Opgenort

A Grammar of Jero, With a Historical Comparative Study of the Kiranti Languages

Brill, Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region, 3 (ISBN: 900415052), xxxvi, 406 pp., Cloth $142, EUR 105. Publication Date: 2005.

This description of the phonology, morphology and syntax of the endangered (Tibeto-Burman) Jero language as spoken in eastern Nepal, appears in sequel to the author's 2004 Grammar of Wambule, the language most closely related to Jero. It pictures the complex-pronominalising language of the Jero Rai, one of the Kiranti tribes of eastern Nepal. With a historical comparative study of the Kiranti languages, the branch of the Tibeto-Burman language family to which both Jero and Wambule belong.

Laurent Sagart

The Roots of Old Chinese

Benjamins, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 184 , xii, 272 pp., Cloth US$132, EUR 110. Publication Date: 1999.

The phonology, morphology and lexicon of late Zhou Chinese are examined in this volume. It is argued that a proper understanding of Old Chinese morphology is essential in correctly reconstructing the phonology. Based on evidence from word-families, modern dialects and related words in neighboring languages, Old Chinese words are claimed to consist of a monosyllabic root, to which a variety of derivational affixes attached. This made Old Chinese typologically more like modern languages such as Khmer, Gyarong or Atayal, than like Middle and modern Chinese, where only faint traces of the old morphology remain. In the first part of the book, the author proposes improvements to Baxter's system of reconstruction, regarding complex initials and rhymes, and then reviews in great detail the Old Chinese affixal morphology. New proposals on phonology and morphology are integrated into a coherent reconstruction system. The second part of the book consists of etymological studies of important lexical items in Old Chinese. The author demonstrates in particular the role of proportional analogy in the formation of the system of personal pronouns. Special attention is paid to contact phenomena between Chinese and neighboring languages, and — unlike most literature on Sino-Tibetan — the author identifies numerous Chinese loanwords into Tibeto-Burman. The book, which contains a lengthy list of reconstructions, an index of characters and a general index, is intended for linguists and cultural historians, as well as advanced students.