Reviewed by Joseph F. Eska, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

This magnificently produced volume is in honor of Professor Anna Morpurgo Davies on the occasion of her retirement from the Chair (now the Diebold Chair) of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford, which she held from 1971 through 2004. Most of the forty-two contributions are written in English, but there are also four in German, three in Italian, and two in French. The majority of the contributions reflect the honorand’s interests in Greek (eighteen) and Anatolian (five) diachronic linguistics and philology and the history of linguistics (two), with the remainder concerned with Proto-Indo-European itself (five), Indo-Iranian (four), Italic (four), Germanic (two), Tocharian (one), and Celtic (one). Professor Davies has always been held in high esteem and regarded with much affection in her field—I note that many of the contributors are her former students—and the generally high standard of contributions reflects this. I have not detected any examples of articles pulled out of a contributor’s drawer because they could not otherwise be placed—a not uncommon phenomenon in Festschriften—in this volume’s pages.

It is impossible, of course, to adequately review all of the contributions in this volume in the amount of space allowed, so I mention some of my favorites. C. J. Ruijgh argues that the Proto-Indo-European verbal exponent *-eh₁– possesses stative rather than fientive force, as has recently been in fashion. Calvert Watkins provides evidence from Sanskrit, Hittite, and Greek for an Indo-European origin legend involving the sacrifice of sexually aroused donkeys, an instance of what he refers to as ‘genetic intertextuality’. Stephen Colvin cogently examines evidence for social varieties of speech in Attic Greek. Don Ringe convincingly demonstrates that the Old English verbs maþelian, mæþlan, and mǣlan, all roughly ‘speak (formally)’, continue a single inherited etymon. And J. H. W. Penney examines the difficult matter of the vocalism of the Tocharian B form päst ‘away’ and n)äś ‘I, me’, which has not been adequately explained heretofore.

The volume is completed by a bibliography of Professor Davies’ major publications through 2001 and a valuable select index of forms discussed. Everyone interested in Indo-European historical linguistics will find something of interest in this Festschrift, which the editor could not have produced with greater care.

Rajbanshi grammar and interlinearized text. By Tikaram Poudel. (LINCOM studies in           Indo-European linguistics 34.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2006. Pp. 132. ISBN 9783895863233. $86.66.

Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

Rajbanshi is spoken in the borderlands of India and Nepal. At last count, there were approximately three-million speakers of Rajbanshi in India, one-hundred-thousand in Nepal, and thirteen-thousand in Bangladesh (Ethnologue.com). In this volume, Tikaram Poudel limits his study to the variety of Rajbanshi spoken in Nepal.

In Ch. 1, P introduces the speakers of Rajbanshi. Ch. 2 overviews Rajbanshi’s phonology, Ch. 3 explores its morphology, and Ch. 4 examines its syntax. Ch. 5 provides a sample text, which includes a morpheme gloss and a free translation.

Rajbanshi nouns bear number, gender, and case and the verbs are inflected for person and number. Unlike many languages in the area that are split ergative, Rajbanshi is a nominative/accusative language. Both auxiliaries and ‘vector’ verbs (which are more lexical than auxiliaries and can be combined with auxiliaries and negated independently) are numerous.

The word order in Rajbanshi is verb-final and wh-words remain in-situ. P discusses the structure of the noun phrase, agreement markers, and passives. Declarative sentences may be equative, intransitive, transitive, bitransitive, or complex transitive. Imperatives are verb-final constructions in which the verb is inflected for the status of the listener.

This book provides an introduction to the grammar of Rajbanshi. Although he provides good examples and glosses, P leaves the reader wanting more data and description at times. It is hoped that the publication of this grammar will inspire P to do a more in-depth study.

Reviewed by Joseph F. Eska, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

This information-rich volume by Raymond Hickey seeks to provide ‘a comprehensive audio overview of English as spoken in present-day Ireland’ (v) and succeeds admirably. The accompanying DVD is packed with maps, images, an introduction to the phonology of Irish English, background information on the variety, software, 1,017 databases, and 1,517 sound files that were collected from the mid-1990s through 2002, the majority of which reflect the speech of eighteen- to thirty-year-olds. All speakers read a list of fifty-seven sample sentences (containing key words to illustrate the pronunciation of a sound), about one-quarter read a sample text, and those from Dublin—the national capital—read a list of words. Speakers are identified by gender, geographical location, and approximate age.

Ch. 1 of the volume, ‘Data collection and analysis’ (1–21), sets out H’s interview methodology and the background of his project. Ch. 2, ‘The English language in Ireland’ (23–84), describes the dialect divisions and historical background of Irish English, goes on to treat the English of Northern Ireland, contrasting it with southern Irish English, and examines the language as spoken in urban locations. Samples of the sentences used in the interview are provided (the full list is printed on pp. 131–32), as are the sample text and the lexical list used in Dublin. The chapter concludes with discussions of the sounds of Irish English.

Readers are urged to listen to the relevant sound files as they progress through this section of the volume. Ch. 3, ‘Processing software for atlas data’ (85–114), explains that the DVD may be used either by installing the Windows software provided and launching it from the reader’s hard drive or by employing the Java version on the DVD, which is platform-independent and does not require any installation. (I tried both versions, and found them both easy to use.) Readers are led through the use of the various databases and sound files. The use of other software on the DVD—a file manager, a word processor, a database editor, and so on—are also explained. Ch. 4, ‘A survey of Irish English usage’ (115–36), instructs the reader on how to use the processing software to examine the databases and goes on to describe morphological and syntactic features of Irish English, which are embedded in the sentences in the survey. H concludes this chapter with his assessment of the source of some of these distinctive features, whether native to English, transfer from Irish Gaelic, or convergence. Chs. 5–8, ‘Technical notes’, ‘Glossary of computer terms’, ‘Timeline for Irish English’, and ‘Glossary for Irish English’, complete the volume.

This slim volume provides a wealth of information for dialectologists, sociolinguists, and those interested in this variety of English.

Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

This book studies complementation in Yaqui, a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Arizona and Sonora. Yaqui has recently become a little less understudied after the publication of a grammar, Sonora Yaqui language structures (John Dedrick & Eugene Casad, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), and a dictionary, Diccionario yaqui–español y textos: Obra de preservación linguistic (Zarina Estrada Fernández, Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 2004), in addition to a number of articles. Lilián Guerrero’s book is a welcome addition.

Ch. 1 provides a brief overview of the Yaqui language. Ch. 2 sketches its morphosyntactic structure with clear examples and glosses: Yaqui is agglutinative, verb-final, and dependent-marking. G uses role and reference grammar as her theoretical framework, a synopsis of which is provided in Ch. 3. Chs. 4, 5, and 6 discuss three different kinds of complements, and Chs. 7 and 8 evaluate the linking of syntax and semantics in predicates and complements.

To classify main verbs, G uses Michael Noonan’s (Complementation. Language typology and syntactic description, ed. by Timothy Shopen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 42–140, 1985) classification, which includes, manipulatives, phasals, desideratives, perception, propositional attitude, knowledge, and utterance predicates. The complements of Yaqui predicates are marked to show different degrees of syntactic and semantic closeness. G explores the three types of sentential complements, which include those that have (i) a subject different from that of the matrix and an independent tense-aspect-mood (TAM) marker, (ii) a subject that is the same as the one in the matrix clause and no TAM information, and (iii) the matrix and embedded verbs linked (26–27).

Ch. 4 discusses the closest semantic relationship a matrix verb can have with its complement—that is, causative constructions. G distinguishes direct causation from result state causation in terms of syntactic linkage. In Ch. 5, phase, psych-action, and purpose verbs are discussed—for example main verbs that correspond to English begin, try, promise, and want. These are constructions in which the subject of the main clause and the subject of the subordinate clause are the same and the verb in question is quite grammaticalized, such as in ne kariu wetaitek I house walk-begin-PERFECT ‘I started walking towards the house’ (106).

In Ch. 6, perception verbs as well as mental and saying verbs are examined. Perception verbs are complex in that, crosslinguistically, they take many types of complements, which depend on direct or indirect perception.

In short, this is a clear and insightful book about Yaqui complementation. General linguists of all theoretical persuasions will enjoy the Yaqui examples.

Reviewed by Joseph F. Eska, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

Variation is present in all natural languages, but it often does not find a place in diachronic linguistic reconstruction. This volume sets out to address specific problems in which the reconstruction of variation might enable further progress towards a solution.

After an introductory chapter in which Mary K. Niepokuj reviews the papers and discusses issues relating to the role of language variation in  linguistic reconstruction, Thomas D. Cravens examines cases in which Latin /p t k/ are not continued unaltered into Italian, but are unexpectedly voiced. He points out that underlying voiceless plosives are variably realized in contemporary Tuscan dialects and that such variation is also reflected in the orthography of medieval documents. He posits that such phonetic variation led speakers to abstract different underlying phonemes for each lexical item. Steven R. Geiger and Joseph C. Salmons look at the voice-onset time of coronal plosives in recordings of the Kölsch dialect of Wisconsin German from the 1940s, 1970, and 1999, and find that it has been decreasing dramatically for /t/ and less so for /d/ with the surprising result that it has diverged significantly from both standard German and American English. Emily L. Goss and Robert B. Howell examine variation in the writings of thirteen seventeenth-century inhabitants of The Hague with regard to dialect contact and find that they support the principles that marked regional forms are disfavored, while forms found in more than one dialect tend to be favored. Ray Harris-Northall demonstrates that grammars of Castilian Spanish from ca. 1500 do not reflect the standardization of the language, but aim to suppress certain variants. Brian D. Joseph deals with the difficulty of knowing when it is legitimate to project variation back to a proto-language to solve a problem in reconstruction. He treats several potential cases and concludes with the suggestion that variation might be responsible for linguistic drift. Cynthia L. Miller examines variation between the complementizers l’mr and lm, used to introduce direct speech, in fifth-century bce Achaemenid Aramaic legal documents and, after investigating a number of factors, finds that style is the most important one, with only l’mr occurring in the clause that gives the date of the document and names the parties involved. James Milroy argues that the role of the speaker is undervalued in the discourse of language change and that this must be corrected. He illustrates his position by examining variation in the realization of /t/ in Newcastle English, which he claims is the result of social factors. Martha Ratliff explains that variation in nominal prefixation in Hmong-Mien makes reconstruction almost impossible, but suggests that understanding the way that this variation works can allow scholars to ‘ignore the absorbed prefixes in our reconstructions of roots’ and ‘reconstruct a classifying prefix position for nouns’ (176). Paul T. Roberge addresses methodological issues concerning the reconstruction of variation in the early history of Afrikaans (ca. 1710–1840), concluding that the conscious manipulation of the language by speakers for reasons of inclusion or exclusion prohibits the reconstruction of variation in gender among Germanic languages and suggests that proto-Germanic should be reconstructed as having had only two genders, with the attested variation having arisen during the shift to a three-gender system. And Graham Thurgood argues that the major source of variation in languages of southeastern Asia is language contact, and, therefore, the reconstructed proto-languages should display a relatively small amount of internal variation.

Many of the papers in this volume show that, with due prudence, the reconstruction of variation in proto-languages can assist in the resolution of long-standing problems. Some go rather too far, however. Everyone interested in the reconstruction of proto-languages would do well to consult it.

Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

This fascinating book presents a disheartening account of the current status of Urdu in India as well as  many positive suggestions on how to remedy the situation. Urdu arose as a standardized (and highly literary) variety of Hindustani and has flourished in various regions since the eighteenth century. Although Hindi and Urdu are grammatically similar and differ only in script and vocabulary, as Ather Farouqui explains, in the twentieth century, the difference between the two languages has become political.

After India and Pakistan became independent from Great Britain in 1947, Urdu became associated with the Muslim identity. Because Urdu was not incorporated successfully into the mainstream schools, it now survives only as the language of the madrasas (i.e. the religious schools), which mainly educate a poor, underprivileged—but not so small (50 million)—section of the Muslim community (27). Here, F presents the case for integrating Urdu in secular schools. Currently, in many northern traditionally Urdu speaking areas, students receive no training in Urdu, even as an elective. Instead they take many hours of Sanskrit, Hindi, and English (xvi): ‘Hindi has been imposed on non-Hindi speaking people in place of their mother tongue. Urdu is not included even as a third language […] Instead, Sanskrit is claimed to be a modern Indian language and is thus invariably taught in this category’ (8).

The book consists of a preface by the politician Slaman Khurshid, an introduction by the editor, and seventeen chapters by sociologists, lawyers, Urdu-specialists, political scientists, historians, and others. The volume is divided into four parts. Part 1, ‘Contextualizing Urdu’, examines the historical and social situation after 1947 and how Urdu came to be a Muslim language abandoned by the Muslim elite. Part 2, ‘Urdu and identity politics’, presents chapters on Muslim religious and cultural identity. Part 3, ‘Civic space, education and Urdu’, raises questions about the role of Urdu in contemporary India. Part 4, ‘Minority language and community: Legal concerns’, deals with constitutional and legal issues.

Some statistics are interesting and revealing: although ‘Muslims form 12% of the population of India’ (40), only two percent of engineers and two and a half percent of doctors are Muslim. If Urdu is an important aspect of the Muslim identity, it may help to strengthen the language in the secular domain, which may in turn strengthen economic prospects as well. According to the 2001 census, Urdu is the mother tongue of over sixty million Indians (1)—about half of all Muslims in India.

In addition to making the case for preserving Urdu in India by incorporating it as a language taught in secular schools, this book has wider implications for language planning and the treatment of language minorities.

Reviewed by Ioana-Rucsandra Dascălu, University of Craiova

This handbook is a very useful guide for all beginners who intend to study linguistics. In the introductory chapter, the editors present the properties language displays as an essential element of human activity as well as the universal properties generally occurring in the description of languages: modularity, constituency and recursion, discreteness, productivity, arbitrariness, reliance on context, and variability. Different aspects of language study are taken up: phonetics, morphology, semantics, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, language change, and computational linguistics.

In the chapter about phonetics and phonology, Elizabeth Zsiga describes the organs that produce articulation, classifying the results of the process into several types of sounds. Morphology is the next level discussed, and it is motivated as the study of the internal structure of vowels and their meaningful parts; a definition of ‘word’ is offered as ‘the smallest independent unit of language or one that can be separated from other such units in an utterance’ (56).

Paul Portner presents the creation of meaning within the domain of semantics and pragmatics: semantics studies the literal meanings of words, phrases, and sentences, while pragmatics deals with the use of language in particular situations (137). The relation between words is depicted by semantic concepts such as synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, ambiguity, and entailment. There are conversational principles that organize human speech: they were mainly theorized by H. Paul Grice, who enunciated the cooperative principle and four conversational maxims: quality, quantity, relevance, and manner. Within the discipline of pragmatics, a notable contribution was proposed by J. Austin, recognizing locutionary acts, illocutionary acts, and perlocutionary acts (162).

Kendall A. King writes about child language acquisition, mixing medical and linguistic data, in order to reveal the phases that children follow when they begin talking: the holophrastic stage, the two-word stage, and the multi-word stage. In ‘Language and the brain’, Michael T. Ullman writes about the biocognitive and neurocognitive processes of the human brain in the production of language. The brain anatomy is clearly presented by drawings and maps describing neurons, hormones, neurotransmitters, and genes. Major problems such as mental lexicon, conceptual semantics, phonology, syntax, and morphology are discussed in biological, that is, cellular, molecular, and genetic terms.

Shaligram Shukla and Jeff Connor-Linton deal with themes of language change, diachrony, and historical linguistics. The types of language changes discussed by the authors are: phonological, morphological, semantic, and syntactic. At the lexical level, the focus is on borrowings and the status of loan words, the difference between a superstratum language and a substratum language, and the difference between adapted elements and loan translations (294). Analogy is discussed as a process that causes modifications or new creations according to existing patterns, and the reconstruction of a protolanguage by the comparative method is presented, with attention to the relations among prehistorical peoples thus revealed (305).

At the geographic level, taking into account regional factors, Natalie Schilling-Estes deals with dialect variation (lexical, phonological, and morphosyntactic), introducing terms such as ‘dialect’, ‘slang’, and ‘jargon’, and their transformations according to social factors (region, social class, ethnicity, age) that are important subjects in multicultural studies. The deeper anthropological implications suggest sets of rules about politeness, ethnic differences, interactional sociolinguistics, indirectness, stereotyping, gender, and ‘languaculture, a term that expresses the way ‘the speaker perceives and orders the world’ (369).

Ralph Fasold, in ‘The politics of language’, continues the sociological approach with the connection between language and identity, studying various types such as political invectives, blasphemy and cursing, and hate speech. Connor-Linton studies writing, covering the types of scripts, including logographic systems with pictograms, syllabic systems, alphabetic and consonantal ones, and concludes that writing plays a decisive role in human cultures and society.

Alison Mackey studies second language acquisition (SLA) by examining methods of learning and teaching that are guided by behaviorist, nativist, interactionist, and socioculturalist principles, with the participation of grammar translation, audiolingualism, community language learning, the direct method, the silent way, and the natural approach (460).

The last chapter, ’Computational linguistics’ by Inderjeet Mani, discusses the domain where human language is learned and understood by machines—whether it is a matter of accomplishing translations, of using mechanical processes and web online data, of modeling morphological processing, syntactic processing, semantic processing, probabilistic theories, or of recognizing speech—all through mathematical patterns, algorithms, and statistic approaches.

Reviewed by Taras Shmiher, Ivan Franko National University, Ukraine

A theoretical consideration of the characteristics and distinguishing features of translations into a nonmother tongue is the focus of this volume by Nike Pokorn. Here, P explores the advantages and disadvantages of translators who are native—or nonnative—speakers of the target language.

Ch. 1, ‘Open definitions of the terms “native speaker” and “mother tongue”’, explains the subjective nature of these terms, which are often interpreted according to the needs of the specific research. P explores the vague origin, competence, function, and identification criteria used to define a mother tongue. Nativity, age of acquisition, lingual creativity, fluent and spontaneous discourse, and intuitive correctness prove to be similarly imprecise criteria to establish a native speaker.

In ‘Translation into a non-mother tongue in translation theory: Challenging the traditional’, P opposes the traditional axiom that translators should translate only into their mother tongue. Although some translation theoreticians have suggested that a translator should be either a native speaker or a perfect bilingual speaker, P argues that bilingualism is an unclear term that may incorporate bi- or even multicultural aptitudes. Meanwhile, team translation may include a native source language speaker and a target language stylist.

Analytical prerequisites and tools are presented in ‘Method and corpus for analysis’. P introduces Slovene as an example of a language with limited diffusion. In an exploration of immigrants’ shift from first language monolingualism to bilingualism to second language monolingualism, P assesses the criteria for nativeness in translators of Slovene and English. His study examines fourteen translators from different lingual backgrounds who provided English translations of the prominent Slovene writer Ivan Cankar’s texts.

The next three chapters contain an analysis of the texts, their translations, and the translators. P discusses three of Cankar’s more commonly translated texts in the ‘Presentation of the selected originals’: The ward of our lady of mercy, A cup of coffee, and Children and old people. ‘Presentation of the selected translations’ describes the macrostructural characteristics of seven of the translations. P focuses on shifts in meaning, stylistic features, and cultural elements that may constitute problems for a nonnative speaker of a source or target language. In ‘Conclusion of the analysis: The visibility of nativeness and non-nativeness in translations’, P does not support any stereotypical assumptions of directionality in translation because almost all of the translators created source-oriented or a mixture of source- and target-oriented translations.

In ‘Native speaker intuitions’, P demonstrates that it is not always possible to distinguish between a native and nonnative translator, nor is it possible to infer the number of translators involved on the basis of a translated text only.

The conclusion summarizes the reasons direct translations are not superior to inverse translations. Two appendices, ‘Questionnaire’ and ‘Responses in the questionnaire’, explain the data collection procedure and may serve as a foundation for further research with other languages.

Reviewed by Maher Awad, Rice University

The Al-Kitaab textbook series, which focuses on Modern Standard Arabic but also integrates Egyptian colloquial Arabic, is a comprehensive communicatively based textbook program designed to teach Arabic from the beginning level to American college students. The first edition of Alif Baa and Al-Kitaab, Part 1 were published in 1995. This second edition is substantially revised and updated. This series also includes Al-Kitaab, Part 2 (1997), designed for the intermediate-level learner, and Al-Kitaab, Part 3 (2001), designed for the advanced-level learner.

Alif Baa, which is accompanied by two DVDs bound into the book, is the basic foundation of the Al-Kitaab series. Its target audience is the novice learner of Arabic. It consists of ten lessons, an English-Arabic glossary, and an appendix with the texts of the twelve dialogic scenes on the accompanying DVDs. Alif Baa systematically covers all of the sounds and letters of the Arabic alphabet, as well as the numbers 1–10. It also introduces about 150 basic vocabulary words and expressions in the context of appropriate and relevant written exercises in the book and sound files and spoken dialogues on the DVDs. The typical lesson covers about half a dozen letters and diacritical symbols. Each lesson has recognition-focused exercises and production-focused drills, along with the basic vocabulary introduced in throughout the lesson. Each lesson also includes a brief section about some salient cultural feature, for example, making and drinking coffee, what to say to someone who is not feeling well, and how to respond when a host offers you food or drink.

The DVDs consist of ten lessons that parallel the lessons in the book and include four main components in each lesson: (i) listening and vocabulary-building exercises, all at the level of individual words, (ii) various signs written in Arabic, such as street signs, shop signs, still advertisements, and so on, (iii) viewing an Arabic calligrapher writing all the different letters and symbols of the Arabic alphabet, and (iv) short dialogues, carried out in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, and covering such topics as self- introductions, greetings, taking leave, and talking on the phone. These dialogues address oral-aural skills and serve as rich cultural lessons. The DVDs make for a multimedia program that is at once attractive and compelling, but they do not come without some technical glitches (on which see below)

Al-Kitaab, Part 1 assumes that the student has gone through Alif Baa. It consists of twenty lessons, three DVDs, an Arabic-English glossary, an English-Arabic glossary, grammar (mainly verb-conjugation) charts, and a very useful index (new to this edition) listing all of the grammar topics covered in the book along with their page location. The goal of the book and DVDs is to take the beginning learner, who has already mastered the sounds and letters of Arabic, from the beginning level to the intermediate level.

The overall organizing theme of Al-Kitaab, Part 1 is a narrative story of two main characters: Khalid, a college student in Egypt, and his cousin Maha, a college student in the United States, their extended families, and their friends. This organizing theme gives context and motivation for many (but not all) of the vocabulary and grammatical structures focused on in the lessons.

Each of the twenty lessons in Al-Kitaab, Part 1 begins with some one to two dozen vocabulary words critical for understanding the lesson’s story line. This is followed by three or four vocabulary-based exercises, one of which is usually an interactive oral exercise best done as a class group activity. A viewing follows of the video scene on the DVD about Khalid or Maha, family members or friends speaking in standard Arabic about themselves. Each successive lesson and scene develops the story line further. There are usually a few listening-comprehension exercises here, and—in keeping with the authors’ desired balance in covering the four skills, culture, and grammar—activities addressing those skills, all based on carefully chosen authentic level-appropriate texts. Grammar explanations are brief, concise, and not too technical, covering topics that emerge from the narrative or the activities and exercises in the lessons. These exercises are usually well contextualized, but some are decontextualized, mechanical drills, especially where certain controlled structures are being highlighted. The penultimate section of every lesson usually contains a few video scenes: an Egyptian colloquial Arabic rendition mirroring an earlier scene and some discussion also in Egyptian colloquial Arabic about some interesting cultural aspect not necessarily directly related to the story line. Finally, there is a list, different from the one appearing at the beginning of the lesson, of important and useful vocabulary that arose in the lesson’s exercises and activities.

This series has become among the most widely used Arabic language programs in the United States for several reasons. First, it follows the principles of meaning-focused, communicative approaches to language teaching, with an emphasis on real, natural, creative, and interactive communication. These approaches aim to enable the learner to attain real proficiency so as to function in a native-speaking environment. A corollary of such approaches is that language must be taught in context, and this tenet is realized throughout, in the well-contextualized exercises and activities. Second, it addresses the four language skills while adding cultural information, resulting in a comprehensive pedagogical program. And, it uses authentic listening and reading materials that make the language come alive, with excellent listening and reading exercises based on these authentic materials.

One key feature of this book, which surely has greatly contributed to its success, is that it does not shrink from the challenging task of teaching standard Arabic alongside a colloquial dialect. The series views the standard and the colloquial as two registers of the same language that exist side by side in harmony, not as two competing languages with a chasm separating them. On objective grounds, and on grounds that take the Arabic linguistic reality of diglossia into account, true proficiency in Arabic cannot be attained by learning only standard Arabic. To be truly proficient in Arabic, one must also attain functional proficiency in the more natural, less formal colloquial spoken Arabic (of any variety), the kind that native Arabic speakers use in natural, real-time conversations. This approach taken here is a welcome and refreshing departure from traditional, prescriptivist approaches to the teaching of Arabic that placed most of the emphasis on reading, less on writing, and much less on speaking and listening. This traditional approach dictated that standard Arabic alone would be chosen for this or that Arabic language program, and in doing so shunned colloquial Arabic.

This program is now the choice of many of teachers and learners partly because the DVDs make the language come alive. They contain the sights and sounds of the Arabic language and culture and make the learning process more fun. The on-demand interactive audio-visual component is indispensable to this program and contributes to its success. But with technology comes challenges. Some technical issues with the DVDs need be corrected in the next release, especially having to do with the way the cursor deals with lists. .Another issue with the DVDs is that the recording of many words is inadvertently chopped off at the beginning, by a few milliseconds, a nontrivial problem when a word consists of only a few phonemes. Another issue with the DVDs is that parts of words on the edge of the screen lie outside the viewable area.

In addition to these technical problems, there are a few imperfections in this textbook series. Alif Baa, which is an otherwise superb coverage of all the sounds and letters of Arabic, would have been an excellent place to include a section on word-stress placement. I hope the next printing of this book will correct this omission, as well as the inevitable, though not too numerous, typos.

These shortcomings notwithstanding, these two books and their accompanying DVDs constitute one of the most complete modern Arabic pedagogy programs available, and they will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Every Arabic language program in the United States that follows the now-mainstream principles of proficiency language teaching ought to seriously and open-mindedly consider this program.

Reviewed by Taras Shmiher, Ivan Franko National University, Ukraine

This collection presents a selection of papers from the International Conference on Culture and Translation in Beijing in 1999. Eight of the eleven papers pay tribute to translation in the host cultures of China and Japan.

In Part 1, translation is viewed as an agent of culture. Gideon Toury, ‘Enhancing cultural changes by means of fictitious translations’ (3–17), investigates how fictitious translations (e.g. Papa Hamlet by Bjarne P. Holmsen, Book of Mormon, and Dzhambul Dzhabayev’s poetry) that are examples of cultural planning can serve specific functions in cultural and historical contexts. In ‘Translation and cultural transformation: The case of the Afrikaans Bible translations’ (19–41), Jacobus A. Naudé examines the relationship between translation and culture as motivated by Afrikaans Bible translations. In ‘Cultural borderlands in China’s translation history’ (43–64), Eva Hung deals with different types of bi- or multicultural communities that influenced culturally-oriented translation activities in China from the second to the late nineteenth century.

Part 2 contains studies of translations in specific cultural contexts. The representation of translation is the focus of ‘Translating China to the American South: Baptist missionaries and Imperial China, 1845–1911’ (67–89) by Ray Granade and Tom Greer. Granade and Greer discuss Baptist missionaries’ attempts to translate Chinese culture for the American South. Eva Richter and Bailin Song explore the concepts of identity and self in ‘Translating the concept of “identity”’ (91–110). They note that these concepts are culturally specific and, therefore, incomprehensible for Chinese speakers. In ‘Translation and national cultures: A case study in theatrical translation’ (111–18), Alain Piette examines linguistic and cultural obstacles to the perception of an author in the literature. A vivid example is the unpopularity of Belgian farcical genius Fernand Crommenlynck in the English-speaking world.

Part 3 is devoted to Japanese translation experience. Judy Wakabayashi, ‘The reconceptualization of translation from Chinese in 18th century Japan’ (121–45), is interested in applying translation norms to kambun kundoku, a special way of reading and noting Chinese texts according to Japanese syntax that allows Japanese nonspeakers of Chinese to read the texts. In ‘Translationese in Japan’ (147–60), Yuri Furuno compares the adequacy versus acceptability opposition in translationese and notes a shift to the pursuit of acceptability in recent Japanese translation. In ‘The selection of texts for translation in postwar Japan: An examination of one aspect of polysystem theory’ (161–73), Noriko Matsunaga-Watson examines one aspect of Japan’s polysystem: the selection of texts for translation into Japanese after World War II.

Part 4 consists of two case studies from China. Suggesting a short overview of the current trends in the translation and interpreting professions in China, Lin Wusun, ‘Translation in transition: Variables and invariables’ (177–81), concludes that the study of translation theories should come after translation practice and not before. In ‘On annotation in translation’ (183–90), Han Jiaming emphasizes the importance of annotation in translation, which can engage translators in more research and improve translations.

Indexes of concepts, names, and titles as well as the editor’s preface help to complete this valuable contribution to the research in the cultural background of translation.