Reviewed by John A. Erickson, Indiana University

Kazak (also spelled Kazakh from its rendering in Russian), a language of the Kypchak group of the Turkic family, is spoken primarily in Kazakstan and in the neighboring countries of China, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Russia. It has gained in importance with the independence of Kazakstan from the Soviet Union in 1991 and its designation as the new country’s state language. As a result, there has been a growing demand for competent grammars of Kazak written in English. Unfortunately, this brief book falls far short of meeting this demand.

Kara notes that the grammar, prepared on the basis of ‘fieldwork with the Kazaks of Kazakstan and other Kazak-speaking groups in neighboring countries’, is ‘based on personal observations’ and that he ‘concentrated on oral literature’ and used a ‘lot of Russian publications from Soviet times, grammar sketches and dictionaries’ (3). Only twelve descriptive works of grammar are cited in the reference section, and not one dictionary. No citations to these or other works accompany the data and text of the grammar. K also does not specify the names and locations of any Kazak native speakers consulted in compiling the data. Nor are any sources given for statistical data, such as estimates of the number of Kazaks or Kazak speakers in the introduction (4) and on the back cover.

The grammar is divided into four main sections—‘Introduction’, ‘Phonology’, ‘Morphology’, and ‘Sample texts’—the most substantial of which is devoted to morphology. No section is devoted specifically to syntax or to the lexicon, and no mention is made of word order (which is SOV), agreement, anaphora, and subordination. Sections are divided into numbered subsections with a title indicating the grammatical category or topic under consideration, followed by a few examples. Many subsection titles are accompanied by further explanation, but it is often too poorly written to be understood by those who have no background in Turkic languages. Most, however, contain no further explanation at all.

The section on phonology provides a phonemic inventory of Kazak vowels and consonants, some phonological rules, succinct comments on diphthongs, and some phonotactic information concerning etymology. Like many other Turkic languages, Kazak exhibits various kinds of vowel harmony, and consonant harmony at morpheme boundaries.

The section on morphology is divided into three main subsections: nominal morphology, verbal morphology, and auxiliary verb formations. Here, K includes additional information about the phonological rules that determine the shape of suffixes in his remarks on individual morphemes. His description of Kazak grammar, however, is often inadequate or erroneous. For instance, in the section on adjectives, K notes that ‘Adjectives morphologically do not differ from nouns’ (28), but subsequently gives examples that contradict this statement, e.g. zhaz ‘summer’ (noun) vs. zhaz-gy ‘summer’ (adjective) (28–29). K attributes only four locational, directional, and comparative functions to the ablative case (20); but even a rapid examination of other sources on Kazak readily reveals many others, such as partitive, causal, and the expression of the material from which items are made. Examples given without explanation can be just as bewildering; for instance, under ‘Indefinite pronouns we find bir kisi ‘someone’ (26), but also kejde ‘sometimes’ (26) and älde kašan ‘sometimes, long ago’ (27), which makes one wonder how K would define pronouns as a category.

The ‘Sample texts’ consist of a single folktale, collected by K in southern Kazakstan in 1994. The short narrative is given in interlinear format with a parsed transcription and a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss followed by a free translation. The morphemic glossing is mostly accurate, but also contains some annoying inconsistencies, glaring errors, and infelicitous renderings in the English. For instance, the grammatical abbreviations PAR and PRT, both defined as ‘particle’(58), and MOD, which is undefined, are all used to mark the same verbal suffix, while PAR is also used to gloss an exclamatory particle occurring after an imperative verb (53). The free translation, rendered into unidiomatic English with many grammatical and lexical infelicities, does not do justice to the original Kazak narrative.

K’s grammar is replete with typographic errors, inconsistencies, and many other editorial infelicities. Many abbreviations are poorly defined, or completely undefined. A botched mechanical replacement of ‘ger’ for ‘gerund’ with ‘CV’ for ‘converb’ is evidently responsible for errors such as ‘KrueCV’ for the surname ‘Krueger’ (59), ‘CVunds’ for ‘gerunds’ (39), and so on. Amazingly, editorial pencil marks indicating needed revisions appear on some pages of the printed text; a stray paragraph of draft notes on the final page of the book also failed to be excised.

In sum, this concise grammar is a rough draft that should never have been published in its current form. Its description is often inadequate or erroneous, lacking many points of grammar that would be essential for any native speaker or student of Kazak. It further suffers from poorly written, unidiomatic English, which is often vague and imprecise, filled with numerous grammatical errors and in dire need of copyediting. Kazak deserves a higher standard of scholarship and better quality of production than evinced in this work. Thus, I cannot recommend this book to individuals and libraries.