REVIEWS

GROVER HUDSON, Essays on Gurage Language and Culture: Dedicated to WolfLeslau

on the Occasion of his 90th Birthday, November 14th, 1996. Otto Harrassowitz,
Wiesbaden 1996. Pp. 239. Price: DM 148.00 paperback. ISBN: 3-447-03830-6.
After the two prior Festschrifts (Ethiopian Studies, ed. S. Segert and A.J.E. Bodrogligeti
[Wiesbaden 1983] and Semitic Studies, ed. Alan S. Kayne [Wiesbaden 1991]) this
Festschrift edited by Grover Hudson is dedicated to the ninetiedi birthday of die
senior researcher in Ethiopian languages and culture, and esteemed teacher of several
generations of Ethiopianists, Wolf Leslau.
This third Festschrift concentrates on Gurage Language and Culture. It pays tribute

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to Leslau's first research and fieldwork in Ethiopia and his lifelong interest in this
subject. Since 1948 Leslau has published eight books and more than fifty articles
on Gurage, among them the Etymological Dictionary of Gurage in three volumes
(1979), Ethiopians Speak: Studies in Cultural Background in five volumes (1950,
1966, 1968, 1981, 1983), Gurage Folklore (1982) and Gurage Studies: Collected
Articles (1992). This tremendous linguistic and cultural material might be exceeded
only by Leslau's extensive work and publications on Amharic.
Preceded by two photographs, one of which shows the senior researcher and
founder of the UCLA's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures during
his trip on muleback to Gurage country more than fifty years ago and the other, a
recent photo shows Leslau with his computer at home in Los Angeles, the present
Festschrift begins with an introduction written by Grover Hudson in which he pays
homage to Leslau's great personality and tremendous ceuvre.
The Festschrift contains fifteen articles, written by various researchers. The first
paper presents an annotated bibliography of Leslau's publications on Gurage. In
this carefully done collection Monica S. Devens cites more than sixty publications,
books, articles and reviews and also four forthcoming articles by Leslau on Chaha,
Ennemor and Gyeto.
Most of the following papers, among them a comparative analysis of Chaha and
Ennemor written by Leslau himself, deal with linguistic problems. Sahle Sellassie
Berhane Mariam, Leslau's former informant on Chaha and author of several novels,
presents a few personal and quite touching rememberances about his linguistic
work with Wolf Leslau.
A very active group of researchers from the University de Quebec a Montreal are
concentrating on phonetic studies in Inor: Robert Boivin presents an acoustic
phonetic study of vowels in Inor, Berhanu Chamora deals with the consonant
distribution, and Jean-Francois Prunet studies the guttural vowels of Inor.
Several papers in the present publication deal with Chaha. Degif Petros analyses
alternations among the sonorants rlmll in his native language Chaha. Wolf Leslau
contrasts in his own contribution features of the Chaha and Ennemor phonology,
grammar and vocabulary. Jean Lowenstamm's paper presents a practical morpho-
phonemic exercice of five Chaha verbs, and the late Robert Hetzron wrote on the
two future tense formations in Central and Peripheral Western Gurage.
Gideon Goldenberg presents forms of a copula, verbal compounds, and forms of
'being' in the Kistane grammar. Sharon Rose's study on allomorphy and morpho-
logical categories gives a detailed analysis of object marking in Muhir. A.J. Drewes'
paper refers to a rare Silti text, the story of Joseph, and cites the text along with the
English translation and grammtical observations.
Three papers deal with anthropological problems. William A. Shack, who
devoted more than thirty years of his life to research into Gurage social life and culture,
presents interesting details enlightening the Gurage myth about the good of justice.

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 REVIEWS

Steven A. Brandt, togedier with his students Kathryn J. Weedman and Girma
Hundie, studied Gurage hide-working and suggest the hypothesis that all the
Ethiopian craft groups represent a distinctive ethnic group or culture. This paper,
which is illustrated by very instructive figures, shows that there is minimal variability
in many aspects of material culture and behaviour within groups, whereas between
groups a considerable variability has been observed. The authors assess the variability
in hide-working methods and tools as an indicator for a peoples social identity.
Worku Nida's paper deals with the vivid problem of urbanization. He describes the
dynamics and cultural changes in Gurage village life and the reasons for urban

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migration of the Gurage people. Besides the anthropological aspect described the
rapidly growing process of urbanization in Ethiopia remains, of course, not without
great impact on the language behaviour and language knowledge of the people. The
Gurage language area, therefore, is also a very interesting region for socio-linguistic
research into problems of language contact, the spread of bi- and multilingualism,
the development of a common lingua franca, etc., an aspect which is not dealt with
explicitly in this volume.
Widi this cleverly arranged publication on die occasion of Wolf Leslau's ninetieth
birthday the editor and publishers have presented a dignified piece of work.
Though not as voluminous as its two predecessors, this Festschrift is a concise and
enlightening volume, which adds a lot to our knowledge about die Gurage languages
and culture. At the same time, it shows diat this language area, with more dian fifteen
languages and dialects, the boundaries of which are hardly defined still offers great
opportunities for further research in and detailed linguistic description of the
phonology, grammar, and lexicon of the Gurage languages, as well as of die language
behaviour of their speakers.
UNIVERSITY OF MAINZ RENATE RICHTER

HANS DAIBER, Bibliography of Islamic Philosophy, Volume I: Alphabetical List of

Publications; Volume II: Index ofNames, Terms and Topics (Handbook of Oriental
Studies, The Near and Middle East 43). Brill, Leiden 1999. Pp. lv + 974 (Vol. I);
548 (Vol. II). Price: NLG 756.00/$444.00 hardback. ISBN: 90-04-09648-5
(Vol. I); 90-04-11348-7 (Vol. II).
Professor Hans Daiber, who holds the chair of Oriental Philology at the Johann
Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat in Frankfurt am Main, has produced a set of volumes
which are both magisterial in conception and design as well as weighty in content,
not least from a literal point of view! This is a true labour of love which has been
twenty-five years in the making, undertaken by one of the most eminently qualified
scholars in the diverse fields of Islamic philosophy, theology, the Greek heritage in
Islam, die history of Arabic literature and its transmission in Arabic manuscripts.
All future students and scholars in these fields will have cause for profound gratitude
to Professor Daiber. The reason is that die author does for Islamic philosophy what
J.D. Pearson et al., many years ago, did for general Islamic studies in their Index
Islamicus. And just as the latter has become an essential research tool for all of us
working in the general Middle Eastern field, so too will Daiber's two volumes,
probably referenced under the abbreviations BIS I and BIS II.
However, Daiber's volumes differ structurally from Index Islamicus. The latter, as is
well known, is a catalogue of articles and books, divided according to topic. Daiber,
however, devotes die whole of volume II to an index of names, terms and topics.
The work covers more than 9,500 primary and secondary sources in two large
volumes. In his preface Hans Daiber tells us that 'Volume one includes as complete

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