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Title: An Encyclopedia of Ancient Languages (The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages) (Book Review)
Author : The Journal of the American Oriental Society
Release Date : January 01, 2005
Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
Pages : * pages
Size : 218 KB

Description

In the last twenty-five years or so the discipline of linguistics has seen a huge outpouring of various encyclopedic compilations that seek to present and catalogue the fruits of a flourishing scholarly activity involving all aspects of human language. The present volume adds to this output, and we must thank the editor for conceptualizing and seeing through to completion a project that will render good service to all those looking for readable capsule treatments of every ancient language about which we know very much at the present time. Sandwiched between an Introduction by the editor (pp. 1-18) and a concluding chapter on reconstructed ancient languages by Donald M. Ringe, Jr. (pp. 1112-28) are forty-three chapters treating a whole range of languages whose actual number is difficult to specify (e.g., Antonio Loprieno treats Ancient Egyptian in its various stages together with Coptic; Dennis Pardee discusses Canaanite dialects; Joseph Eska describes a variety of Continental Celtic dialects; Roger Woodard follows a chapter on Attic Greek with one on Greek dialects, etc.). One chapter deals with a large linguistic phylum (John Huehnergard on Afro-Asiatic) and one treats a reconstructed proto-language (Indo-European, on which more below). What the chapters have in common is a unitary seven-part presentational format that includes Historical Contexts, Writing System, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Lexicon, and Reading List. The chapters average just over twenty-five pages, with twenty-four pages being the median; but the range is from five pages to seventy (Akkadian and Eblaite). Needless to say, languages having relatively meager attestation are disposed of quickly, including Carian, Canaanite, Palaic, Lydian, Lycian, Luwian, and Phrygian, all of which are treated in twelve pages or less. Unsurprisingly, given the nature of linguistic history and the preservation of linguistic records, twenty-two of the chapters deal with Indo-European languages, eleven with Afro-Asiatic (mainly Semitic), and ten with other, including four cuneiform languages of the Ancient Near East (Elamite, Urartian, Hurrian, and Sumerian). The six remaining chapters handle Old Tamil, Early Georgian, Ancient Chinese, Etruscan, and two languages of the New World: Mayan and Epi-Olmec. In his introduction Woodard makes a case for a terminus ante quem of the fifth century in determining what qualifies as an ancient language (fall of the Roman Empire, often associated in the popular mind with the end of antiquity); and this decision allows him to make the claim (preface, xvii) that the book provides "a linguistic description of all known ancient language"; nevertheless, scholars of Inner Asia will be disappointed not to find a chapter on Orkhon Turkic or Old Uighur, and I myself would have liked to see a treatment of Tocharian and even Old Church Slavic (ninth century) on the grounds that the former is a unique exemplar of an Indo-European linguistic strain which has left no descendants, whereas the latter is foundational to a group of languages currently spoken by several hundreds of millions of people. The inclusion of such languages would still have been more or less in line with a widespread conception of late Antiquity as extending to the time of Charlemagne, but would have meant that not all known ancient languages would have been described. This quibble aside, however, the individual chapters of this book are generally of very high quality. Given that these are for the most part thumbnail basic sketches written by experts, one would not expect to find major errors of detail, and this is in fact true, with a few notable exceptions. The main problems are localized in three chapters. The first of these is the chapter on Indo-European (Henry Hoenigswald and Roger Woodard, with a discussion of syntax by James P. T. Clackson, pp. 534-50), where one finds many errors in reconstruction. Thus, in table 17.1 Proto-Indo-European nominal endings (543), the thematic