Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The English and Foreign Languages University

This book deals with four major areas in acoustic phonetics: acoustic properties of major classes of speech sounds, acoustic theory of speech production, auditory representation of speech, and speech perception. The book contains nine chapters arranged in two parts. The first part handles the fundamentals of an acoustic-auditory study, and the second applies these fundamentals to speech analysis. Each chapter includes recommended readings and exercises, the solutions to which are provided at the end of the book. Apart from the customary graphs and figures, the book also makes ample use of shaded boxes to digress from the discussion and highlight interesting issues.

The introductory note lays down the blueprint of the book and touches upon the changes and improvements in the third edition. Basic concepts in acoustics, like frequency, amplitude, different kinds of waves, spectrum, and filters are introduced in Ch. 1. Ch. 2 introduces fundamental frequency and harmonics and discusses quantal theory, vocal-tract filtering, and resonance frequency. Ch. 3 addresses digital signal processing in terms of issues like sampling and quantization apart from a discussion on six different techniques used in digital signal processing, including root mean square (RMS) amplitude, fast fourier transform (FFT), and spectra and spectrogram, among others. Ch. 4 covers the differences between acoustic and auditory representation of speech sound, and discusses the effect of saturation and masking on audition. Describing speech perception as imperfectly categorical, Ch. 5 examines the effect of the auditory system and phonetic knowledge on perception.

Arguing that a stand-alone approach to the acoustic study of speech is incomplete, the author approaches the analysis of speech sounds in Part 2 in terms of acoustic, auditory, and perceptual attributes. Chs. 6–9 deal with the analysis of vowels, fricatives, stops and affricates, and nasals and laterals, respectively. The vocal tract constrictions for each are explained in terms of tube models. Other issues discussed include calculation of the resonances, formant frequencies, vocal tract resonance peaks, and source and vocal tract filtering. In terms of individual attributes, the importance of the first two formants for vowels, the location of acoustic energy in the spectrum for fricatives, apart from turbulence that characterize them, the effect of the coupling/decoupling of front and back cavities on resonant frequencies in stops and affricates, and the damping effect of anti-formants in nasals, laterals, and nasalized sounds are also discussed.

The book is intended to be a non-technical supplementary textbook to general phonetics or speech science texts, and will delight and interest students from non-technical backgrounds, particularly the experiments that the shaded boxes invite them to do. Teachers will also find these experiments useful in their classrooms to generate a better appreciation of the technicalities involved. However, at certain points the book might be intimidating to non-specialists, with the many formulas and calculations presented. The correlation drawn between the acoustic, auditory, and perceptual aspects of speech sounds makes this book a unique contribution to texts on speech sounds.

Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University

Few people will have ever heard of Volapük, and fewer still will know its characteristics and structure, At one time, it was a widely touted artificial ‘international’ language praised for its simplicity and regularity of morphology.

Volapük was the invention of a German Catholic priest, Johann Martin Schleyer, who devised the language in 1879–1880. The Volapük movement soon caught on, especially in Europe. There were three Volapük conventions between the years 1884 and 1889, the last being held in Paris, where only Volapük was used in the official proceedings. During this period there were numerous clubs established, and many teaching manuals and other publications appeared. By the end of the century, however, Volapük, had been pushed aside by Esperanto, with the first publication by its inventor, Ludwig Zamenhoff, appearing in 1887.

This guidebook to the language is a reprint of a work that first appeared in London in 1888, when enthusiasm for the new language was at its height. The Volapük vocabulary is based mainly on English, with some German, but whose truncated forms obscure their origin. The name of the language itself is a good example of this: Volapük, where vola- is the genitive case form of vol ‘people,’ from German Volk, followed by pükm based on the English ‘speak.’

The nouns, adjectives, and pronouns are all inflected with identical endings in four cases (e.g. nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative), with the morpheme –s (from English) added to the singular forms to form the plural. There is also obligatory agreement between nouns and adjectives in case and number. The verbs present a complex array of forms, with different inflectional morphemes for the finite categories of person, number, tense, mood, and voice, and for the various non-finite forms including infinitives, participles, supines, and gerundives.

The book begins with a short preface and introduction. Part 1 provides a brief overview of the structure of the language, its creator, and the favorable reception it received at the time. Part 2 presents the letters and pronunciation in addition to the complex, but highly regular, inflectional morphology. There are lists of prepositions, adverbs, and derivational morphemes interspersed through this section. Part 3 is a discussion of the syntax. This is mainly presented in the form of exercises, with vocabulary lists and answer keys. Part 4 is a collection of texts in Volapük, followed by translations, or originals, in English. Part 5 is a series of conversations, in parallel columns in Volapük and English. An appendix in Part 6 contains groups of words organized by subject matter. The final section, Part 7, contains a Volapük–English glossary.

It is difficult to say whether this book will find a wide audience outside the small group of linguists who study constructed auxiliary languages. In historical terms, Volapük is important in that it was the first constructed language to gain widespread adherents and promoters. It set the stage for later, more successful artificial languages, above all, Esperanto, but also Ido and Interlingua. These later languages are much more similar in sound and written appearance to their standard average European language sources than Volapük is, which at first sight does not seem to be derived from an Indo-European language.

Reviewed by Michael W. Morgan, Indira Gandhi National Open University

This book opens with an introduction, in which Gerrit Dimendaal lays out several basic issues regarding participant coding: the distinction between core and peripheral constituents; the role of event structure and how it is framed in a language, case-marking and head-marking strategies (and cases where neither head nor dependent is marked), case alignment types (including ergativity, which until recently was thought absent among African languages), issues involving part-of-speech categorization (especially the ‘fuzziness’ of the noun-verb distinction), the role of constituent order, and the interaction of syntax and pragmatics.

A remarkable range of languages is covered in this book, balanced by geography, morphological type, and genetic affiliation. Chapters by Christa König on !Xun and Christa Kilian-Hatz on Khwe describe Khoisan languages, which, while both spoken in the Namibia, Botswana, and Angola border areas, differ notably. While both have core arguments unmarked (!Xun) or optionally marked (Khwe) but nevertheless allow for the omission of one or both main core arguments, !Xun is an isolating non-Khoe language, and Khwe a suffixing Khoe language.

Nilo-Saharan languages are represented in Christa König’s chapteron Ik, a Kuliak language of Uganda, and by Gerrit Dimendaal on Tama, an Eastern Sudanic language of Chad and Sudan. Ik is a verb-subject-object (VSO) language, with perhaps Africa’s most elaborate, albeit highly defective, case system. Accusative alignment competes with no alignment, distributed through five construction types. Tama has both subject-object-verb (SOV) and object-subject-verb (OSV) word orders (depending on assertive focus), extensive clitic case-marking, and has general dependent-marking, but head-marked subjects and differential object-marking.

From the Afro-Asiatic family, three Ethiopian languages are represented: one Highland-East Cushitic, Alaaba, by Gertrud Schneider-Blum; and two Omotic, Haro by Hirut Woldemariam, and Wolaitta by Azeb Amha. All three languages are basically SOV and agglutinative, and while all three employ case, subject-indexing, and word order to establish core arguments, Haro is notable with case-marking only assigned to definites and definites unmarkable for focus.

Three Niger-Congo languages are presented, each from a different branch. Anne Storch describes Hone, a Jukun, East Benue-Congo language of Nigeria with poor noun and verb inflection. Felix K. Ameka describes Likpe, a Kwa language of Ghana, which uses word order supported by cross-referencing of subject, and with different event structure perspectives employing specific constructions and coding devices. Makonde (Peter Kraal) is a Bantu language of Tanzania and Mozambique with typical Bantu noun-class agreement, but with a distinctive system of conjoint/disjoint verb forms.

Finally there are two languages with disputed genetic affiliation, although both are often classed as Niger-Congo. The Central Mande language Jalonke of Guinea (Friederike Lübke) has grammatical relations rigidly marked by word order, but also presents  strong evidence for lexical (versus constructional) specification of argument structure. Tima of Sudan (Gerrit Dimendaal), possibly an isolate or Kordofanian, has three sets of subject-marking prefixes/enclitics (and double markings when specific tense-aspect markers are present) but is most notable for its split ergativity.

The chapters in this book have a comforting uniformity in organization and content, covering all pertinent aspects of noun and verb morphosyntax, with specific focus governed by the genius of each respective language. In addition, each chapter provides an introduction to the language and its speakers (including maps and discussion of genetic affiliation, dialects, sociolinguistic issues, and relations with neighboring languages), and a short typological overview, making each chapter a short reference grammar.

The languages discussed demonstrate that a broad range of strategies are deployed across Africa to mark argument structure and participant coding, with certain dedicated constructions and patterns in some languages, and with considerable pragmatic and semantic flexibility in others. This book and the language descriptions found within will be valuable to Africanists, language typologists, and morphosyntacticians alike.

Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The English and Foreign Languages University

This book is comprised of twenty articles, organized into six major sections, and identifies three major strands of discussion: linguistic aspects of documentation, technology in documentation, and ethical issues.

Part 1, ‘Praxis and values’, includes three articles. Empowerment of the heritage communities, capacity building, and collaborative research are strongly emphasized. While N. Louanna Furbee sees language documentation (LD) to be atheoretic, comprehensive, and multipurposed, Keren Rice considers LD research to involve ethics, advocacy, and empowerment. Martha J. Macri discusses issues of ownership, copyright, and access, and emphasizes support for continued use and intergenerational transmission.

There are four articles included in Part 2, ‘Adequacy in documentation’. Anna Berge defines adequacy as collection, preservation, and dissemination, covering all genres, registers, contexts, linguistic levels, and speaker populations. While Laura Buszard-Welcher’s case study highlights the problems with not covering all genres in LD, Verónica Vásquez Soto’s case study demonstrates the importance of oral narratives and natural conversations in LD. Barbara Lust, Suzanne Flynn, María Blume, Elaine Westbrooks, and Theresa Tobin discuss data management, the development of infrastructure, and methods for the storage and dissemination of shared data in collaborative works.

Part 3, ‘Documentation technology’, includes four articles. Jeff Good discusses the Open Language Archives Community focusing on the preservation and portability of language data. Jessica Boynton, Steven Moran, Helen Aristar-Dry, and Anthony Aristar discuss the Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data School of Best Practices, focusing on technical standards for language documentation. Nicholas Thieberger and Michael Jacobson discuss two archives Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources and Langues et Civilizations à Tradition Orale, focusing on long-term access and good practices in computerization. David Golumbia discusses the representation of minority languages and cultures on the web and warns against objectification.

There are six articles in Part4, ‘Models of successful collaboration’. Donna B. Gerdts visualizes the role of the academic in relation to the heritage community as that of a trainer, teacher, mediator, and advocate. Arienne Dwyer lays importance on ethics, design, relationships of inclusiveness, consultations, mutual training, flexibility, prioritization, and empowerment in LD. Martha J. Macri presents a case study involving the unarchiving of J.P. Harrington’s notes on the Californian Indian languages with active participation from community members. Hermelindo Aguilar Méndez et al. report a case study on Tojolabal, emphasizing the value of relationships of trust and how language renewal could lead to cultural renewal. Colleen M. Fitzgerald deals with legacy documentation on Tohono O’odham and its unarchiving with active collaboration with community members. Susan M. Burt presents a case study on language shift and pragmatic change in Hmong in Wisconsin.

Part 5, ‘Training and careers in field linguistics’, includes two papers. Judith M. Maxwell lays emphasis on flexibility in goals and commitment to dissemination apart from other best practices in the field. The case study by Frances Ajo, Valérie Guérin, Ryoko Hattori, and Laura C. Robinson presents native speakers as documenters, making the end-products more relevant and accessible to the community.

Lenore A. Grenoble concludes the book with a state-of-the-field article on language documentation and field linguistics, touching upon collaboration, accessibility, technology, training, and empowerment.

With language documentation understood as practically achievable only through collaboration, the list of online resources provided at the end proves very useful. With ample case studies, the book highlights not only the challenges in language documentation projects but also the way to move forward. Linguists, activists, policy makers, and communities interested in language documentation will find the book enlightening and resourceful.

Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, University of Nizwa

This reader comprises forty-three contributions arranged in ten main thematic areas. It includes numerous additional studies published since the original reader’s appearance in 1997. Many of the contributing authors are among the foremost authorities on sociolinguistics. While the articles included primarily study language use in social and institutional settings in countries where English is the dominant language, several studies on other language communities are also included. Each section begins with an introduction to the theme and a brief overview of each paper.

Part 1 considers how grammar and pronunciation may index gender. The articles primarily look at quantifiable linguistic features, such as phonetic or grammatical variation, and instances of non-standard forms, as used by speakers from particular communities. Most of the articles illustrate a tendency for certain forms to be associated with ‘female’ language use, while one article (i.e. that on the Australian Yanyuwa language) discusses a gender-exclusive use of language. Articles in Part 2 focus on language functions such as complimenting, apologizing, swearing, and giving directives. The authors examine the communicative and social purposes these functions serve when used by men and women, finding, in some instances, that they may reflect cooperative and competitive ways of talking, and contribute to the construction of gender identities.

Part 3 focuses on mixed-talk scenarios, in particular, how linguistic strategies such as interruptions, silence, and delayed responses contribute to the establishment of unequal power relations.  The selected articles in Part 4 look at how gender, social and cultural identity, and, more broadly, social relations are constructed in same-sex talk.

Part 5 examines gender across a range of work places in the public domain. Being essentially male-dominated social environments, forms of discourse more typical of men predominate, and women’s more cooperative discursive style may be considered ineffective. To be ‘heard’, women may have to adopt more ‘masculine’ forms of discourse, which may even be the prevailing strategy in all-female environments functioning within broader male-dominated institutions. The articles in Part 6 investigate the contribution of language to the often fluid construction of gender identity. Linguistic resources are used to index particular gender or sexual identities in a range of social contexts.

The three parts that follow examine theoretical issues in the study of gender and language. Part 7 discusses values associated with particular ways of talking, such as hedging or particular intonation patterns, which are associated with power or the lack thereof. These values may be cultural rather than essentially gender-related. The theoretical debate in Part 8 concerns the ‘dominance’ and ‘difference’ approaches to language and gender and the emergence of the social constructivist perspective, which involves understanding the role of language in the construction of social identities, including gender. The reader ends by placing the debate on language and gender in the twenty-first century, which may be characterized by a fluid, social-constructionist view of gender, where men’s adoption of ‘female’ forms of communication is increasingly being seen as desirable in certain contexts.

The thematic organization of the reader provides a superb overview of key developments in the study of language and gender over three decades. Primarily directed toward graduate students and scholars, some articles will also be suitable at undergraduate level, accompanying general introductory course books.

Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The English and Foreign Languages University

This volume includes twenty-six chapters, organized into four major sections.

Part 1, ‘Foundations’, begins with a contribution from the editors, who address diagnoses of communication disorders and the task of labeling them and related negative fallouts, such as stereotyping, isolation, and stratification. Exploring factors underlying/influencing communication disorders, Brian A. Goldstein and Ramonda Horton-Ikard analyze cultural and linguistic factors. Laura W. Kretschmer and Richard R. Kretschmer discuss hearing impairment and blindness, and Vesna Stojanovik discusses genetic factors, such asWilliams, Down, and Fragile-X syndromes. Megan Hodge and Tara Whitehill address how comprehensibility and acceptability of speech defines intelligibility, and Bonnie Brinton and Martin Fujiki discuss assessment and intervention principles aimed at maximizing functional communication.

Part 2, ‘Language disorders’, begins with a contribution from  John Muma and Steven Cloud, who discuss autism spectrum disorders that lead to dysfunctional social interactions and communication. Deborah Weiss and Rhea Paul present a discussion of delayed language development in pre-school children with respect to sounds, meaning, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics. Sandra L. Gillam and Alan G. Kamhi discuss linguistic and processing deficiency in specific language impairment and the role of non-verbal intelligence. Michael R. Perkins explores difficulties in the pragmatic use of language and various adaptive strategies. A contribution from Robert Reid and Laura Jacobson studies learning disabilities that result from language disorders and complications of memory. Jack S. Damico and Ryan Nelson discuss reading as a component of human learning and explore reading impairments like dyslexia. Truman E. Coggins and John C. Thorne discuss the organic after-effects of prenatal substance abuse on the linguistic abilities of children. Ending this part of the book, Chris Code explores aphasia and its emotional and psychosocial effects, such as depression and problems with turn-taking, conversational repair.

In Part 3, ‘Speech disorders’, Sara Howard discusses developmental disorders, focusing on the heterogeneity of a population and multiple etiologies for disorders. Hermann Ackerman, Ingo Hertrich, and Wolfram Ziegler examine dysarthria and its types, which result from neurological disorders, and Adam Jacks and Donald A. Robins take up apraxia of speech, a speech motor planning/programming disorder resulting from neurological diseases and cognitive deficits. Kathryn D. R. Drager, Erinn F. Finke, and Elizabeth C. Serpentine discuss alternative communication techniques and clinical procedures to augment speech for those with communicative disorders. A contribution from John A. Tetnowski and Kathy Scaler Scott examines stuttering from behavioral and constructivist perspectives. Richard Morris and Archie Bernard Harmon take up laryngeal/voice disorders. Finally, Jane Russell studies speech disorders as a result of orofacial anomalies like cleft lip/palate and craniofacial and velopharyngeal dysfunctions, and Tim Bressmann deals with speech disorders related to head and neck cancer, focusing on speech production.

Part 4, ‘Cognitive and intellectual disorders’, includes four chapters. Carol Westby and Silvana Watson explore learning disabilities and language/literacy disorders, such as delayed speech and pragmatic and discourse/reading deficits due to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and Margaret Lehman Blake explores various deficits in discourse comprehension/production due to right-hemisphere brain damage. A contribution from Jennifer Mozeiko, Karen Lé, and Carl Coelho discusses cognitive communication disorders resulting from traumatic brain injuries. Nicole Müller takes up dementia and its effect on physical, cognitive, and communicative abilities, examining Alzheimer’s disease in detail.

Each chapter follows a general structure. After detailing symptoms, each author presents diagnostic tools, highlights causal factors, suggests multiple remedial/intervention measures, highlights future research prospects, and discusses matters pertaining to the topic under focus. With its comprehensive and step-by-step details, this handbook is a unique resource, indispensable for researchers, clinicians, and therapists, in addition to care-givers.

Reviewed by Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini, University of Warwick

This volume is the third of nine handbooks intended to provide a comprehensive perspective on the field of applied linguistics. In the words of the series editors, the collection aims to ‘present the knowledge available in applied linguistics today firstly from an explicitly problem solving perspective and secondly, in a non-technical, easily comprehensible way’ (xiii). Structured in four parts and twenty-six chapters, the 626 pages of this volume contain the work not only of several distinguished contributors and some younger scholars, but they represent also the editors’ own understanding of what applied linguistics is about and what future may lie ahead for its practitioners.

In this respect, the choice of areas representing organizational and professional communication reflects the track record and the long-standing research interests of the editors, both internationally known for their work in professional communication. Three domains of practice, namely health and social care, the legal arena, and the workplace, are introduced by position papers in Part 2, authored, respectively, by Aaron Cicourel, Roger Shuy, and James Taylor. The latter is a scholar speaking from an organizational communication angle. Both Parts 3 and 4 include chapters illustrating empirical studies conducted in all three fields. Worth highlighting in Part 4 are two chapters on professional learning and two chapters on research-practitioner collaboration, which the reader with an interest in pedagogic and methodological issues will find especially interesting.

If the reader is looking for the rationale behind the ordering of chapters in this handbook, the introduction offers clarification: a substantive forty-two-page discussion of their understanding of an applied linguistic approach to professional and organizational practice. The choice of distributing chapters on all three domains of practice across both Parts 3 and 4 is intended to give the reader the opportunity to identify ‘discursive parallels’ between domains, cross-cutting ‘critical themes’ (e.g. expertise, evidence, relevant knowledge, and rationality), and the discursive devices associated with their realization. This requires a certain degree of effort on the part of the reader, in spite of the editors’ useful chapter synopses in their introduction.

It is quite clear, however, that the applied linguistics perspective that the editors envisage for professional communication, and partly realize in their handbook, can only be multidisciplinary. In their words, their perspective ‘not only builds on the cumulative insights gained from discourse based studies [  ], the sociology of professions and the sociology of work’ (45) but, also, for example, on organizational communication and organization studies. Similarly, research on the embodied nature of social interaction (hinted at as ‘multimodality’ in Ch. 14), and the contribution of materiality to professional practice, are not documented in this collection but should be included in future research on applied linguistics. Regrettably, the high cover price may put the volume beyond the means of most individuals.

Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University

This grammar is an exact reprint of a work that first appeared in Vienna in 1917. The author is best known and frequently cited by English-speaking scholars for his later work Yiddish: A survey and a grammar (1979), which in some respects represents an expanded version of the German original. The book was reprinted using Fraktur typeface, suggesting the older style of German printing.

This book comprises a densely packed description of modern East Yiddish at the period of its greatest geographical spread and largest number of speakers, coinciding with an explosion of literary, educational, and scholarly use of the language. It begins with a short introduction (5–10) that briefly describes the state of limited scholarship in Yiddish at the time. The section that follows provides a detailed description (11–33) of the Hebrew-alphabet-based writing system, the sounds of the language, phonemic transcription, Yiddish handwritten forms, and notes on the differences between the orthography and pronunciation of the extensive Hebrew-Aramaic and Indo-European elements of Yiddish. This fusion of elements from two different language families is characteristic of Yiddish, and the contrast therein is crucial in a study of the written form of the language. This is something the author stresses, as do most contemporary scholars of Yiddish, as opposed to laying emphasis on much older German scholarship, which was mainly interested in the Germanic element in Yiddish and its significance in German dialects and historical studies. This section contains exercises for practice reading individual words and sentences in Yiddish orthography, which are accompanied by transcription.

The following section of the book (33–57) describes the nominal and verbal morphology of Yiddish. The strong verbs are divided into their Germanic classes, making for easy comparison with other Germanic languages. Syntax is covered in the next section (57–70). The readings section (70–101) contains selections by three of the most prominent writers in Yiddish of modern times, namely I. L. Peretz, Mendele Mocher Sforim, and Scholem Aleichem; each selection is followed by a translation.

There is an extensive Yiddish-German vocabulary (102–75) with indications of correct pronunciation of the Semitic forms. Grammatical information is provided for most of the entries. The glossary is followed by a various lists (176–81), including a list of the most common Yiddish abbreviations, a brief description of the Hebrew numeral system, a list of common variant forms of the Semitic vocabulary, a list of the most common East Yiddish given names, and a list of common geographical names. A tabular summary of the Yiddish phonological system is provided and concludes with a short bibliography (185–88) of the main works dealing with the contemporary Yiddish of the time, with the latest entry dated 1917.

Students and scholars of Yiddish can be thankful to the publisher for returning to print a classic in the history of Yiddish scholarship, one that has long been out of print and mainly available in libraries. This is a nicely printed and bound volume that will be useful to anyone interested in Yiddish and capable of reading the older printed style of German.

Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University

This grammar is a facsimile reprint of an edition published originally in Spain in 1919, presenting Gipozkoan, one of the older literary dialects of Basque,. Until relatively recently, various written forms of the main Basque dialects were the only literary forms of the language available to writers and readers of Basque. In the recent decades, in the post-Franco era, a standard Unified Basque (euskara batua) has been developed and has become widely used, at least in public domains, especially in the Spanish Basque Country. Unified Basque is also one of the two official languages of the autonomous Basque region of Spain.

Since the standardized form of Unified Basque is based, to a considerable extent, on the Gipuzkoan literary language (with some input from the two most important dialects of the French Basque Country, Lapurdian, and Low Navarrese), the student of Basque will find the language described in this grammar to be rather similar to the contemporary standard language in many respects. Standardized Basque is now the form most commonly studied by non-native learners of the language and the one presented in contemporary linguistic descriptions and discussions of Basque.

The Gipuzkoan dialect is geographically situated in the central area of the Basque-speaking region of northern Spain and southwestern France. Spoken Basque is conventionally divided into seven major dialect clusters, and Gipuzkoan is one of the most widely spoken of the dialects. Since it is centrally located, it shares features with the westernmost dialect, Bizkaian, with the other dialects of the Spanish Basque Country, and with those across the political border in France.

This grammar is designed to be primarily an instructional manual of Basque. It is divided into two parts. The first part (5–158) contains a brief exposition of the author’s purpose followed by a very short discussion of the orthography and pronunciation, including indications where the spoken forms differ from the written. The rest of the first part treats the basic elements of the language: articles, noun inflections, and basic verbs. This part is divided into twenty lessons, each of which deals with a particular point of grammar and/or inflectional paradigm, and includes a vocabulary list as well as example sentences in Basque with Spanish equivalents given in parallel columns. Each lesson contains exercises consisting of sentences in Basque and in Spanish to be translated into the other language.

The second part of the book (159–370), containing thirty lessons, is organized in a similar way, but deals in much more extensive detail with the complex verb morphology of the language. Here the Basque verb is presented in its splendid complexity of subject/object/number/person agreement with its various tenses and other forms. A Basque-Spanish and Spanish-Basque glossary occupies the final portion of the book, and there is also a short index of grammatical topics.

The publisher is to be commended for making more widely available a classic description of an older Basque literary dialect. This work will be of interest to linguists of Basque, especially those interested in the history and development of the language in the twentieth century.

Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University

This textbook first appeared in 2000 and has since become the standard learning manual for those interested in the classical form of ancient Egyptian, usually referred to as Middle Egyptian. Egyptian is a separate branch of the wider Afro-Asiatic family and is conventionally divided into several periods: Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, and Late Egyptian, including Demotic and Coptic (the language of Christian Egypt). While it has been extinct for approximately half a millennium, extensive written records in Egyptian are available from around 3,000 BCE and to the last documents written in Coptic in the eleventh century CE, although Coptic is reported to have continued to be spoken into the seventeenth century CE. The language and writing system described and taught in this book continued to be extensively used, especially in monumental hieroglyphic inscriptions, until the end of ancient Egyptian civilization and its replacement by Christian culture. Middle Egyptian continued to be in use long after spoken Egyptian had changed. In this way, its use is analogous to the use of Latin in Romance-speaking areas of the former Roman Empire for centuries after the end of the empire.

This manual is more extensive than a mere ‘introduction.’ It is for the serious beginner student of Egyptology and may also be useful to linguists who want to acquire some knowledge of the structure of ancient Egyptian and its complex hieroglyphic writing system, one of three used by the ancient Egyptians. The textbook is divided into twenty-six lessons. The first three lessons consist of a short overview of the language, its history, and its genetic affiliation. The phonology of the language is discussed in detail, and the initial part of the book gives a thorough treatment of the hieroglyphic system of writing used in Middle Egyptian.

The grammar portion begins in Lesson 4, with nouns, followed by lessons on pronouns, adjectives, prepositions, adverbs, numbers, and non-verbal sentences. Verbs are introduced in Lesson 13, and the subsequent nine lessons deal with the tense-aspect-mood (TAM) forms of the language. Lesson 23 covers participles, and the following two lessons cover relative constructions and their usage. The final lesson presents a summary of the grammar and a comparative discussion of the three main theories of Egyptian grammar that have been developed over the years by scholars since the decipherment of the hieroglyphic writing system in the early nineteenth century. The author uses what he calls the ‘current theory’. This comparison is useful for those who want to look to older linguistic descriptions of the language, such as Sir Alan Gardiner’s grammar. The book concludes with extensive lists of hieroglyphic signs, organized first by representational form and then by sign shape, a short glossary, a key to the exercises, and a detailed index.

All of the examples given in the text appear in hieroglyphs, transcription, and English translation. Since the book is also an introduction to the ‘culture of hieroglyphs’, each but the final lesson contains a short essay on ancient Egyptian history, society, or culture. This textbook is probably the best, and certainly the most detailed, manual for Middle Egyptian available in English. It is an exhaustive survey of the language and culture of ancient Egypt and is destined to remain the standard textbook in English on the language for a long time to come.