{"id":475,"date":"2010-05-04T10:00:18","date_gmt":"2010-05-04T08:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=475"},"modified":"2010-03-04T12:24:40","modified_gmt":"2010-03-04T10:24:40","slug":"the-afroasiatic-protolanguage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=475","title":{"rendered":"The afroasiatic protolanguage"},"content":{"rendered":"
The afroasiatic protolanguage:<\/strong> An attempt at a combined phylogenetic and historical-comparative reconstruction with anthropological objectives. By Gyula D\u00e9csy<\/strong>. Bloomington, IN: Eurolingua, 2002. Pp. 136. ISBN 9780931922701<\/a>.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Harald Hammarstr\u00f6m<\/strong><\/a>, Chalmers University, Sweeden<\/em><\/p>\n

As the subtitle indicates, this book is an attempt at a reconstruction of Afroasiatic with an interpretation of its putative proto-vocabulary. Unfortunately, this attempt is an amateurish recasting of Ehret (1995) and the Moscow school\u2019s work on proto-Afroasiatic (Diakonoff, Belova, Chetverukhin, Militarev, Porkhomovsky, & Stolbova 1993\u20131997).<\/p>\n

The introductory chapter recounts Ehret\u2019s (1995) hypothesis on the Afroasiatic family: that Omotic was the first subfamily to split-off at about 12,000 BC. The section is riddled with unclarities, spurious remarks, and outright errors (e.g. page 7 says Joseph Greenberg introduced Cushitic into Afroasiatic).<\/p>\n

The chapter on phonology and phonetics recasts Ehret\u2019s (1995) hypothesis on proto-phonemic inventory with occasional comparisons to Orel-Stolbova. There is no real comparison or critical review and the author\u2019s remarks are often unsupported.<\/p>\n

The chapters on morphology, syntax, and semantics follow the same pattern. Many of the analyses are so poor that they belong to nineteenth century linguistics\u2014for example, \u2018it is hard to estimate the time of introduction of s\/z into the humean [sic] phoneme inventory. It porobably [sic] happened in [sic] different times in different places of the earth but hardly before 15,000 BC\u2019 (13), \u2018We can state that it is impossible to reconstruct tonal oppositions for any protolanguage. It is better not to deal [sic] the problem in spite of Ehret\u2019s strong argument for the case (Ehret 1955. 67\u201378 [sic])\u2019 (15\u201316), \u2018Also the rivers were in principle feminine in Indo-European as they contributed fish to the food pattern of prehistoric men. Women, trees and rivers were connected with the common feature of fecundity (fertility) in the mind of human ancestors\u2019 (53).<\/p>\n

The last two thirds of the book is a simplified proto-Afroasiatic vocabulary taken from Ehret (1995) but without the commentary, attested forms, and proper diacritics.<\/p>\n

This is the first time I have come across a scientific book with so many spelling and typesetting errors (pages 53\u201354 have commercials for books in the same series!) that it significantly detracts from reading.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, this book offers no advantage to Ehret\u2019s (1995) or the Moscow school\u2019s (Diakonoff et al. 1993\u20131997) work. Interested readers or libraries should forgo this volume and go directly to those works.<\/p>\n

References<\/p>\n

Diakonoff, Igor, Anna G. Belova, Alexander S. Chetverukhin, Alexander Militarev, Victor Ja. Porkhomovsky, and Olga Stolbova. 1993\u20131997. Historical comparative vocabulary of Afrasian. St. Petersburg Journal of African Studies<\/em> 2\u20136<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Ehret, Christopher. 1995. Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Afrasian): Vowels, tone, consonants, and vocabulary<\/em>. Berkeley: University of California Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The afroasiatic protolanguage: An attempt at a combined phylogenetic and historical-comparative reconstruction with anthropological objectives. By Gyula D\u00e9csy. Bloomington, IN: Eurolingua, 2002. Pp. 136. ISBN 9780931922701. Reviewed by Harald Hammarstr\u00f6m, Chalmers University, Sweeden As the subtitle indicates, this book is an attempt at a reconstruction of Afroasiatic with an interpretation of its putative proto-vocabulary. Unfortunately, […]<\/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\/475"}],"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=475"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":476,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475\/revisions\/476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}