Review

Author(s): D. E. Ager
Review by: D. E. Ager
Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Jan., 1990), pp. 124-125
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3732800
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 REVIEWS

The World's Major Languages. Edited by BERNARD COMRIE. London and Sydney:

Croom Helm. I987. xiii + I025pp. ?50.00.

This substantial volume is said by the editor to have, as one of its aims, to provide

answers to questions from the interested layman: for example, 'How many lan-

guages are there in the world?'; 'What languages were spoken in California before

European immigration?'. The forty-four scholars who have collaborated have

provided much more than this, in the form of fifty chapters on individual languages

or groups of languages, and although the volume is slanted towards European lan-

guages, because of the potential readership, more than half of it deals with languages

spoken outside Europe. Contributors were given freedom to include the material

they felt 'most interesting' in their descriptions, although they were asked to cover

both language structure and the social background.

The introductory essay presents preliminary notions: criteria for defining a

speech variety as a language, problems of the family-tree model of classification,

distribution of the world's languages, and the social interaction of languages: this

latter also dealing with the definition of 'major', which includes as criteria the

number of speakers, use as a second language, cultural heritage, and influence.

Bernard Comrie notes that the definition of'major' is a dynamic process, with Asian

and African languages becoming more important both in terms of numbers of native

speakers and also in the range of functions they handle. Even so, the inclusion of

some with small numbers of native speakers is dubious - Czech/Slovak, with fifteen

million speakers, or Hungarian, with fourteen million - unless one adds the

criterion of linguistic interest and notes the potential readership.

It is clearly impossible to review each of the twelve sections: Indo-European,

Uralic, Turkic, Afroasiatic, Dravidian, Tai, Vietnamese, Sino-Tibetan, Japanese,

Korean, Austronesian, and Niger-Kordofanian languages; and the freedom given to

authors means that approaches, as well as the content and information provided in

the chapters, vary widely. But twenty to thirty pages per chapter allows quite

detailed presentations of the basic facts, however determined, and most authors

have covered the ground in terms of phonology, morphology, syntax, and the

lexicon, leaving the social facts such as register usage and regional variation to be

dealt with through the linguistic levels. Most authors, too, have given more

attention to the history of the language than to present-day descriptions, and have

concentrated on the standard language.

Unsurprisingly, the European language chapters are the most sophisticated, with

authors presenting facts but also a flavour of the debate among linguists on

interpretation. One might question the value of information overkill: several pages

of declensions and conjugations, as in the Czech/Slovak chapter, are too much, and

in the better-known languages the information is so condensed that the assumption

must be that the reader will not acquire new information. In general, as in the

chapters on French and Spanish, he will be introduced to contemporary develop-

ments seen as communication strategies: left-dislocated nominals generally remain

outside the core sentence; popular spoken French has a highly flexible word order of

the kind often called 'free'; the device to avoid ambiguity is a complex system of

preverbal affixes derived from earlier conjunctive personal pronouns.

In the chapter on French, the author covers, in the section on the lexicon, the

initial Latin-based word stock, and mentions the 200 words of Celtic origin and the

import from the Frankish lexicon; he reviews the learned words of Latin origin and

discusses the English loan-words, and the reaction to them, finishing by comment-

ing that French is 'holding its own surprisingly well in the face of constant

competition from English'.

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 Reviews
I 25

A contrasting chapter is that on Malay (Indonesian and Malaysian), which

presents a strictly synchronic picture, dealing mainly with the affixes and reduplica-

tion. Each of the twenty-five Indonesian affixes is reviewed and illustrated, and a

restricted list of seven functions of reduplication is given. This chapter is a highly

condensed presentation of the basic facts of the language(s), and there is little time

for consideration of descriptive theories or alternative formulations.

There are very few 'interested laymen' about with fifty pounds to spare, so the

expectation must be that the 'normal' reader for this volume will be a student, most

probably of linguistics, in search of information. Such a reader will do quite well in

the individual chapters, although there are no sample texts and the various authors

generally assume a certain amount of familiarity with their language areas and

certainly with relevant linguistic terminology and tools: the phonetic alphabets, for

example, vary from chapter to chapter according to the traditions of scholars dealing

with that area, and transliterations are into Roman typefaces. But there is very little

overview material, not even a list of languages arranged in order of number of

speakers, or a chart of the sixteen stocks, and there is only one index, of language

names.

It is difficult therefore to see this as mainly a work of reference, although it will

have that function. It will be very helpful to those with some linguistics behind them

who wish to understand something of the variety of languages in the world, who wish

to read themselves into a new language area, or who wish to get some distance from

the scholarly traditions they know. The editing seems impeccable, the presentation

first class.

ASTON UNIVERSITY D. E. AGER

A Guide to the World's Languages. Volume I: Classification. By MERRITT RUHLEN.

Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. I987. xxv + 433 pp. ?40.00.

The first volume of what promises to be an interesting work of scholarship is

concerned with how to classify in genetic terms, and with the resulting classification

of nearly 5,000 languages into seventeen major families and many subgroupings,

plus a mention of language isolates, invented languages, pidgins and creoles, and

unclassified (that is, those with insufficient data). The complete classification runs

from page 301 to page 378, with a ten-page preceding outline, a map of the phyla,

and a summary table giving the number of languages in each phylum, its speakers

and geographical location, and its major languages. It should be noted that

although Merritt Ruhlen identifies 'taxon names' in ascending order as dialect,

language, family, stock, and phylum, with the added use of sub- and macro-, he also

uses group, unit, and node and is as inconsistent as his sources in their distribution,

so that 'family', for example, can mean any group at any level. The taxonomy is in

fact indicated by typeface, indenting, and a numbering system in the main list,

where ambiguity is hence avoided.

General presentations of the world's languages, and taxonomic studies of this type

have been somewhat out of favour on this side of the Atlantic and for most of the

twentieth century, despite Katzner, The Languages of the World (London,I977 and

1983), Voegelin and Voegelin, Classification and Index of the World's Languages (Oxford,

1977), Comrie, The World's Major Languages (London and Sydney, 1987), and there is

undoubtedly a use outside linguistic research, as well as a fascination within it, for

this information, for example within the 'language industries' in identifying

languages.

A student of Greenberg, Professor Ruhlen started the project as an update of his

own Guide of the same name, first published in 1975, and there are clear connexions

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