{"id":194,"date":"2010-01-21T10:00:04","date_gmt":"2010-01-21T08:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=194"},"modified":"2010-02-25T12:10:12","modified_gmt":"2010-02-25T10:10:12","slug":"language-contacts-in-prehistory-studies-in-stratigraphy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=194","title":{"rendered":"Language contacts in prehistory: Studies in stratigraphy"},"content":{"rendered":"
Language contacts in prehistory: <\/strong>Studies in stratigraphy. Ed. by Henning Andersen<\/strong>. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. viii, 292. ISBN 1588113795<\/a>. $180 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Malcolm Ross<\/strong><\/a>, The Australian National University<\/em><\/p>\n

The topic of the eleven papers in this volume is nicely defined in the opening words of Henning Andersen\u2019s introduction: \u2018Linguistic stratigraphy is the systematic investigation of the layering of grammatical and lexical material in a language or dialect which reflects its historical development and past contacts between its speakers and bearers of other linguistic and cultural traditions\u2019. The papers were originally presented at a one-day workshop at the fifteenth International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Melbourne in August 2001.<\/p>\n

The book is organized into seven geographically based sections: \u2018Indo-European\u2019 has three papers, \u2018Africa\u2019 two, and \u2018Southeast Asia\u2019, \u2018Australia\u2019, \u2018Oceania\u2019, \u2018Japan\u2019, and \u2018Meso-America\u2019 have a paper apiece. This welcome geographic coverage is rare among thematic volumes on historical linguistics.<\/p>\n

Bernard Mees<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018Stratum and shadow: A genealogy of stratigraphy theories from the Indo-European West\u2019 is a critical survey of the stratigraphy and stratum theories of west European linguists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and of their applications to western Indo-European languages. In \u2018Slavic and the Indo-European migrations\u2019 Henning Andersen<\/strong> offers a beautifully documented stratigraphy of loans in Slavic from nearby Indo-European varieties and among early Slavic dialects. Bridget Drinka<\/strong>\u2019s chapter, \u2018The development of the perfect in Indo-European: Stratigraphic evidence of prehistoric areal evidence\u2019, begins with the striking statement that \u2018morphological change \u2026 is, by its very nature, stratum-building\u2019 (77) and shows how a division of early Indo-European history into periods and regions that she proposes elsewhere is further supported by an internal reconstruction of the development of the perfect aspect.<\/p>\n

The African section is introduced by Christopher Ehret and contains two short but well-documented lexical stratigraphies, \u2018Stratigraphy and prehistory: Bantu Zone F\u2019 by B. F. Y. P. Masele<\/strong> and Derek Nurse<\/strong>, and \u2018Language contacts in Nilo-Saharan prehistory\u2019 by Christopher Ehret<\/strong>. The first concerns a group of languages located in western Tanzania. The authors show how the conventional divergence (family tree) approach requires a complementary convergence approach if the history of these and other Bantu languages is to be properly understood. The second reconstructs the history, reaching back five or so millennia, of the Rub group of languages.<\/p>\n

In \u2018Evidence for Austroasiatic strata in Thai\u2019 Anthony Diller<\/strong> surveys the history of Thai contact with speakers of Old Mon and Old Khmer and describes the complexity of the resulting stratigraphy.<\/p>\n

\u2018Millers and mullers: The archaeo-linguistic stratigraphy of technological change in holcene Australia\u2019, by Patrick McConvell<\/strong> and Michael Smith<\/strong>, describes the borrowing of lexical items associated with the archaeologically attested rise and spread of seed-grinding in central Australia.<\/p>\n

Hans Schmidt<\/strong> provides a useful summary of the literature on \u2018Loanword strata in Rotuman\u2019, a central Pacific Austronesian language whose lexical stratigraphy has received considerable attention because of massive borrowings from languages belonging to two Polynesian groups.<\/p>\n

In \u2018Substratum and adstratum in prehistoric Japan\u2019 J. Marshall Unger<\/strong> summarizes the hypothesis that the lexical distance between Japanese and Korean (much greater than the time depth of their separation would lead one to expect) is explained by the number and extent of the strata of lexical borrowings in Japanese, both from Chinese and from earlier sources.<\/p>\n

Whether Uto-Aztecan speakers spread from north to south or vice versa remains controversial, but Karin Dakin<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018Uto-Aztecan in the linguistic stratigraphy of Mesoamerican prehistory\u2019 reports on research indicating an early presence of Uto-Aztecan speakers in Mesoamerica and thus calling the north\u2013south hypothesis in its usual form into question.<\/p>\n

All in all, this volume provides some excellent and detailed examples of lexical stratigraphy based on carefully worked-out phonological histories, and provides a surprising insight into just how far-reaching historical inferences based on stratigraphy can be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Language contacts in prehistory: Studies in stratigraphy. Ed. by Henning Andersen. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. viii, 292. ISBN 1588113795. $180 (Hb). Reviewed by Malcolm Ross, The Australian National University The topic of the eleven papers in this volume is nicely defined in the opening words of Henning Andersen\u2019s introduction: \u2018Linguistic stratigraphy is the systematic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194"}],"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=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":436,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions\/436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}