{"id":1262,"date":"2010-12-11T22:00:15","date_gmt":"2010-12-11T20:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1262"},"modified":"2010-11-23T13:01:54","modified_gmt":"2010-11-23T11:01:54","slug":"in-hot-pursuit-of-language-in-prehistory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1262","title":{"rendered":"In hot pursuit of language in prehistory"},"content":{"rendered":"
In hot pursuit of language in prehistory: <\/strong>Essays in the four fields of anthropology in honor of Harold Crane Fleming. Ed. by John D. Bengston<\/strong>. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008. Pp. xxiv, 476. ISBN 9789027232526<\/a>. $180 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Jason D. Haugen<\/strong><\/a>, Oberlin College<\/em><\/p>\n

This volume is a Festschrift for Harold Crane (\u2018Hal\u2019) Fleming, an anthropologist and linguist with a long history of work in Africa, including both synchronic and historical linguistics. Fleming originated the proposal that Western Cushitic is not actually part of Cushitic but is instead a primary branch from Afro-Asiatic that he refers to as Omotic. Fleming holds an abiding interest in long-range historical comparison and served as a key conduit for the ideas of the Moscow Circle of historical linguists to the western world in the mid to late 1980s.<\/p>\n

The book contains twenty-four chapters divided into five parts that show an impressive range of approaches to language in prehistory that cut across the four fields of anthropology. Given limitations of space, I can do little more here than list the papers contained in the volume, but this overview should itself suffice to give the reader an idea of the diversity of topics covered.<\/p>\n

Part 1, \u2018African peoples\u2019, contains three papers: Shomarka Omar Keita<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018Geography, selected Afro-Asiatic families, and Y chromosome lineage variation: An exploration in linguistics and phylogeography\u2019; Christy G. Turner II<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018A dental anthropological hypothesis relating to the ethnogenesis, origin, and antiquity of the Afro-Asiatic language family: Peopling of the Eurafrican-South Asian Triangle IV\u2019; and Daniel F. McCall<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018African weeks\u2019.<\/p>\n

Part 2, \u2018African languages\u2014synchronic studies\u2019, has just two papers: Azeb Amha<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018Gender distinction and affirmative copula clauses in Zargulla\u2019 and Paul Black<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018Riddling in Gidole\u2019.<\/p>\n

Part 3, \u2018African languages\u2014Classification and prehistory\u2019, contains five papers by V\u00e1clav Bla\u017eek<\/strong> (\u2018A lexicostatistical comparison of Omotic languages\u2019); Christopher Ehret<\/strong> (\u2018The primary branches of Cushitic: Seriating the diagnostic sound change rules\u2019); Herrmann Jungraithmayr<\/strong> (\u2018Erosion in Chadic\u2019); Phillippe B\u00fcrgisser<\/strong> (\u2018On Kunama ukunkula<\/em> \u2018elbow\u2019 and its proposed cognates in Nilo-Saharan languages\u2019); and Roger M. Blench<\/strong> (\u2018The problem of pan-African roots\u2019).<\/p>\n

Part 4, \u2018Languages of Eurasia, Oceania, and the Americas\u2019, broadens the geographical scope considerably. The papers in this section include those by Allan R. Bomhard<\/strong> (\u2018Some thoughts on the Proto-Indo-European cardinal numbers\u2019); Juha Janhunen<\/strong> (\u2018Some Old World experience of linguistic dating\u2019); John D. Bengston<\/strong> (\u2018The languages of northern Eurasia: Inference to the best explanation\u2019); Michael Witzel<\/strong> (\u2018Slaying the dragon across Eurasia\u2019); Jonathan Morris<\/strong> (\u2018Trombetti: The forefather of Indo-Pacific\u2019); Jane H. Hill<\/strong> (\u2018Otomanguean loan words in Proto-Uto-Aztecan maize vocabulary?\u2019); and Larry Lepionka<\/strong> (\u2018Historical interpretations of geographical distributions of Amerind subfamilies\u2019).<\/p>\n

Finally, Part 5, \u2018Human origins, Language origins, and Proto-Sapiens language\u2019, contains seven papers, Stephen L. Zegura<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018Current topics in human evolutionary genetics\u2019; Philip Lieberman<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018A wild 50,000-year ride\u2019; Ofer Bar-Yosef<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018Can Paleolithic stone artifacts serve as evidence for prehistoric language?\u2019; George van Driem<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018The origin of language: Symbiosism and symbiomism\u2019; Paul Whitehouse<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018Some speculations on the evolution of language, and the language of evolution\u2019; Alain Matthey de l\u2019Etang<\/strong> and Pierre J. Bancel<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018The age of Mama and Papa\u2019; and Pierre J. Bancel<\/strong> and Alain Matthey de l\u2019Etang<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018The millennial persistence of Indo-European and Eurasiatic pronouns and the origin of nominals\u2019.<\/p>\n

The book also contains several photos of Fleming, a foreword on Fleming by the editor, and a comprehensive list of Fleming\u2019s publications at the time of printing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In hot pursuit of language in prehistory: Essays in the four fields of anthropology in honor of Harold Crane Fleming. Ed. by John D. Bengston. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008. Pp. xxiv, 476. ISBN 9789027232526. $180 (Hb). Reviewed by Jason D. Haugen, Oberlin College This volume is a Festschrift for Harold Crane (\u2018Hal\u2019) Fleming, an anthropologist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1262"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1263,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262\/revisions\/1263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}