Reviewed by Benji Wald, Los Angeles, CA

A tribute to the late Egyptologist and Semiticist Carleton T. Hodge, this volume is a selection of twenty of his most creative articles originally published in a variety of specialized journals. The editors note in a brief foreword (ix) that their purpose is to bring together a number of articles that may not have received the attention they deserve because of their scattered and sometimes difficult to access places of original publication. The collection begins with ‘Life and career of Carleton Taylor Hodge’ (xv–xxi), by Alan S. Kaye, which includes a discussion of Hodge’s writings. Each of the following articles is prefaced with an introductory abstract by one of the two editors.

Hodge’s articles are organized into five sections that demonstrate his range of interests and accomplishments: ‘Afroasiatic linguistics’ (six articles; 1–114), ‘Semitics’ (five articles; 115–98), ‘Egyptology’ (seven articles; 199–318), ‘Chadic linguistics’ (one article; 319–26), and ‘Indo-European linguistics’ (one article; 327–39). The book does not contain an index and each article retains its own set of references.

The articles in the first three sections best display the depth of Hodge’s knowledge and interests. His observations on Afroasiatic as a whole will be of widest interest because of their clarity in identifying some critical problems regarding prospects for a sound reconstruction. In ‘The linguistic cycle’ (1–16), Hodge recognizes the general importance of the long documented history of Egyptian from Coptic in studying long-term linguistic change, and in this particular case, in the cycle from inflectional verb morphology to replacive (i.e. suppletive) auxiliary syntax and then to a new round of morphology. Among his most radical proposals, in ‘Afroasiatic pronoun problems’ (17–32), Hodge suggests that the pronouns in the various Afroasiatic branches evolved from an earlier set of nonpersonal deictics, which is reflected in the initial consonants, the case endings, and in the following vowels.

Also radical is Hodge’s article ‘Consonant ablaut in Egyptian’ (265–72), in which he proposes that reconstructing early word-level phonological processes of laryngealization and nasalization can help identify cognates both within Egyptian and between Egyptian and various other branches of Afroasiatic in which semantic correspondence was previously evident but sound correspondence appeared to be irregular. This device, which allows, for example, such consonant alternations as Egyptian [p] (simple [*p]), [f] (laryngealized [*p]), and [m] (nasalized [*p] via [*mb]), vastly expands the number of forms that can be considered cognates and, in some of the other articles, is used to propose cognates between Egyptian and other Afroasiatic branches. Such radical suggestions are counterbalanced in other articles with a concern for the soundness of identified cognates between branches.

A particularly rigorous exercise in the quantitative assessment of cognates is ‘An Egypto-Semitic comparison’ (175–97), in which Hodge devises a numerical scale for confidence in cognate pairings from apparently ‘genuine […to…] marginal’ (194). He deduces that less than half of a list of 170 individually rated and discussed cognates between Egyptian and Semitic are confidently paired and concludes optimistically that further research may raise the rating of some of the less-well-supported pairings.

In sum, the editors succeed in providing a thought-provoking sample of Hodge’s writings. Even if his more radical proposals are unlikely to be accepted by other Afroasiatic scholars, the quality and informativeness of Hodge’s discussions are bound to add impetus to the research. At the very least, this volume is instructive in the development of Afroasiatic linguistics and in problems that the field continues to deal with.